A variação linguística e o ensino de língua portuguesa: crenças e atitudes

Abstract

The aim of teaching and learning the Portuguese language must be the development and improvement of the linguistic and communicative skills while students´ needs, demands, abilities and potentialities are comsidered. Based upon the theoretical and methodological principles of the Educational Sociolinguistics, Etnography and the Intervention Research, this work analyses the linguistic variation in the teaching of the Portuguese language in two groups of the Ensino Fundamental II – 6th to 9th grade – of the Municipal School José Maria dos Mares Guia, Barão de Cocais City, Minas Gerais state, Brazil. The text focuses on the teaching of Portuguese as a set of variations in order to find the images students make of their native language, mainly that referring to the uses different from the Standard language and suggests strategies and actions so that the linguistic variation issue would become part of the school curriculum. To accomplish such a goal, text discusses linguistic prejudice while points at the necessity of students´ knowing and using the Standard Portuguese and evaluates the aplicability of those strategies and actions that emphasize the relevance of a satisfactory control over the Standard Portuguese. Results showed that the approach of the linguistic variation under the continums of orality/literacy, stylistic control and rural-urban language may be highly productive because it potentializes the use of language according to the communicative situation, desmythicize negative thoughts and prejudices, stimulate reflexion and linguistic consciousness, aspects which may contribute the construction of positive images about language and its variations