Reflections on writing production based on information and communication technology mediated environments

This article contrasts two writing activities produced by students of the Electrical Engineering Course at Cefet-MG, a federal center for technological education in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, as part of the subjects studied at the discipline “Technical-Scientific Writing”. One of the aims of this discipline was to motivate students to discuss divergent positions through arguments that support their points of views. We have randomically distributed two writing proposals related to the same situation raised in a newspaper article: the holistic approach to teaching in opposition to a teaching focused on a specific topic related to the professional field. Group one was assigned a task to produce a piece of writing discussing the teaching concepts presented in the article. This activity was done in the classroom. Group two had to write an e-mail to the section “letter to the editor” of the same newspaper in which they should present their arguments to defend their points of views about the teaching concepts presented in the article. The e-mail was written in the IT lab and sent to opiniao@em.uai.com.br with a carbon copy sent to my personal e-mail address so that I could have access to their written production. In a discursive perspective, supported by a concept of language as activity in which I propose to evaluate the interference of the absence of an interlocutor and the discontextualization found in the first purpose in contrast with the presence of an interlocutor in a real interaction situation, mediated by the computer in the perspective of the learners communicative and linguistic performances. Key words: speaker, enunciator, co-enunciator, argument/counterargument