Culture, cognition and language in the constitution of reading and writing practices in an adult literacy classroom

In this article we analyze a discursive interaction between a researcher and an Youth and Adult Education student intending to show the meanings and uses of reading and writing taken by him. We take as our basis for discussion the theoretical-methodological contributions from Historical-Cultural Psychology and Paulo Freire's theories, which are combined with Bakhtin's concept of dialogue. This procedure allowed us, on one hand, getting into the other's perspective and, on the other hand, to make relations between cognition, language and culture to understand the adult students' metacognitive strategies, in the appropriation process of literacy practices of school culture. Thus, we could discuss the intimate relationship between doing and knowing and the importance of school in the transition from concrete thinking to the abstract thinking and vice-versa.