A análise linguística no ensino de língua portuguesa do 6º ao 9º ano: uma investigação no Documento Curricular do Território Maranhense

Abstract

Since the 1980s and 1990s, the teaching of grammar(s) in Portuguese language classes has been redefined with the rise of linguistic analysis in the national Portuguese language curriculum. Since then, the activities of this curricular component started to contemplate the students' abilities to reflect on the language in its actual use practices. The teaching based on linguistic analysis thus suggests an alternative to the normative grammar teaching model, which focused on the transmission of grammatical contents through a repetitive methodology. Linguistic analysis therefore demands from the teacher, in Portuguese language classes, the use of both metalinguistic and epilinguistic activities that are, both activities that use concepts and classifications to speak of the language itself, as well as activities that favor reflection about the expressive resources used in a text, in view of a communicative intention. In this new perspective of working with language, teaching based on the practice of linguistic analysis has been gaining prominence in official documents that guide teaching in the country's schools, even becoming a thematic axis of the curricular component of Portuguese Language in the Parameters National Curriculum (1998) and in the Common National Curriculum Base (2017), as well as in the regional documents that guide the teaching of the mother tongue. Given this scenario, this thesis aims discussing the teaching model resulting from the proposals for linguistic analysis in the state of Maranhão curriculum, as well as the nuances involved in the process of preparing this document. For this, due to the complex character of language and teaching, this work approached them through the lens of complexity theory. In this context, to articulate the principles of linguistic analysis, teaching, language, official curriculum and educational policies, we adopted the theory of complex adaptive systems and one of its aspects that, in our view, has a great potential impact on teaching based on the practice of linguistic analysis: the attractors. In this context, it was possible to radiograph the teaching model based on the practice of linguistic analysis that the Maranhão´s curriculum document proposes for the final years of elementary school, using the language teaching models defined by Halliday et al. (1974): prescriptive and productive. As a methodological choice, we adopted content analysis, a fruitful method in the investigation of a variety of communications, pointing out the paths that lead to the interpretation of the reality of a given document. Therefore, we carried out a survey of the number of metalinguistic and epilinguistic skills available for the final years of elementary school, seeking in this distribution the implications for teaching based on the practice of linguistic analysis. As a result, we identified a predominance of epilinguistic activities, constituting almost triple the number of metalinguistic activities, which indicates us a productive teaching model, aligned with proposals for teaching renewal, but incurring the risk of having its bases compromised due to this expressive imbalance between the activities. Therefore, we base our discussions on the theoretical concepts discussed in the works of Geraldi (2006), Morin (2011), Bertanlanffy (1975), Halliday et al. (1974), among other productions that deal with the theme.