Academic textual production

receptivity of undergraduate students with multimodal genres “data analysis” and “video presentation”

Abstract

The discipline “Portuguese Language Workshop: Reading and Text Production” has been offered, online and face-to-face, for a decade to undergraduate students at UFMG, aiming mainly at academic literacy. At the end of each semester, students are asked to complete a questionnaire evaluating the course and its activities. From the data of this questionnaire, in the period between the second semester of 2017 and the second semester of 2018, we noticed, on a recurring basis, the preference for the “Data analysis”, and the rejection of the “Video presentation” activity. In the light of these data, in this research, we seek possible explanations for such choices. We believe in the importance of this article, primarily, because it addresses multimodal genres that are often overlooked in the classroom. Moreover, mainly, for evidencing, from the theoretical reflections of Marcuschi (2001), Rojo and Barbosa (2015), Ribeiro (2016), among others, the relationship between the students' choices, the creative freedom allowed and the difficulties in producing oral texts by the students, potentially arising from an educational deficit in relation to oral and digital literacy.