Corpo e escrita: a correlação entre gestualidade e elementos linguísticos escritos no processo de escrita colaborativa

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate how a dyad of students uses gestures in order to establish more productive communication with their pair about linguistic objects, related to graphic accentuation, punctuation marks and paragraphing, which were recognized during the production of the school manuscript. The analyzed data, in turn, comprise visual, auditory and written media related to the collaborative writing process of two Portuguese students, collected through the Ramos System (Calil, 2020), in a school in Aveiro – Portugal, in 2017. Given the multimodal nature of the corpus, it was possible to observe the metalinguistic activities (oral, written and gestural) of the students. Thus, the students' gestures were analyzed in relation to their verbal actions (oral and/or written) on the text that they were collaboratively constructing, which allowed us to observe how the gestures are configured during the collaborative writing process and how they may influence it. Regarding the research methodology, studies on gestures (Kendon, 1988; 2000; McNeill, 1992; Novack; Goldin-Meadow, 2015; among others), collaborative writing processes (Calil, 2008; 2016; Calil et al., 2022; among others) and metalinguistic activities (Camps et al., 2000b; Camps, 2019; Morato, 2020; among others) were used. The investigation found that the gestures of the students both indicate and represent the linguistic elements in focus, recognizing, in the first case, their places of incidence in the manuscript, and in the second, building an “image” of what they refer to. Additionally, the gestures manifested are presented either in conjunction with speech or complementing the gaps present in the oral discourse of the students.