Sociolinguistics and textbook: an exploratory analysis

Abstract

This study aims to examine the treatment of linguistic variation in Brazilian Portuguese textbooks for High School and prompts a debate about concepts like right and wrong, language variation, language change and language prejudice. In this sense, it considers whether the textbook discusses the linguistic variation, understanding it as a result of a variety of sociocultural factors of a linguistic community. Our corpus consists of a collection of Portuguese Language for High School, prepared by Carlos Alberto Faraco, approved by the National Textbook Program (PNLD 2015). The research is part of the dialogue between Sociolinguistics and mother tongue teaching, more specifically, in theoretical and methodological studies of Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), Faraco (2004), Alkmim (2005), Labov (2008), among others, in addition to the National Curriculum Parameters of High School Portuguese Language – PCN (BRASIL, 2000). The methodology is based on descriptive, bibliographical and documentary research and a qualitative approach. The results show, that the current development, in that collection highlights a concern to incorporate linguistic studies in the heterogeneity and linguistic diversity from sociolinguistic perspective.