This research has the objective of evaluating the contributions of the use of the WhatsApp application in a work focused on the expansion of argumentative competence and favoring of critical literacies. For this, six debates were conducted in a virtual environment with two groups of eighth grade students from middle school. The corpora constitute approximately 305 minutes of debate, transcribed to a text file by the application itself. In order to justify the interests of this research and to promote the understanding of the material produced by the students, we discuss, throughout the chapters, the orientations present in the official documents and we deal with the importance of the multiliteracies and pedagogical possibilities provided by Information and Communication Technologies. Moreover, based on the bakhtinian theory about the genres of discourse and, through the contributions of Marcuschi (2004), we verify the development of the genre debate from the digital space provided by the WhatsApp application. We also used a theoretical contribution related to the argumentation, considering the need to build a significant and relevant basis to be used in our analyzes of corpora. In this sense, we highlight the contributions of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1996 [1958]) that take up the aristotelian Rhetoric, as well as the studies of Amossy (2007), important for this work, insofar as they understand the argumentative dimension as an inherent characteristic to any speeches. The results allow us to ratify the validity of the virtual space used for argumentative practice from a context in which students find real interlocutors with whom they can argue and defend their positions.