The adjectival subordinate clause in the production of meaning in the text: the prospect of Portuguese textbooks in high school

Abstract

This paper studies how Portuguese textbooks of high school, approved by the Programa Nacional do Livro Didático-2015, approach the teaching of adjectival subordinate clause. Several researchers (Bagno, 2011; Neves, 2011; Travaglia, 2009, 2011) address the issue of grammar teaching, questioning the mechanistic and traditional teaching of identification and classification of linguistic units (morphological and syntactic). These authors argue the articulation of grammar with the teaching of reader and writer skills, so that linguistic resources are studied in mobilizing effects of meaning in the textual construction. The choice of textbooks corpus, therefore, was determined by the grammar teaching proposal explicitly stated in the manuals for the teacher (part attached to the textbook), under which linguistic resources are subsidiary to the reading and writing teaching. First we compare the proposal of manuals on the teaching of grammar and what was accomplished in the book of the student, more specifically on the proposals for the teaching of adjectival subordinate clause. Then, from the study on the functional description of the adjectival subordinate clause (Câmara, 2015), which is based on Functional Discourse Grammar (Hengeveld e Mackenzie, 2008), we studied how some descriptive aspects can be subsidiary for the teaching of the adjective clause, aiming at the development of reading and writing skills. The reason for the choice of this theoretical support is the fact that grammar is hierarchically structured in levels and layers of linguistic analysis, and the pragmatic units determine the semantic units, which in turn determine the morphosyntactic units which, in turn, determine the phonological units. The data show that remains, in the educational proposals of the relative clause in high school textbooks, a grammar teaching that focuses primarily in the nomenclature, metalanguage and in the normative grammar rules. There isn’t many reflection of the linguistic resource from authentic texts to understand how the effects of sense are produced. On the other hand, these materials have a different view of traditional teaching, because some of them consider pragmatic aspects in the non-restrictive relative clause concept.