A genre teaching in different social environments

An experiment with the genre detective story

Abstract

This article aims to reflect upon the use of teaching strategies to improve writing, in different social contexts, bearing in mind the students' individual track, and their specific cultural-historical situations. The study was based on principles derived from the socio-discursive interactionist theory (Bronckart, 1999, 2006) and on the possibility of making genres teachable through didactic sequences (Schneuwly & Dolz, 2004). An applied comparative work was developed using a didactic sequence, related to the detective story genre, with two 5th grade classes in different elementary schools. Although the schools were located in the same geographical region, one was a local-government-run public school, with students belonging to a low socio-economic class, and the other was a private, religion-oriented school, with students belonging to a high socio-economic class. The study demonstrates that the work with didactic sequence has productive consequences in the students' textual productions from both schools, independently of the social environment in which the work with genre was developed. If quantitative growth was more evident in the public school, qualitative growth between early and final productions in both schools was significant and reveals the importance of consistent work on genre teaching.