1997-2001
Bi-National Research Project sponsored by the French and Brazilian Agencies: COFECUB and CAPES.

Unicamp
Angela Kleiman (coord.)
Silvana Serrani
Maria José Coracini
Inês Signorini
Université de Grenoble III
Michel Dabène (coord.)
Louise Dabène
Francis Grossmann
Christian Degache

To study reading strategies in French, Portuguese and Spanish as first and second languages by Brazilian and French university students at the University of Grenoble and the University of Campinas.

Discursive Heterogeneities: Socio-cultural Misunderstandings in Spanish and Portuguese (Argentine and Brazilian varieties).

Case studies were carried out in reading comprehension classroom settings at a Brazilian University. An experimental corpus for a discursive analysis was composed from the students’ protocols. The focus was on argumentative skills in epistolary commercial discourse. The letters were produced by executives who belong to firms operating within the Mercosul (The Free Trade Area Project in Latin America Southern Cone countries). The approach was contrastive and discursive oriented, considering Spanish and Portuguese languages and the Brazilian and Argentine Societies.
The analysis followed:
a) the methodological procedures for approaching reading protocols applied in the Galatea Program, which is sponsored by the European Union to study and promote inter-comprehension in the Romance languages - Dabene, 1996; Degache, 1998).
b) the analytical operations for examining paraphrasing mechanism in discourse developed in the AREDA Project (this was carried out in Brasil to study repetitions in discourse - Serrani, 1993 and 1999; Schnell, 1997; Berg 2000). The results were mostly related to directness and indirectness in speech and linguistic politeness. One of the theoretical conclusions was about the approach of politeness not only as a pragmatic strategy used to avoid interaction conflicts, but also as a feature of socio-cultural identity building. Consequences were drawn for the teaching/learning of reading in both languages, mainly in cross-cultural contexts.

Serrani, Silvana (2001) “Resonancias discursivas y cortesía en prácticas de lecto-escritura”. D.E.L.T.A. - Documentos de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada, 17, 1. ISSN 0102-4450, São Paulo: Educ, pp. 31-58. [ link ]

Serrani, Silvana (2000) Pragmatic Failures in Second Language Argumentation and Compreension. 7th International Pragmatics Conference. Budapest, pp. 202-203.

Serrani, Silvana (2000) “Discurso sobre a Língua, Textualidade e Línguas Próximas”, Anais da ANPOL em CD-ROM: Niterói, R.J, 2000.

Serrani, Silvana (1998) “Diversidade e Alteridade na Enunciação em Línguas Próximas – O Caso do Espanhol e do Português Brasileiro”, revista Letras 14: Alteridade e Heterogeneidade. ISSN 1519 -3985. UFSM, Santa Maria, RS, pp. 1 –19.