Abstract:

In recent decades, there have been various endeavours in Europe and the United States to rejuvenate curricular development practices, aiming to reinstate didactic-curricular integration as a methodological approach to explicit lexical teaching. The genesis of the curricular integration concept we adopt stems from a phenomenological understanding of this issue and technical-didactic approaches to vocabulary teaching and learning within initial teacher education contexts.

Building upon the multidimensional relationship between curricular integration and lexical knowledge architecture, we explore how different conceptions of curricular integration, applicable to students in initial teacher education, manifest during supervised teaching practice in primary education.

Approaching this from a technical-didactic standpoint, we delineate the key domains shaped by the interface of Curricular Integration and Lexical Knowledge Architecture at this educational stage. Here, the transversal nature and explicit dimension of word teaching are pivotal for declarative knowledge, encompassing phonetic form, graphic and orthographic representation, inflectional paradigms, meaning in context, word class, and usage restrictions.

Our research, grounded in Design-Based Research (DBR) principles, aims methodologically and investigatively to cultivate processes and cycles of didactic action within initial teacher education. We focus on producing and implementing integrated curricular units that feature didactic-curricular integration, specifically targeting explicit vocabulary teaching. Our goal is to scrutinize and comprehend the connections between explicit vocabulary teaching, reading practices, and learning success across various curricular domains. The primary investigative objective is to propose and test integrated practical interventions for explicit vocabulary teaching, viable within supervised teaching practice settings.

The specific cycles of DBR experimentation seek to operationalize and demonstrate the efficacy of technical-didactic development in approaches to explicit vocabulary teaching processes. We view this as a crucial integrating element, bringing prospective teachers closer to developing lexical awareness and promoting inclusive education and integrated academic success. This entails deep immersion in the linguistic and cultural contexts of the school communities they engage with.

Through our research experiences, we have unveiled a direct impact relationship among these three realms, underscoring the technical-didactic importance of considering two key aspects related to explicit vocabulary teaching in early schooling:
- The criteria for selecting vocabulary for explicit teaching, alongside reading and writing practices, considering semantic features and shared cultural significance of chosen words.
- The methodological approach process, emphasizing, from a didactic perspective, fundamental knowledge of phonetic form, semantic and categorial selection properties, syntactic category, meaning, and selection constraints.

References:
[1] Pais, A. P. (2021). Elementos de Integração Didática e Ensino Explícito do Vocabulário. Propostas didático-pedagógicas para as aulas de Português. Tomo II (pp.12-38). Rio de Janeiro: Dialogarts. ISBN: 978-65-5683-015-5.
[2] Pais, A. P. (2020). Elementos de Integração Didática e Treino da Consciência Fonológica. . Boas Práticas. das artes várias à formação do leitor crítico (pp.9-32).. ISBN: 978-972-8952-68-6.

Keywords:

Lexical knowledge architecture, Lexical awareness, Lexicultura, Primary Teachers Training.