O ensino da vírgula em livros didáticos de Língua Portuguesa: prescrição gramatical ou análise linguística?

Abstract

In Brazilian basic education, especially in the public school system, different systemic assessments show the notorious gap of students in reading and writing practices at the end of the 3rd cycle of elementary school. Among the difficulties pointed out, the inability to use punctuation marks in written textual productions stands out, with the use of comma being the most common problem among students. Taking these notes into account and, above all, the idea that the comma is an important linguistic mechanism for the construction of meaning effects, this study aimed to investigate how this language resource is approached in two approved teaching collections of Elementary School II, in the National Textbook Program (PNLD), following the guidelines implemented by the Common National Curriculum Base (BNCC). The collections are entitled, respectively: (i) Connects in language: reading, text production and language, by Wilton Ormundo and Cristiane Siniscalchi, and (ii) Weaving languages: Portuguese language, by Tania Amaral Oliveira and Lucy Aparecida Melo Araújo. The investigation carried out took into account aspects related to the didactic axis of linguistic/semiotic analysis, as proposed by the BNCC, based on different theoretical works, with emphasis on Bagno (2014, 2015), Leal and Guimarães (2002), Marcuschi (2008), Mendonça (2020 [2006]), Moretto and Feitosa (2019). From a methodological point of view, this study is characterized as a documentary research, qualitative in nature and with an interpretive approach to data, focusing on questions present in 8th and 9th grade textbooks. After the analysis, the results indicate that, although the authors propose to produce teaching material in accordance with the BNCC guidelines, the comma, in particular, is not approached as an effective resource for linguistic analysis in favor of textual cohesion and/ or of different meaning effects in the texts in which it appears. This fact demonstrates that both the theory on this topic and the exercises presented in the investigated collections continue, to a large extent, based on prescriptive concepts of normative grammar, with little emphasis on reflection activities on the functionality of the comma in the language in use in the different textual genres that circulate socially.