Stella Maris BortoniRicardo

1
Designing sociolinguistically based material
for further education in Brazil
Stella Maris Bortoni-Ricardo (University of
Brasilia)
Nwav 33, 2004
2

• Variationist studies of Brazilian Portuguese were
  begun in the late 1970s.

• A large body of research has been carried out and
  a digitalized database has been organized for on
  several university campuses.

3

• Despite these advances, a systematic application
  of these studies to education did not follow a
  parallel development even though the linguistic
  educational literature has benefited from the
  academic discussion of general sociolinguistic
  concepts such as communicative competence and
  cultural relativism.

4

• Since 2000 as the Brazilian Government started to
  apply nationwide reading assessment tests for
  4th and 8th graders SAEB , the Ministry of
  Education and society at large have been
  concerned with the high percentage (national
  average of 59) of reading underachievers. This
  percentage varies according to the levels of
  human development throughout the country. As a
  result of this situation, policy makers have
  resorted to linguists to provide reading
  resources for school use and teachers training
  programs.

5

• Illiteracy is one of the most serious national
  chagrins in Brazil.
• Literacy statistics show an improvement from 66
  in 1970 to 80 in 1991.
• Still the estimation of illiteracy reduction is
  modest illiteracy is expected to decrease only
  0.09 by 2010 and 0.06 by 2020.

6

• Differently from many developing countries, the
  high numbers of illiteracy in Brazil cannot be
  accounted for by extensive multilingualism. 99.9
  of the population are native speakers of
  Brazilian Portuguese. The causes for the high
  illiteracy rates therefore are to be found in
  social inequalities and in poor school
  performance. Linguistic heterogeneity is indeed
  an important variable in school achievement in
  our society.

7

• Rural and rurban school children as well as
  children from social netwoks with a predominant
  oral tradition show the lower levels of reading
  and writing achievement and therefore the
  contribution of sociolinguistically-based
  educational studies can be relevant for
  educational policies.

8

• In the last decade the Brazilian government has
  started a few distance education projects of
  Literacy and Primary School Teachers Training.
• Despite these efforts the nationwide 4th and 8th
  grade (SAEB) test results in the last two years
  are indicating a decline in the pupils achieved
  rates in reading, writing and arithmetic skills.

9

• Accordingly, the results of the OECD Programme
  for International Student Assessment (PISA),
  which assess reading, mathematical and scientific
  literacy, for Brazilian school children are
  extremely low as compared to those of other
  countries.

10

• Almost 60 of the 4th grade students are below
  grade level in Reading literacy and 22.2 of
  them have serious reading difficulties.
• My focus in this paper is on an on-going
  nationwide government project PRALER For
  reading (sponsored by the World Bank) that
  provides sociolinguistically-based complementary
  material for teaching reading and writing to
  children that are behind grade level.

11

• The PRALER was designed in order to enhance
  teachers and pupils linguistic awareness and
  draws heavily on Classroom Ethnography and
  Variationist Studies.
• Teachers attention is brought to bear on the way
  experiential and referential social networks can
  influence the local linguistic and cultural
  repertoires.

12

• Teachers and pupils carry out ethnographic
  investigation of variable rules such as noun
  phrase concordance and subject-verb concordance.
• A working assumption in the PRALER project is the
  use of the pupils oral repertoire as a basis for
  teaching reading and writing.

13

• Categorical and variable oral features of the
  language, such as the rhythmic units on the
  speech flow, unstressed /e/ and /o/ raising, the
  tendency toward open syllables and consonant
  cluster simplification are duly emphasized as
  an agenda for explicit and contextualized
  phonics teaching.
• Phonological variable rules are not treated as
  residue information as it usually happens in
  similar materials.

14

• What follows are fragments of the PRALER material
  that illustrate the use of sociolinguistic
  categories in the Program.
• The translation in English is not very detailed,
  it is just a gloss.

15

• Some of the examples also come from a recent book
  of mine Educação em Língua Materna A
  Sociolingüística em sala de aula) Education in
  he Mother Tongue The Sociolinguistics in the
  Classroom.

16
Discussing the concept of Communicative Competence
17

• When every child arrives at school, at age 6 or
  7, s/he has already developed to a great extent
  her/his communicative competence because s/he can
  interact with her parents, brothers and sisters,
  friends, neighbors and peers.
• The speech s/he uses to interact with all these
  people is very cohesive, coherent and meaningful.
  We can say his speech is cohesive because all the
  linguistic components of his utterances are well
  related to each other, like, for instance, the
  agreement between the subject and the verb.

18

• We say that they are coherent because they
  reflect the logical state of things as they
  appear in the world.
• Finally, we say they are meaningful because they
  are representative of the experiential universe
  of the child and allow for his efficient
  communication with other people.
• This ability to communicate properly is called
  Communicative Competence.

19
Discussing the concept of communities
20
We want to think with you about the concept of
community. Each person is a member of several
communities that are nested one within the
other. The smallest one is the nuclear family
The father, the mother and children and other
variants mother, children, grandparents etc.
21

• The families belong to larger communities, such
  as the population of a city, of a state, a
  region, the country etc. If a community is small
  and spatially limited, their members can interact
  on a person to person basis. In the larger
  communities such as a city, or a state, everybody
  doesnt interact on a person-to person basis. The
  links people have in communities can be
  experiential or virtual. Virtual communities are
  defined, for example, by the language a person
  speaks, his/her religion, the football team s/he
  roots for the political party s/he votes with
  etc. (many examples follow)

22
Discussing subject verb agreement
23
Lets read a poem of Cecilia Meireles The
fishermen and their daughters
24
Os pescadores dormiam The fishermen
slept Cansados ao sol, nos barcos Tired, in the
sunshine, on the boats Os pescadores dormiam The
fishermen slept Cansados de seu trabalho Tired
from their work As filhinhas dos pescadores The
little daughters of the fishermen Brincavam na
praça de mãos dadas Played on the square, hand by
hand As filhinhas dos pescadores The little
daughters of the fishermen Falavam de beijos e
abraços Talked about hugs and kisses
25
Have you noticed that every time we had the
subject of the sentence in the plural, the verb
was in the plural as well? Os pescadores
dormiam Lets talk about the plural of nouns and
verbs. This is an important issue because in our
colloquial talk, when we are not monitoring the
speech, I mean, when we are not paying attention
to our speech, we dont use too many plurals. In
fact, plurals are marked in Portuguese in a very
redundant way.
26
See the example Os pescadores dormiam. We
have three marks of plural In the article Os,
in the noun pescadores and in the verb
dormiam. In our non-monitored oral speech,
when we are not paying attention to the way we
speak, we tend to mark the plural only once.
27
See the examples
28

• On the left-hand side plural is marked only once.
  On the right hand side, in formal speech, plural
  is marked redundantly.
• There is another thing that you must be aware of.
  The more similar the forms of singular and plural
  of a word, the more we tend to substitute the
  singular for the plural. Researchers that have
  studied this tendency have provided a scale of
  the probability of us using the plural of nouns.

29
The scale is like this
30

• amigo/amigos, escola/escolas The plural
  mark is just the s The probability of any of us
  using the plural forms is very little.
• Pescador/pescadores - To make the plural we add
  a syllable to the singular form. The probability
  of using the plural forms is a little higher
• Rapaz/rapazes Like in number 2, we make the
  plural by adding a syllable to the singular form,
  but notice that the singular form ends in a
  sibilant sound.
• Real/reais, cão/cães Here the forms of the
  singular and the plural are quite different .
  They are known as irregular plurals.
• fogo/fogos Like in 4, the forms of the singular
  and of the plural are different. The plural forms
  of nouns as in 4 and 5 are the ones that we use
  most often.

31
Think about this scale and pay attention to your
own speech and to the speech of your pupils.
32

• Do they tend to use marks of plural in the nouns
  of type 4 and 5 of the scale more often?
• Do they use the plural marks less frequently with
  the nouns of type 1, 2 and 3 of the scale?

33

• Another important thing to note is how your
  students are using the plural marks when they
  write.
• We have always been told that irregular plurals
  should require more attention but we are seeing
  now that in the Brazilian Portuguese we tend to
  use the irregular forms of the plural more often
  than the regular ones, that is, the more
  different the singular and the plural forms the
  more we remember the plural forms when we need
  them.

34

• Therefore we should dedicate more time in the
  classroom to practice the plural of the regular
  forms.
• The ones that make the plural just by adding as
  s. Whenever plural noun phrases appear, in the
  classroom discourse, as in the poem of the
  fishermen and their daughters, we must draw the
  attention of our students to the plurals of nouns
  and to the verb-noun agreement.

35
This is an important issue in our language and we
will come back to it many other times in the
PRALER units.
36
Stella Maris Bortoni-Ricardo

• stellamb_at_zaz.com.br