FROM RELATIONSHIP TO WRITING TO LEARNING OF DISCURSIVE FORMS

Abstract

Two perspectives are present in studies on teaching of writing: one of them appropriates the notion of representation from different branches of the social sciences; the other one borrows the notion of discursive forms from linguistics. My purpose is to try to connect both perspectives. For this, the work is organized in three stages: (a) initially, I evoke recent advances from research on teaching of writing, which encourage the appeal to the notion of representation; subsequently, (b) I discuss this notion. I explain why, in teaching of writing, the notion of representations is used without adding the adjective “social”; next, I explain why a certain number of researchers prefer the notion of relationship to writing to the notion of representations of writing; finally, (c) I address about the connections between the relationship to writing and the learning of discursive forms. For this, I present some results of a field investigation. I show how one of the dimensions of the relationship to writing – the way of verbalizing about writing – can be the object of a didactic operationalization.