Oral and written reflections in the process of textual revision in elementary school

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an investigation on text revision with young children, one of the processes involved in the construction of knowledge about writing. Specifically, it deals with revising another’s text and commenting on it in writing using digital tools, as fundamental resources of the written interactions that occur socially. The research was conducted with 7-year-old children in the 2nd year of elementary school in a private school in São Paulo, Brazil, who had already mastered the alphabetic principle of the writing system and could reflect on written composition, reading alone and commenting in writing. The main research questions were to understand what linguistic contents they could select to comment on the texts, what communication strategies they would use with the proposed digital tool and how the oral exchanges would be in the process of text revision. Among the main results we highlight the realization of different types of comments that we call direct and indirect, and their impact on the text, the intense reading and writing process when they assume the tasks of commenting and reviewing and, finally, the importance of oral exchanges between pairs of authors and commentators of the texts to understand the different learning that were developed in the didactic proposal.