Curricular content and objectives of teaching of the Portuguese language in Faraco & Moura’s textbooks: a study of the PCN influences

Abstract

This paper is aimed at understanding the characteristics and the possible changes occurred in the teaching of Portuguese, in the period between 1980 and 2000, resulting from the analysis of the objectives and curricular content of two textbooks written by Faraco & Moura, one dated from 1986 and the other from 2004. In order to develop this study, a historical perspective about the education practice and the learning of the Portuguese discipline during these times – and, therefore, their language concepts – and the PCN (Brazil, 1998) were used as basis, in order to comprehend the way in which the objectives and contents of this discipline were instituted in the textbooks before the orientations of those official education documents and how they were instituted after the document’s publishing, in the late 90’s. The results of the research showed that although the 2004 textbook carries some of the PCN orientations, either about the contents or the objectives of the education, it does so in a very limited manner, keeping many of the approaches used by the authors in the 1986 textbook, when the official documents still didn’t circulate in the educational context.