Anterioridades discursivas nos documentos oficiais para a correção da redação do Enem: em pauta as noções de língua e texto

Abstract

The main objective of this study is to analyze the conceptions of language and text that underlie the official documents of Inep (Anísio Teixeira National Institute for Educational Studies and Research), intended for Enem essay-grading trainees, in order to understand the degree to which these official documents align with the National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC), examining the discursive precedents of both sets of documents. In 2020, amid the Covid 19 pandemic, Inep, the agency responsible for the Enem (National High School Exam), released its confidential grading manuals for the first time, with the aim of supporting the teaching of writing. However, this release also posed a risk: that such guidelines would be treated as the primary, sole, or exclusive teaching material, which clearly is not their intended purpose, nor does it meet the objectives of language education, which should fundamentally aim, in my view, at the development of (inter)discursive competence. The notion of pre-discourse (Paveau, 2013) – and its articulation with the concept of interdiscourse, as performed by Mussalim (2020) – will serve as the theoretical foundation for this research, since, based on it, it will be possible to identify, through analysis, the presence of pre-discursive frameworks of knowledge and beliefs that underpin the proposals in these documents – especially regarding conceptions of language and text. In addition, we will draw upon the notions of formal and content stereotypes (Lemos, 1988) and of writing and rewriting as recursive processes (Fiad and Sabinson, 1989), as well as other converging theories. Preliminary results suggest that stereotypes, such as those of form and content, identified in studies from the 1970s in Brazil, are being reproduced today by the testing model established by the Enem, which has generated other stereotypes with a considerable influence on basic education, such as the stereotypes of discourse genres (Mussalim, 2024). Not only that, but this influence extends beyond the school walls, gaining a disturbing destructive force through media coverage (Mendonça, 2014), which disseminates “tricks,” “tips,” and ready-made templates for “perfect essays”, sometimes formulated by students who have just graduated from high school. This situation allows people without training in the field of languages to act as “teachers” (or “profetubers”) of writing. Therefore, and strongly considering the hypothesis that the alignment of Inep’s official documents with the BNCC is minimal and insufficient, given that they are linked to divergent discursive precedents, and that, furthermore, stereotyping regarding language and text phenomena has harmful socio-historical and linguistic implications, this study aims to contribute to a reflection on educational processes of the Portuguese language, as well as on nationwide assessment processes, such as Enem.