O ensino do papel discursivo das conjunções na leitura de intenções, valores e sujeitos

Abstract

This work emerges from the disturbing perception of permanently low literacy levels of Brazilian citizens, as shown in the rates released by government agencies and international literacy tests. That landscape deserves our attention, especially because it hasn‟t changed after the National Curriculum Parameters were published, as were several education-related scientific works. Besides, this work gains its strength faced with another perception, initially subjective: that language teaching strategies have been fragile when it comes to reach the discourse level, which we believe is strongly related with the perpetuation of power inequality (according to DIJK, 2008). Thus we‟ve decided to investigate the elements that most clearly compose the textuality of our speeches and that point out to the enunciator‟s intentions and values, then we came to the conclusion that conjunctions or discourse markers are very powerful resources to this end. Those words concentrate presupposed senses, generate implicatures and lead people to conclusions in a very effective way, according to countless studies in Discourse Analysis (FIORIN, 2015; ILARI, 2015; KOCH, 2013). We understand that conjunctions, by their nature, should be dealt more thoroughly in school, focusing in their potential to optimize language use, mainly in reading skills. Therefore, we search to draw up a table of the quality of discussions concerning this class of words, also suggesting amendments, modifications and additions when necessary, in the five most used collections of Portuguese textbooks in Brazil. We have chosen to do a documental research (ALMEIDA; GUINDANI; SÁ-SILVA, 2009) since those are traditionally the main working material of teachers in our country: they not only register the educational reality, but also they help to create it. For our suggestions, we take the guidelines offered in works such as Antunes (2010), Barbosa (2008) and Mendonça (2006) as our basis. In the end, we take stock of what has been revealed by the books with respect to the current thought about conjunctions, and we shall discuss the possibilities of working with the collections analyzed.