As políticas linguísticas declaradas, percebidas e praticadas no domínio escolar: as vozes dos documentos oficiais e da comunidade escolar em Guiné-Bissau

Abstract

Decree Law No. 7/2007, the first official document in which the Guinean State requires the mandatory use of Portuguese in the country in some domains (Spolsky, 2004, 2009), aiming to facilitate communication and access to the integration of Guinea-Bissau into the international Portuguese-speaking community. For this reason, the present work has the general objective of investigating the language policies declared, perceived and practiced in public schools in the voices of official documents and the Guinean school community. To this end, we have developed the following specific objectives: to describe the language policies and ideologies present in official documents that address teaching, to analyze the role(s) of languages in the school domain in the perception of Guinean educators, students and parents, and to describe the language policies practiced and their reasons in the school domain from the perspective of educators, students and parents. Therefore, the work has as its theoretical basis the notion of Language Policy by Spolsky (2004, 2009, 2012) because it takes into account the three components that constitute language policies: practices, beliefs and management. As for IL, we based our analysis on the theoretical assumptions of Woolard and Schieffelin (1994), Woolard (2007), Kroskrity (2004), Del Valle (2007), Del Valle and Arnoux (2010) and Del Valle and Meirinho-Guede (2016). Methodologically, the work is inserted in the qualitative-interpretivist paradigm (Lin, 2015) and has a documentary character (Decree of Law No. 7/2007). The corpus consists of Law No. 7/2007, which establishes the mandatory use of the Portuguese language in State departments and the Education Sector Plan (2017-2025), which aims to outline strategic points for curricular development. The research was conducted through semi-structured interviews with our collaborators with the purpose of describing language policies from the perspective of the Guinean school community. The results show that the management of the Portuguese language in Guinea-Bissau went from a macro to a micro level, characterizing a language policy that comes from the top down. The research concluded that it is important for the Guinean State to rethink its language policies, in a more democratic and inclusive way, avoiding imposing fines on students for using their mother tongue in the school environment. Such an attitude disrespects not only the students, but all Guineans, since Portuguese is not the population's first language.