Coesão e coerência na construção de sentidos em textos de alunos do 5º ano do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This study discusses textual cohesion and coherence in the construction of meaning by 5th-grade elementary school students, a transitional stage in which writing production becomes more pedagogically demanding. The main objective was to investigate the cohesion and coherence mechanisms employed by these students in their written productions. The research questions aimed to understand which textual resources are used, what textuality problems emerge from these productions, and the importance of working with such mechanisms in the early years of schooling. The theoretical framework is based on authors such as Antunes (2003), Koch (2008; 2014), Koch and Travaglia (2011), Cavalcante (2014), Marcuschi (2008), Cagliari (2010), and Ferrarezi and Carvalho (2015), who discuss factors of textuality, textual genres, and pedagogical practices in writing instruction. The adopted methodology followed a qualitative approach (Minayo, 2009), involving field and documental 4 research, based on the analysis of 14 letters written by students from a public school in Caicó-RN, within the context of the "Papai Noel dos Correios" (Santa Claus Post Office) project. The data reveal the use of resources such as repetition, parallelism, conjunctions, pronouns, ellipses, noun phrases, and verb tenses, although issuessuch as sequential cohesion problems, redundancies, and misuse of connectives were also identified. The findings indicate that, despite some difficulties, students show an initial command of textual meaning construction, which reinforces the importance of addressing textuality in pedagogical practice, contributing to more meaningful, contextualized, and communicative writing. The study also highlights the value of working with textual genres and implementing contextualized pedagogical interventions.