The mind in constant motion and the reflective essay as a genre

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze a classroom experience carried out at the National University of La Plata (UNLP) to teach reflective essay writing in English to higher level students. In the context of English Language 4, a final year subject common to the English Language Teaching, Translation and Licentiate programs, we focus our efforts on the reading and writing of reflective essays from a discursive perspective, which considers students as real actors who operate with language to achieve specific goals through specific interactions. The pedagogical sequence presented here is to be carried out in three stages and it aims at the development of the reflective competence through exposure to definitions of the genre and a variety of reflective texts. We inscribe our work within the pedagogy of genre (Martin & Rose, 2012), derived from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 1985) as pedagogical and theoretical framework. The first two stages are carried out collaboratively and they aim at the analysis of the genre itself and the typical uncertain tone of the mind in constant motion, whereas the third one is to be solved autonomously and it is aimed at reflection and written production. The final product of the sequence encompasses the pooling of reflections on the students’ experience with words.