O resumo produzido no meio acadêmico sob a luz de uma abordagem linguístico-textual

Abstract

Summarizing is a requested didactic activity in the academic environment, however, it is observed that many students present difficulties developing this textual genre. According to Machado et al. (2008), knowing how to summarize is a task that demands reflection on the original text, which requires linkage between ideas in order to identify and select the most relevant information to maintain the essence of the content expressed in the source. Accordingly, the aim of the present study was to reflect on the difficulties encountered in the production of summaries from texts written by graduates of a Spanish Distance Education Language Course, requested in one of their disciplines called Portuguese Language’s Reading and Writing. In this context, eighteen texts were selected, which form our object of study. The methodological approach focused on the text as a whole, searching for textual, linguistic and discursive marks that typify a summary. We based our analysis on Bakhtin's (1997) discursive perspective and on the socio-discursive reinterpretation that Bronckart (2012) proposed based to Bakhtin’s studies. We also considered the dialogical aspect of such summaries, since the student-author makes a conversation with the original text, producing a responsive (dialogic) action for the teacher-reader, who requested the activity. In addition to that, we mentioned the linguists Platon (1990; 1996); Travaglia (1990; 1998); Fávero (1991); Fiorin (1996; 2006); Marcuschi (2001; 2002); Therezo (2001); Matencio (2002) and Koch (2006; 2011), whose studies on the subject were fundamental to our research. Five criteria were defined to analyze the selected summaries, namely: identification of the main ideas of the original text; student’s authorship in the production of the summary; reference to the original author; summary’s cohesive and coherent preparation; concise text writing. The results show that, in general, the eighteen summaries analyzed have retained both the compositional structure and the theme addressed in the base text. However, they did not present the basic characteristics of this textual genre. As noted, the greatest difficulty lies in identifying the main ideas of the source text. Considering the own writing criteria, we verified that among the eighteen abstracts, only five did not present a literal copy of the source text. In addition, they were not able to adequately manage the voices present in the source text. With regard to cohesion and coherence, summaries presented few cohesive elements that have been entered by summarizers, since most of it was copied from the text-based. Finally, we identified that the criterion of concision, among the five that have been listed, was better observed by the academics. Thus, based on the identifications we have made, we believe that one of the possible ways to solve the difficulties mentioned is the systematic investment in projects aimed at the teaching of textual genres, starting with the summary genre, whose appropriation will enable the construction of texts with higher quality.