Professoras alfabetizadoras e língua materna: relacionando expectativas, conteúdos e forma de ensiná-los

Abstract

This study was conducted with literacy teachers at local schools in a city in the interior of São Paulo throughout the school year 2003. The aim of the research was to verify the expectations these teachers had in relation to the lessons they would teach about their students´ native language, relating such expectations to the contents taught, besides identifying the lessons that were most often provided as well as the way they were provided. This investigative work was based on the assumption that every educational methodology articulates a political orientation which includes a theory about how to understand and interpret the methods used in the classroom. Therefore, the lessons taught and the attention directed to them, the teaching strategies, and the like are performed according to the conceptual orientation of the teachers, which, in turn, depends not only on their education, but also upon their conception of world, people and language formed during their process of socialization. Childrens´ entry into the world of writing may be conceived of as a simultaneous process of alphabetization and literacy, in which learning is beyond the technical scope of reading and writing skills. The study was carried out in two stages: a) the teachers completed a questionnaire with closed questions about the lessons from 1st to 4th grades on oral expressions, reading, and writing; b) a semi-structured interview was conducted with the teachers. The data collected through these tools showed that the process of teaching reading and writing skills was generally conceptualized as the increasing acquisition of the language elements from the lowest to the highest units (letters, syllables, words, sentences, texts), supporting what other research had previously demonstrated. The texts provided the pretext for identifying the lower units. Although reading was frequently practiced in the classroom, it was usually developed by the teachers. In addition, the reading was focused on a few types of literary genre, showing that the opportunities for reading at school do not involve the complete variety of available literary materials. Concerning writing skills, the data indicated that both orthography and grammar were taught more unsystematically than systematically. The teachers showed an awareness of the importance of teaching orthographic rules, but the way they conducted the activities in the classroom was often focused on the repetition and memorization of rules rather than through reflection on them. This may be a consequence of the fact that some teachers do not understand regularity and irregularity in language, inasmuch as they adopt the same strategies to teach orthographic aspects of differing origins. As regards grammar teaching, it was hardly representative in relation to the other lessons.