Naming Princesses and Building Arcs: Intertextuality and Memory of the Object as Illuminated by the Oral Erasure with Textual Comment in the Texts of Recently Alphabetized Students

Abstract

Giving names to characters of invented stories is a creative process in itself. Our study analyzed how a dyad of pupils recently literate, writing a text collaboratively at school, debated what name they would assign to the main character of a story created by them. Choosing the character’s name, the pupils made evident the references they draw on when writing a narrative, a feature that Amorim (2009) calls memory of the object, and the typological intertextuality they used (a group of characteristics that are common in a textual genre, such as narrative in this case). We selected as unit of analysis the dialogal text (dt): the conversation of the students during this process, registered with multimodal tools, while respecting the environmental, didactic and interactional conditions of the classroom. Through the dts we were able to observe and obtain some insights on the following aspects: why some parts of the text were erased during composing; why there were substitutions of a word by another one; why the dyad made certain decisions concerning the spelling of a particular word, and their initial relationship with punctuation marks; and * Doctoral Student. Postgraduate Program of Languages and Linguistics. Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil. E-mail: brunojaborandy@gmail. com ** Titular Professor. Postgraduate Program of Languages and Linguistics. Federal University of Alagoas, Brazil. E-mail: eduardocalil@hotmail.com 92 | Bruno Jaborandy Maia Dias & Eduardo Cali l finally, the “teacher’s voice” along with her didactics in the discussion with the students. We investigated what Calil (2016) has called commented oral erasure, a phenomenon composed of a point in the text that is a trigger to the debate between the students (textual object) and the comments made about this object. Our focus was on the subdivisions called textual comments, the ones related to the criteria of textuality.