As implicações da linguagem das redes sociais na produção textual em processos seletivos para ingresso no ensino superior

Abstract

The use of digital technologies has caused changes in the interaction among people and has been influencing, at an accelerated pace, the ways of production, circulation, and reception of texts. It is considered that such changes take place, among other reasons, due to the dynamics of virtual social networks, which are characterized by the search for linguistic economics and expressiveness in interactions between interlocutors. Given that, the present work elects as a research problem the influences of interactions mediated by digital technologies in the practice of producing written texts. Thus, the main objective of this research is to analyze possible implications related to the uses of the prototypical language of virtual social networks in texts produced in the context of a selective process for entering higher education. The selection process chosen as the object of research is the PAS (Serial Evaluation Process), a way of entering the face-to-face undergraduate courses at UFLA (Federal University of Lavras), in which the candidate is evaluated in three consecutive stages, at the end of each high school year. To achieve the proposed objective, a qualitative and quantitative investigation was carried out, contemplating the analysis of essays produced by candidates for the selection process for admission to the public university (triennium 2016, 2017, 2018). For the analysis, occurrences of linguistic and discursive mechanisms/resources of digital genres were verified in essays produced by the candidates and the correlation of this occurrence with the evaluations obtained. The analysis undertaken showed that the implications of language used in virtual social network contexts were not very representative in terms of occurrences in the texts produced by the candidates. In addition, the research demonstrated the impossibility of attributing the occurrences presented in the essays to the influences of social networks, exclusively. The research points out the importance of a discussion about the specificities of the influences of technologies in the textual production process, since teaching based on a heterogeneous way of writing constitution allows to consider this practice as a process of producing the statement, with its value of the social and historical event, and not only to the structural aspect of a written product, that is, the influences brought by the uses of language in digital contexts are presented, more recurrently, in the discursive dimensions in detriment of the formal dimensions.