Abstract:

This research discusses the teaching approaches in punctuation found in textbooks from 6th to 9th grade in two collections: Português: uma proposta para o letramento, by Magda Soares, and Português: linguagens, by William Roberto Cereja e Thereza Cochar Magalhães, and P6, by Ana Santiago e Sofia Paixão. The motivation for this paper arose from the concern we have about punctuation marks that are addressed in Portuguese textbooks of Elementary Education/Basic Education approved and distributed by the National Program of Textbooks in brazilian public schools, and the General Direction of Education, in Portugal. Thus, this work is justified by the need to reflect on the subject, with a view to improve the proposals about punctuation marks in the textbooks, revealing a way of questioning the approaches in use, and allowing new perspectives on the subject, whose results can contribute to expansion of the subject in the field of language studies. In support of our investigation, the research has as theoretical framework the contributions of Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA), taking as input some key concepts developed by Bakhtin´s Circle, such as utterance, dialogism and dialogical relations. From the methodological perspective, two axes were proposed. In the theoretical axis, we introduce the state of knowledge on the subject of punctuation searched in brazilian academic production in recent decades, and a contrastive study on the subject in contemporary’s grammars. Afterwards we structured the description of the research context, gathering and defining the corpus. In practical axis, we aimed a dialogic study of teaching approaches on the use of punctuation listed in both collections, as well as the reflection of these contrastive results. In our considerations, preliminary data indicate considerable differences in approach to the punctuation between the two collections, which include the heterogeneous distribution of content in different years, and emphasis only on oral modality or in writing modality to submit the subject to the learners.

Keywords:

Teaching, punctuation, textbook, dialogic discourse analysis.