The Writing of Field Diaries by Language Students. From the Observed Class to the Production of Relevant Data

Abstract

We departed our research from an inventory of the difficulties faced by people who are concluding their language courses while they are writing their internship reports. We look for parameters in the internship reports in which the authors describe a classroom, making that work as research data. We tried to answer the following question: What challenges must the students face to be able to testify the construction of a professional reasoning while: a) Facing the Portuguese class as a language event? b) Reading their own text? Therefore, we analysed 1600 internship reports produced between 2003 and 2013. While analysing the data, we have investigated three themes: 1) how the trainees see their task of writing diaries; 2) how the trainees register the conversations of a third party; and 3) how the trainees construct temporal references. The undergraduate course in a Faculty of Letters should lead the student to construct the capacity of writing well. The students should develop this skill without losing their condition of speakers. Therefore, as speakers, they should be able to ask themselves if, as native speaker of their own language, they would accept their text as a good one.