Editor's Note
This issue, including thirteen articles and two book reviews, is a proof of the diversity of research interests in Applied Linguistics. Genre is the keyword in the first four articles. Motta-Roth and Marcuzzo present their research on the popularization of science in the light of Critical Genre Analysis. The authors highlight the relationships among discourse, knowledge production, media and society. The following article, written by Jesus, reflects upon the teaching of reading and writing through a gender approach. She studies a piece of advertisement from a Brazilian newspaper with the support of Functionalism, Semantic Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis. In the third article, Baptista presents an interactional sociolinguistic discursive microanalysis of telephone conversations in two different radio programmes; and, in the fourth, Schröder works on metaphorical blends in four discourse genres: spoken interviews, written interviews, newspaper articles and non-fictional books.
Two articles, with different grammatical approaches and methodologies, examine textual aspects in two different texts. Rodrigues Júnior presents a translation study which investigates gay representation in parallel literary corpus. His study focuses on transitivity processes in order to reveal how gay characters are discursively constructed. The sixth study, carried out by Hotza, analyses the use of pronouns in a text by Martin Luther in order to identify the addressee(s) referred by Luther.
The next group of seven texts belongs to the educational context. Borghi, Calvo and Freitas offer the reader a pedagogical view of genre. They describe an experience of a didactic sequence development by undergraduate students working with the genre Curriculum vitae. In the second article in this group, Cavallari reflects upon the inclusive discourse in the realm of education and its truth effects within our social and historical environment. The third, by Conceição, uses data from a Brazilian national exam to demonstrate how Portuguese teachers are semiotically represented by undergraduate students. Then, Bernadino and Nobre, in a Critical Discourse Analysis approach, analyze a seventeen-year sample of writing instructional texts for the entrance exams of a university and point out the discursive changes in lexical and grammatical levels during this period. In the fifth text, Finger-Kratochvil and Silveira study reading perceptions and abilities of freshmen college students; in the sixth article, Lima Júnior reports an interventionist action research dealing with the effect of explicit pronunciation instruction. Finally, Magalhaes and Fidalgo discuss four different historical moments of the concept of collaboration. To do so, they examined theses and dissertations defended in the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo.
This volume closes with two book reviews. The first is done by Ribeiro and the second by Wittke. The first reviews a book about virtual interactions and the last about qualitative research in the classroom.
The diversity of themes and research methods in this volume is a portrait of the fertility of Applied Linguistics in its mission to study a wide range of linguistic social practices.
Vera Lúcia Menezes de Oliveira e Paiva
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
03 Mar 2011 -
Date of issue
2010
