Text Production Practices on MSN

Redifining Collaborative Writing

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to articulate school writing practices and the new communication and information technology from the Internet, by searching a way of rethinking and redefining the text production patterns with which schools still deal. In order to explore such relationship, we propose a paper which points out how the use of some digital genres from cyberspace, such as the e-mail and the MSN Messenger, contribute to the construction of collaborative writing practices of some secondary school students. To do so, we will be based on Bakhtinian constructs of speech genres and on the Genre Situated Theory (ERICKSON, 1997; YATES; ORLIKOWSKI; RENNECKER, 1997; SHEPHERD; WATTERS, 1999; DEVITT, 2000) to understand what digital genres are and how they behave. It is an empirical research carried out with sixteen students and one teacher from a secondary State school located in the municipality of Campinas – SP. The students created a website to release a digital newspaper, and, in order to produce texts which shall be exposed in such newspaper, they make use of e-mail, and MSN Messenger. As a resource for a multimodal analysis of the students text productions over the Internet, we will adopt the semiotic metafunctions (presentational, orientational, organizational), displayed by Lemke (1995, 1998a, 1998b), to deal with the data generated by means of the registers of the several ways with which the students construct senses when they learn and develop texts collaboratively through the use of digital genres.