Variação linguística e tecnologia digital: por uma abordagem reflexiva da língua portuguesa no ensino fundamental

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of a survey of the Professional Master's Degree in Letters – PROFLETRAS – Federal University of Uberlândia. Based on the assumption that the Portuguese Language teaching has been a great challenge to Brazilian education, especially in public schools, which serve a clientele from such diverse socioeconomic and cultural classes, we believe, like Cyranka (2007), Dantas (2015), Santos (2017) and Frasson (2017), that to diagnose the student body’s linguistic beliefs can be a useful path towards the search for a meaningful and stimulating Portuguese language teaching in Basic Education. In line with this perspective, we also believe that for such education to be feasible, it is necessary to take into consideration the student's extensive prior knowledge of his mother tongue as a Portuguese native speaker, something that is almost invariably ignored by thousands of Portuguese language teachers in Brazil. Given this scenario and based on the hypothesis that most of the students of Basic Education, especially in public schools, have very negative linguistic beliefs, both in relation to the teaching of the Portuguese Language and the knowledge they have of this language as native speakers, supported by the Linguistic Variation Pedagogy (cf. BORTONI-RICARDO, 2004; 2005; FARACO, 2008), we have developed a didactic intervention proposal and applied it to students of the 6th grade of a Municipal School in the city of Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, in order to contribute with the increase of the linguistic self-esteem of these students. For such, believing that it is essential to raise heterogeneity student awareness regarding the Portuguese Language, we focused a great part of the didactic proposal to the deconstruction, together with the students, of the notion of homogeneous language, as well as of the false relation of Portuguese Language study as synonymous to teaching / learning normative grammar. By doing so, we also seek to contribute to the abolition of "right and wrong" dichotomy regarding the uses of language, favoring the notion of "adequate and inappropriate" to certain communicative situations of speech and writing (BAGNO, 2007). In order to achieve our objectives, we explore the digital resources present in students' daily life as a way of sparking their interest in developing their language skills, thus helping to broaden these students communicative competence. The research was based on the methodological assumptions of action research (THIOLLENT, 1985), in which once a particular demand in the classroom was identified, we elaborated and applied an intervention proposal. In addition, we used other methodological resources, applying a questionnaire of beliefs and linguistic attitudes at two different moments of the 2018 academic year, as well as a questionnaire on the use of digital technology by students participating in the research. Linked to this, we elaborated a didactic intervention proposal created in the blogosphere and titled "Our daily Portuguese" with activities elaborated in the light of the contributions of Educational Sociolinguistics and of Linguistic Variation Pedagogy. In this virtual space, both teachers and students will be able to find, in a simple and practical way, useful information in an interactive space created as a means to ponder on language issues from the language variationist bias. With the development of this research and in accordance with the presented results, we have been able to confirm the urgent and effective need, from the early grades of Elementary School, for a more systematic Portuguese language teaching regarding the reflections related to linguistic variation, to promote a Portuguese language teaching based on the language in use and therefore sensitive to the heterogeneity language, paying attention to the linguistic variation in all its different levels. The analysis of the results allowed us to observe that, despite the short period of intervention, there was a positive contribution coming from our research, since we managed to promote a more reflective look of the students on the mother tongue, extrapolating the school walls.