A percepção das vogais médias pretônicas por estudantes do ensino fundamental II e o ensino de língua portuguesa

Abstract

This research aims to verify the influence of the perception of medium vowels /e, o/, in pretonic position and in contexts of vowel harmony (VH) or vowel raising (VR) in the writing of middle school students, as well as to ascertain their dialectal consciousness. In order to do that, we have applied four identification tests with 40 students of a public school of João Pessoa, Paraíba, and, at the end of that application, a socioeconomic questionnaire, with the intention of providing base for, respectively, the quantitative analysis and qualitative present of this research. Regarding the authors that have substantiated the theoretical discussions on Variationist Sociolinguistics, we mention Labov ([1966; 1972] 2008) and Eckert (2012); as for the studies on orality and writing, we emphasize Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), Faraco (2012) and Roberto (2016); finally, on the topic of pretonic medium vowels, we have selected the studies of Câmara Jr (1970), Bisol (1981), Silva (1997), Lee and Oliveira (2006) and Schüller (2013). For the elaboration of the tests, variants were controlled as preceding and following context, number of syllables, distance of the tonic syllable. The results point out that the degree attributed to the pairs with the variants “open.closed” (p[Ɛ]pino.p[e]pino), “open.high” (p[Ɛ]pino.p[i]pino) and “closed.high” (p[e]pino.p[i]pino) was higher for /e/ than it was for /o/. Besides that, we have found that the level of schooling does not influence the native listeners to choose, mostly, the closed variant. As for the crossing of the variant “attributed degree” with the variant “sex”, there were no significant results. Such information can help us understand not only the linguistic changes in the pessoense community, but also issues related to stereotypes and linguistic prejudice. Regarding the relation between orality and writing, we have identified that the students, even on grade 8 and 9 of Brazilian middle school, have obtained a large level of errors related to the writing form of the stimuli they had been exposed to.