Crenças e atitudes linguísticas de alunos e professores da EJA sobre a variação linguística e o ensino de língua portuguesa

Abstract

This work presents a study on linguistic beliefs and attitudes of EJA (Educação de Jovens e Adultos) teachers and students about the relationship between linguistic variation and Portuguese Language teaching. A study such as this one is important, since the notion of the mother tongue being a homogeneous language is still very prevalent in the school context. Thus, this work intends to present and analyze the linguistic beliefs and attitudes of EJA teachers and students regarding linguistic variation and the teaching of Portuguese. The main foundation of this work is the Theory of Linguistic Variation and Change (LABOV, 2008[1972]). Regarding educational sociolinguistics, Bortoni-Ricardo (2004), Cyranka (2015), and Coelho et al. (2020) discuss important contributions that sociolinguistic studies have provided to the teaching of Portuguese. Moreover, to support the work on linguistic beliefs and attitudes, we bring Barcelos (2006), Lambert and Lambert (1968), Moreno Fernández (1998) and Cyranka (2021). As a work methodology, this study consists in applying specific questionnaires to a teacher and eleven EJA students, in a public school in the city of Rosário do Sul - RS. The questionnaires contain questions about beliefs and attitudes towards linguistic variation and Portuguese teaching, and the questions were designed to allow more open answers, in order to perform a qualitative analysis of the data collected. The results show that, in general, the belief that Brazilian Portuguese is a homogeneous language is very present, especially through answers that denote notions of "right" and "wrong" within the mother tongue. In relation to linguistic attitudes, when faced with situations involving the use of non-standard variants, the participants provided varied answers, with different justifications, evaluating the use of these variants negatively or positively. Thus, we highlight the importance of the debate about beliefs and linguistic attitudes within the school context, in order to provide a broader view of linguistic variation in Portuguese Language teaching.