Official documents relating to portuguese language teaching, interculturality and literacy policy

Abstract

The present article analyzes two documents Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais – Língua Portuguesa (BRASIL, 1998) and Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais – Temas Transversais – Pluralidade Cultural (BRASIL, 1998b), conceiving these documents as constituents of language policies (RICENTO, 2006; SHOHAMY, 2006) and literacy policies, and it focuses the intercultural dialogues/conflicts that these documents promote when guiding that the teaching of the language should have as main object the text and indicating which genres should be privileged. Thereby, the text deals with language policies, more specifically focusing in literacy policies (bringing to bear the concept of literacy formulated by the New Literacy Studies (STREET, 1984, 1993, 2003; BARTON; HAMILTON, 1998; SIGNORINI, 2001) and interculturality (JANZEN, 2005). The analysis of the documents is undertaken to the light of the bakhtinian conception of language and it mobilizes the following concepts of the Circle of Bakhtin: dialogism, utterance and genres of speech. Furthermore, this text is based methodologically on the orientations of the authors of this Circle for the study of the language (BAKHTIN/ VOLOSHINOV, 1986; BAKHTIN, 2003). The analysis indicates that the official documents, when promoting literacy policies, also promote intercultural conflicts, because they privilege the dominant literacies, silencing other literacy practices. We understood that this silencing and invalidating local literacy
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practices has implications for the constitutions of the students’ identities and local language policies.