Tasks on linguistic knowledge in the upper high school - DOI: 10.4025/actascilangcult.v30i2.813

Abstract

Current teaching conditions on linguistic knowledge in public and private secondary education contexts in a town in the state of Paraíba, Brazil, are discussed. References for discussion involve two fields, or rather, linguistic theories concerning text and discourse underlying the Brazilian official guidelines for the teaching of the mother tongue, and the educational field pertaining to determining factors in the teaching task. Data analysis, comprising evaluation tasks performed in four public and four private schools, shows that the differences between the two teaching contexts lie within the context of a more favourable standing of the private school student, mainly in terms of access to printed material. Two aspects are similar in the two school contexts: the teacher’s poor conditions to interact with bibliographical sources in order to prepare classroom activities, and the focus of the teaching object. Since the latter is predominantly structural and normative, it is foreign to the national requirements for an innovatory form of teaching in Linguisitc Knowledge. In the first decade of the 21st century, these requirements have been embodies by the official initiative in the parameters and evaluation of Portuguese language teaching.