Perspectivas semânticas em livros didáticos do ensino fundamental I : por uma proposta léxico-cultural

Abstract

In Linguistics, the need to reformulate conceptions and practices regarding the teaching of Portuguese language has been much discussed. Among such discussions, the relevance of teaching based on the aspects of the meaning of language is strengthened, in particular the teaching based on the relations between words and between sentences, since its effectiveness in language learning. Hence, extrapolating the discussion, this thesis work arises from the premise that Semantics and teaching must be allies in the task of developing the skills and competences defended by the Brazilian official documents as well as the government entities responsible for Education. From this macro understanding, we propose, thinking about the importance of it, that the teaching of/through semantic components must be a constant since the lower grades of Elementary School, especially when to lexical aspects the theoretical assumptions that conceive the language as somehow culturally influenced and an influence for the thought, as seen in Ferrarezi Jr’s (2010, 2013) Cultural Semantics, are added. In the hypothesis that the lexicon of a language produces and reflects culture, it must be the logic that permeates teaching. For this reason, we defend a confluence between two distinct semantic theories: Lexical Semantics (LYONS,1979; ILARI; GERALDI,1987; MURPHY, 2000) and Cultural Semantics (FERRAREZI, 2010; 2013). Therefore, we aim to propose a new Semantic approach to Portuguese language teaching, as a result of the interposition of the two lexical theories that are sources of attention throughout this study. Under the scope of this new approach, it is argued that knowing how to make meaningful choices is fundamental for communication and teaching has the function of providing not only the vocabulary expansion, typically the focus of the initial grades of language study. It is also argued, above all, the apprehension that this language is a place of probabilities of use and contextual interdependence. In this sense, with the intention of constructing our trajectory in fulfillment of our general objective, we will qualitatively analyze, in an illustrative way, three collections of Portuguese language textbooks used in Elementary School, specifically, by the 4th and 5th years (the two last grades of this cycle). This object of analysis refers to textbooks recommended by the 2016 National Textbook Program (PNLD 2016) and of intense adhesion by the municipal public schools around Brazil. Our attention to the corpus (which are 10 activities taken from the textbooks of interest) is focused on the type of semantic work developed, and such concern is observed through some analytical categories used during our reflection. Directed by this analytical aspect and driven by the concern to provide a model that serves as a demonstration of the Lexical-Cultural Semantic (LCS) approach, which we defend, our last attempt is the elaboration of activities that illustrate our thesis, showing the inherence of cultural issues to lexical aspects, putting them as dichotomies in the construction process and perception of the language in use. Preceding the elaboration of such activities, we present other three activities in order to illustrate how the work based in this perspective is approached and distanced. Besides, we present four proposals of activities framed in the perspective of the Lexical-Cultural Semantic (LCS) approach. Finally, it should be pointed out that it is not a matter of assuming any specific semantic phenomena to be investigated, which led us to the cut of the relations of synonymy and antonym, homonymy and hyperonymy and lexical ambiguities, all of them based on analysis in generic terms, such as, successively: substitution activities, categorization activities, and activities of meaning identification.