ABSTRACT
We present partial results of a research project in which we discuss the function of writing in teachers' education. The general premise is that writing about a class may be an activity through which the teacher produces, to himself and to others, data that will allow him to keep working on the ideas and positions assumed by him when in class. In this paper we focus on two aspects of this research: the "polyphonic" analysis centered on unfurling the "voices" that make up a written discourse about the class, based on the ideas of O. Ducrot; and the questioning of what the configuration of the enunciate may show about the "empirical subject" responsible for it, diverging from Ducrot in favor of M. Bakhtin's ideas. Our data comprise two universes: texts written by Language Arts students during their in-school training and papers on the teaching of Portuguese published in academic journals. We point out three problems that are common to both kinds of data: a) the use of "weasel words" in the place of concrete information; b) the insertion of cited discourses as enunciates to which one answers instead of as data that one analyses; c) conclusions about the class that do not result from the data analysis that is shown. We synthesize our results by stating that, when it comes to discussing what goes on in the classroom, even though one might listen to the "voices" that come from there, such voices hardly receive any treatment as data and are responded to in different ways; the resulting discourse is thus inconsistent as far as an analysis of the class.
Keywords:
Teachers' education; Language teaching; Polyphony; Dialogism