The discursive practices of the Portuguese Language teacher in the virtual classroom: responsiveness and dialogism in the digital age

Abstract

The teacher’s discursive practice is constituted in the dialogical relationships among subjects in real situations of language use, which, according to Mikhail Bakhtin ([1977] 2011), materialize in the production of concrete utterances. In the context of Portuguese Language (PL) teaching, these processes are shaped by specific modes of teacher subjectivation, intensified in the Digital Age. Considering that spaces of interaction may be (re)oriented by unexpected events, such as the covid-19 pandemic, this study is grounded in the assumptions of the Bakhtin Circle, according to which the subject is discursively constituted in and through interaction by means of concrete utterances. From this perspective, we pose and substantiate the following research question: how does the Portuguese Language teacher, in the digital classroom, constitute themselves responsively within the dialogical relations of the teaching–learning process? In light of the Bakhtinian dialogical perspective, we investigate how discourse genres that emerge in the virtual classroom materialize relations of responsiveness, as well as the discursive processes articulated with forms of expression characteristic of the digital space. To this end, we adopt Dialogical Discourse Analysis (DDA) to construct and analyze a corpus produced during the pandemic period. The discussion, therefore, focuses on the teaching dimension, considering the discourse genres that shape the pedagogical relationship in the digital context.