“Eu pegava vários temas e escrevia só a conclusão: do discurso institucional às vozes dos alunos a respeito da Competência V da Redação do ENEM

Abstract

Themes related to Large Scale External Assessments, the National High School Exam (ENEM) and writing have fostered debates in the academic field in several areas related to education and teaching of Portuguese Language. In this thesis, we turned our attention, in a dialogical way, to Competence V of ENEM's composition, which concerns the elaboration of a social intervention proposal, since, according to our practice, we noticed that this is one of the criteria in which students have the most difficulties, and that it integrates the most influential competence in the final grade, since the performance in it is usually lower than expected. We defend the thesis that there is a mismatch between the official requirements and propositions about the ENEM Writing Test in the materials made available by INEP and the way candidates (re)mean orally and handle writing to meet Competency V. Thus, the motivating question of the study is: how do the research participants (re)mean and manage their writing to meet the requirements of the Participant's Booklet regarding Competence V of ENEM's Writing Test? In order to seek answers to this question, we created a space to listen to a part of the public most affected by the test: high school students who are candidates to ENEM. More than knowing what the official documents related to this exam say, it is necessary to know how students perceive, (re)mean and position themselves by the need to meet Competence V, and to raise difficulties presented in the writing of the essay. Thus, our general objective is to reflect on the ENEM writing test, establishing a dialogue between the discourse of the official documents' guidelines and the students' voices regarding how they understand and how they mobilize the linguistic-discursive skills related to Competence V. The specific objectives are: (i) to trace a historical overview of ENEM and address the guidelines of the official documents produced by the Ministry of Education (MEC) that subsidize the production and evaluation of the ENEM writing test regarding Competence V; (ii) to analyze the 2018 and 2019 writing tests; (iii) to analyze the discourses that the participants (re)produce regarding Competence V of ENEM in their oral statements; (iv) to investigate the linguistic-discursive aspects of the participants' texts, in their attempts to meet Competence V. This qualitative-interpretativist research (TRIVIÑOS, 1987; BORTONI-RICARDO, 2008), within the scope of Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 1996; 2006), is linked to the research line Language: Linguistic, cultural and teaching practices. The research consisted of three corpora: i) the ENEM writing tests of 2018 and 2019; ii) the mirror of the essays written by 12 participants (high school students who took ENEM in those years); and iii) the answers to semi-structured interviews conducted with these participants about Competence V. To analyze the corpora, we resorted to document analysis, taking the Participant's Primer (2019), the Correction Manual (2019), the writing proposals of the years 2018 and 2019, and the mirror of the essays as documents, and to the analysis of the participants' discourses, materialized in the interview responses, resorting to reflections based on the studies of the Bakhtin Circle (BAKHTIN, 2013; 2016; VOLÓCHINOV, 2013; 2017, among others). The results indicate that, in the official documents about the exam, there are echoes of a discourse on textual typologies in detriment of discursive genres, which reverberates in the writing proposal that does not explain elements of the conditions of production of the essays. Moreover, there is a quantitative evaluation of the elements that should compose the intervention proposal. In the interviews, we noticed that the students highlight the insufficiency of their training on text production in high school, and they are forced to complement it, aiming to obtain better results in the ENEM writing test. Listening to the students' voices allowed us to observe the values discursively constructed regarding the practice of text production, mostly seen as a product and not as an interactive process of meaning construction through language. The analysis showed a constant valuation of their textual production, based exclusively on the grade received, with emphasis on the difficulty of producing the intervention proposal, a situation in which the participants reported the need to resort to ready made models to study. In the essays, the study found that most participants discoursed in the text the need to solve the proposed problem, but that many, by not contemplating the five elements present in the evaluation criteria, find themselves silenced by not having what to say in the text and not knowing how to do it, since the lack of understanding of the theme limits the proposition of interventions