Representações sociais dos professores de língua portuguesa sobre o ensino gramatical
Abstract
In Brazil, grammar teaching has drawn attention from Portuguese language teaching scholars and experts over last decades. However, the guidelines on this teaching are not homogeneous, emphasized either by a more normative grammatical view, which focus only the work with the standard language, or, starting from a Linguistics as Science perspective, which considers and works with students’ non-standard varieties. Moreover, often the grammatical notion, approached by teaching materials or official documents, is not explicit or delimited, which maintains almost the exclusive traditional and normative grammatical perspective continuity in the teaching process. Thus, in most cases, Portuguese teachers in Primary/Secondary Education associate grammar with Traditional and Normative Grammar. Considering also that contemporary Linguistics presuppositions influenced the teaching of Portuguese language, but had not had the same force in relation specifically to grammatical teaching, we aim, with this investigation, at understanding how non-exclusively scientific and academic factors, but institutional, social and even intellectual influences in teaching practice building social representations about what is to teach grammar in the school context. To do this, we recovered grammar studies development since its emergence in Classical Antiquity and analyzed how different language conceptions influenced language teaching. To reach our objectives, we developed a qualitative investigation, with interpretative lens, through notions of the clinical method and artificial participant observation. We collected data from our corpus through comments posted in virtual learning environments by teachers participating in a university extension course offered by us, about grammatical approaches and Portuguese language teaching. In data analysis, we used the Ginzburg’s indiciary paradigm. Our analysis have shown that teachers are aware of their teaching role regarding to standard language teaching and generally begin work on students' knowledge and linguistic varieties. Also they demonstrated the contemporary academic and scientific orientations on grammatical teaching, present in official documents such as the Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais para a Língua Portuguesa. However, due to a tense work context, strongly influenced by social and institutional issues, they develop grammatical teaching practices, trying on their own way to harmoniously associate traditional and normative notions with contemporary scientific and academic orientations. Also have our analysis shown that teachers are unaware of academic and scientific grammars. Lastly, our research has allowed us to verify that teachers’ social representations influence the grammatical work which they develop, maintaining, to a certain extent, the traditional and normative perspective, although they demonstrate to know contemporary theories and orientations. In addition, we consider that there is a need for a more explicit and delimited grammar presentation or consistent grammatical approaches with contemporary scientific and academic thinking, in official documents and guidelines, so that there would be a change in the Portuguese language teaching in the country.