AUTORIA DE ALUNOS-ESCRITORES DE LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA:POSSIBILIDADE OU UTOPIA

by SPECHT, LUCIANA

Research on authorship has recently developed an understanding of the relationship between thewriter and the meanings produced in mother tongue and in foreign language (ORLANDI, 2004;CARMAGNANI, 2001). Such a comprehension seems possible because authorship refers to theunity, originality, coherency, progression, non-textual contradiction (ORLANDI, 2004) and to themeaning production of a text (ORLANDI, 1998). In view of this, the present study intends todiscuss and understand the authorship revealed in texts of students writing in a foreign language,discussions are based on the French Discourse Analysis principles. For this purpose, fiveundergraduate language students of English from a private university in Southern Brazil wereinvited to write two texts in English and participated in an oral, individual interview in mothertongue about their authorship and writing conceptions in English as a foreign language. Resultssuggest that the students? interpretation remained stable in both texts, because they were unable toproduce new meanings in their writing. In other words, they only proposed, for instance, solutionsfor the themes, but did not develop them. Another aspect that contributed for the stabilisation of themeanings on the students? texts refers to the titles, they were short of originality because they didnot offer, for instance, inquiries about the themes to be developed. Concerning the interview, it wasobserved that some of the students do not consider themselves part of the sociocultural andideological context of English as a foreign language, and besides, students believe that the writingin English is only related to the structure and to the lexicon of the target language. Because of this,authorship becomes practically impossible to show in this context, unless the language can be seennot only as a structure but also as part of the sociohistorical and ideological context. In this case,students could produce meanings and not only reproduce them and authorship could be present