As interações sociais na elaboração conceitual em uma aula da primeira série do ensino fundamental Social interaction in the conceptual elaboration in a class for firstgraders

Considering the importance of the beginning of school education for the cognitive development, our goal, in the present study, is to understand how the interactions in the classroom promote conceptual elaboration. A teacher and 25 firstgraders of a private school in a suburb of Belém (State of Pará, Brazil) participated in this research. The class was about the concepts of culture and nature. It was transcribed and analyzed microgenetically, focusing changes occurred in the conceptual elaboration and their transition from the social plane to the individual plane. By means of different movements in the zones of proximal development, the students, with their previous knowledge and their capacity of generalization and abstraction in development, learned the definitions presented by the teacher. The communicative approach adopted by the teacher was, predominantly, interactive with authority. We consider that a different comprehension of the presented contents might help the teacher to sustain a dialog-based communicative approach, valueing the students’ points of view.