Written words, indicia of spoken words

Abstract

According to the Bakhtinian view, all enunciation is just a fraction of an “uninterrupted flow of verbal communication.” How should one situate those texts written by children in their initial school years? To exclude them from such a flow would mean to assume that the child’s effort to write produces the perverse effect of an enunciative deteritorialization: as speakers, children take part in the continuous process of producing enunciations; as learners of writing, considering the usual unfamiliarity of initial conviviality, they would produce texts that are excluded from that same flow, as if they were foreigners to the words of their own native language. My goal in this work is to find, after reading a random set of texts written by children, indicia of other texts, the product of school discursive practices, whose words, recovered by the learners of writing, acquire new appreciative tones in their texts and may reveal their understanding of the words, discourses, attitudes and relations that are instituted in the school environment.