The Rebellion of the Little Copyists

This research came from an interest in knowing what happens when children enrolled in the third year of Elementary I of a public school, located in the west zone of São Paulo, meet the request to reproduce, as faithfully as possible, source-texts whose reading aloud, by their teachers, they have just followed. For this, the work explored a corpus of 236 manuscripts produced by 59 children. The whole research indicates that, even in tasks with a predominantly paraphrastic character, the participants end up generating effects of meaning that, together with the reader, are configured as authorial. Between repeating exactly what they read and taking it back in a different way, children tend to the second movement, giving signs that they are continuously interpreting the texts given to read.