The (non) place of the literacy teacher in the pedagogical-curricular proposals of portuguese language for primary school

Abstract

Portuguese language teachers’ education for the early years is historically conditioned by cleavages in the curriculum of basic school and its counterparts in undergraduate courses. The first years of Primary School are historically assigned the primary objective of promoting the acquisition of alphabetic writing, in a discursive space characterized by competition between theoretical and methodological conceptions produced in different fields of knowledge. The production of texts, in reading and writing practices, occupies a different position in these spaces of competition, sometimes conceived as a precondition for the literacy process to be carried out in a meaningful way for the learner, sometimes as an instrumental factor for the effectiveness of the literacy process, which produces effects on the ways in which the concept of literacy is appropriated as a didactic-pedagogical reference. The formation of the reader and the writer is expected to occur either integratedly to the acquisition of alphabetic writing, or separately, when the possibilities of autonomous achievement of alphabetic writing by students would/should be established. In this diffuse curricular process, the different functions assigned to language, text and literacy refer to different ways of professional valuation of the literacy teacher, while it is assigned or not, curricularly, the function of Portuguese language teacher. The objective of this work is to characterize the official representations of the teaching work resulting from the level of specialty that is attributed to the formation and professional performance of the Portuguese language teacher for the initial phases of schooling in Primary Education. In order to answer this objective, the ways in which conceptions of language, text and literacy are interrelated in curricular reference documents for the teaching of Portuguese language in the initial years were analyzed based on concepts of French discourse analysis.