Apreciando a literatura: Um estudo sobre a fala de alunos de Letras

Abstract

According to Rothery and Stenglin (2000), one of the objectives of literary education is to provide language students with strategies which enable them to articulate opinions containing emotional, ethic and/or aesthetic values. The present article reports an investigation on how first-year undergraduates at a public university in Rio de Janeiro articulate appraisals in their mother tongue in terms of the aesthetic quality of poems. To this end, the work describes data collection using focus group discussions (cf. BARBOUR; KITZINGER, 1999) and the analysis of such corpus by means of Martin and Rose’s (2003) system, which focuses on the language of Attitude. With the help of a concordancer, the most frequent lexical items and the clusters they formed are extracted and analyzed. Finally, the article discusses how far the research subjects are capable of articulating the types of aesthetic opinions referred to by Rothery and Stenglin (2000).