GENRE TEACHING IN DIFFERENT SOCIAL ENVIRONMENTS:AN EXPERIMENT WITH THE GENRE DETECTIVE STORY

This article aims to reflect upon the use of teaching strategies to improve writing, in differentsocial contexts, bearing in mind the students’ individual track, and their specific cultural-historicalsituations. The study was based on principles derived from the socio-discursive interactionist theory(Bronckart, 1999, 2006) and on the possibility of making genres teachable through didactic sequences(Schneuwly & Dolz, 2004). An applied comparative work was developed using a didactic sequence,related to the detective story genre, with two 5th grade classes in different elementary schools. Althoughthe schools were located in the same geographical region, one was a local-government-run public school,with students belonging to a low socio-economic class, and the other was a private, religion-orientedschool, with students belonging to a high socio-economic class. The study demonstrates that the workwith didactic sequence has productive consequences in the students’ textual productions from bothschools, independently of the social environment in which the work with genre was developed. If quantitativegrowth was more evident in the public school, qualitative growth between early and final productionsin both schools was significant and reveals the importance of consistent work on genre teaching.