Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to present observations on the role of literacy in adult education, with special emphasis on the cognitive and discursive transformations that represent the appropriation of a new communicative technology such as writing (Goody, 1977; Ong, 1982). Starting with the contributions of rhetorics of this century (Burke, 1969; Billig, 1989), we have studied an activity frequently promoted by teachers inspired in the main ideas of Paulo Freire: classroom debates. Through the study of this kind of adult classroom activity, we have analyzed the following aspects involved in them: types of semiotic means (e.g., contextualized vs. decontextualized signs, speech genres, social languages; Bakhtin, 1986a; Wertsch, 1985, 1991) used in debates and similar forms of conversation by students (all of them women of several adult centers situated in southern Spain); modes of argumentation and ways for persuading the audience displayed by participants in debates; motives that emerge in the course of this form of dialogue.
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Ramirez, J.D., Wertsch, J.V. (1997). Discourse in the Adult Classroom: Rhetoric as Technology for Dialogue. In: Resnick, L.B., Säljö, R., Pontecorvo, C., Burge, B. (eds) Discourse, Tools and Reasoning. NATO ASI Series, vol 160. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03362-3_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-03362-3_19
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