Ensino de oralidade: a produção de gêneros orais em livros didáticos para os anos Iniciais do ensino fundamental

Abstract

This doctoral research aims to investigate how oral text production activities proposed in Portuguese language textbooks, intended for the early years of Elementary School, contribute to the development of orality as a social practice of language. The research is situated in the field of Applied Linguistics—a transdisciplinary field that seeks to overcome traditional approaches to language teaching, making room for more contextualized and socially situated pedagogical practices. It starts from the understanding that language is materialized through discursive genres and that orality, as a legitimate language practice, should be systematically addressed in school, just as writing is. The theoretical framework is mainly based on the studies of the Bakhtin Circle, addressing concepts such as concrete utterance, speech genres, ideological sign, and dialogism supported by the studies of Bakhtin [1895–1975] (2002a; 2002b; 2016), Volóchinov [1895–1936] (2018), and other authors focused on the Circle's theories, such as Faraco (2009), Grillo (2018), Miotello (2021), and Molon; Vianna (2012), as well as studies by Marcuschi (2001; 2003; 2007; 2008; 2010a; 2010b), Botelho (2012), Carvalho; Ferrarezi (2018), Rojo (2001), Rojo; Cordeiro (2004), and Dolz; Schneuwly (2004), which discuss the relationship between writing and orality and how orality is taught at school. Methodologically, this is a qualitative study anchored in the Dialogical Discourse Analysis (Brait, 2021a, 2021b), aimed at understanding the social and discursive relations present in the language practices proposed by teaching materials. The research corpus consists of oral text production activities found in the “Ápis” Portuguese Language collection (teacher’s manual) by Editora Ática, approved by the PNLD/2019, for the early years of Elementary School. This collection was uniformly adopted by the municipal education network of Birigui, in the interior of São Paulo, covering the fourteen schools offering Elementary Education (1st to 5th grades). Activities were selected based on orality skills outlined in the National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) and classified into three categories: Orality as a social practice of language, Orality practices as possibilities to take place in the classroom, and Invented orality practice, distant from a social practice of language. The results show that, although there are proposals aligned with the perspective of orality as a social language practice, most activities in the initial volumes present only partial alignment, often leaving the implementation of oral practice to the discretion of the teacher, without proposing clear communicative situations, defined interlocutors, or concrete discursive purposes. Some activities still reinforce a view of orality as merely a preparatory stage for writing. On the other hand, the activities classified as appropriate stand out for promoting concrete oral genres in meaningful communicative contexts, respecting the progression and development of students’ discursive abilities. Although the analyzed collection shows progress in incorporating orality as a teaching object, especially by theoretically anchoring itself in a dialogical and social conception of language, it is still necessary to expand and improve the didactic proposals to ensure that orality is treated as a fundamental axis in the critical and discursive formation of students.