Acentuação gráfica: mudança de metodologia

Abstract

The author proposes a revision of the methodology of teaching of accents in written Portuguese. After a brief history of grammars from the 16th centuries, he justifies the present criteria which the Academia Brasileira de Letras uses as a basis for decisions on written accents. Although it is not possible to defend these criteria from a strictly linguistic point of view, it can be seen that they are the result of the historical development of Portuguese and they are, to certain extent, coherent. If the teaching methodology of written accents is changed, throught the substitution of rules, or conclusions of previous reasoning, for the premises which determine these rules, written accents may be no longer a problem but and aid to the teaching of orthography of Brazilian portuguese.