Gêneros discursivos/textuais e cidadania: um estudo comparativo entre os PCN de Língua Portuguesa e os Parâmetros em ação

Abstract

Published in 1998, the National Curriculum Parameters for the Portuguese Language of the 3rd and 4th cycles of Fundamental Education (NCP) suggest a new approach to teaching the mother tongue. Consequently, before their suggestions can be followed by the teachers, several actions are indispensable, among which are the production of intermediary theoretic material in order to divulge the new theories on which they are based as well as the introduction of these theories in the Language Licentiate curriculum. Another urgent necessity is the expansion and intensification of existing practices of teacher in-service continuing education, geared to discussing and implementing that which is proposed by the NCP. It was with this intention that the Ministry of Education (MEC) elaborated, in 1999, Parameters in Action. It is unnecessary to affirm that, if there is interest in following the Portuguese Language CPN, the support material and action towards its implementation must be coherent with its basic principles (social inclusion and citizenship) and with the theories on which it is based (among them, the Genre Theory). This consideration set the track for designing the course of this dissertation, which is based on two central ideas: citizenship and discourse/text genres. In this manner, taking into consideration the social and historical context of the production of the CPN of the Portuguese Language for the 3rd and 4th cycles as well as the respective Parameters in Action modules, with attention towards differentiating theoretical approaches that adopt, in different manners, the terminology discourse genres and text genres, this work proposes to be a documental analysis with the objective of comparing both documents, based on an interactional, social and historical viewpoint of language, according to Bakhtin s theories of language. A computer tool for corpus analysis called WordSmith was used as a support instrument. The result of this comparison shows that there are flaws in the dialogue between the two texts since the Parameters in Action modules do not sufficiently incorporate the objectives declared in the CPN for the Portuguese Language, which is that of taking the genre as an object of teaching-learning. This results in pulling back from the step ahead that the CPN proposals represent in regard to previous curricular proposals, and distancing students and teachers from that which could propitiate the forming of a more critical reader and of an education which would in fact be more geared to citizenship.