The Statement of Purpose genre and teaching argumentation in English language
Keywords:
didactic sequence, motivation letter, Statement of Purpose, Theory of Argumentation in the LanguageCopyright (c) 2023 Revista Iberoamericana de Argumentación
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Abstract
One of the documents requested from candidates for students’ scholarships for courses such as High School offered in the United States, Canada, England, among other countries, is the Statement of Purpose (SOP) or letter of motivation. In this context, with the aim of working on argumentation in English, it was decided to implement a didactic sequence (Dolz, Noverraz & Schneuwly, 2004) with 8th and 9th grade students of the bilingual program of a school located in Paraíba, Brazil. This action research has a qualitative approach and an interpretative nature. It consisted in the elaboration and application of a didactic sequence for the SOP genre. The Theory of Argumentation in the Language (TAL), proposed by Ducrot (1987, 1988) and his collaborators, constituted the theoretical framework that supported the analysis of the data. The final productions revealed that the argumentation developed was adequate for the genre, which shows the effectiveness of the didactic sequence implemented.
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