Language conceptions: Portuguese grammar and mother tongue teaching

Abstract

The language is heterogeneous, variable, socio-historically constituted, however, not always this view prevails in daily practice in the classrooms. Many teachers follow what is prescribed by the grammar rules, disregarding the mutability of language, presenting the "right" as opposed to "wrong" in their mother tongue. In this paper, we base our discussion on the assumptions of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, with the objective of investigate the conceptions of language that permeated the school at the beginning of the XIX century from the analysis of grammar rules of Portuguese Rocha Lima. For this, we contextualize the situation of the Portuguese language in Brazil and its teaching since colonization, the role of the Jesuits to the consolidation of education in Brazilian lands. We comment briefly the concepts of language based on the work developed by Geraldi (1984), Perfect (2004, 2005, 2007), Travaglia (2009). For discussions about the Brazilian linguistic heterogeneity and implications for teaching language, consider the studies Castilho (1998, 2002, 2010), Camacho (1988), Ilari and Basso (2011), Mattos e Silva (2004). We observed with the corpus analysis that despite the introduction presents indications mentions the heterogeneous and variable language, the author remains stuck to prescriptivism, whereas, according to the conception of language as an expression of thought, the rules of good use of language those present in the literary works of classical authors.