A LÍNGUA E A LITERATURA: REFLEXÕES PARA UMA PEDAGOGIA COALESCENTE

Abstract

Over the past fifty years, the teaching of language and literature in primary and secondary schools and in higher education has undergone major changes which are reflected in epistemological models, pedagogical methods and syllabi. Two aspects that require examination are the reduction of school time alloted to literary reading and the pedagogical integration or separation between the teaching of language and the teaching of literature.

The teaching of Portuguese fulfilled the consensual mission of “enriching and improving” the use of a cultured language, modeled on literary standards, including the teaching of grammar rules and the lesson of the classics. The study of grammar had already begun in the late 18th century, as ancillary to Latin learning, but the subject ‘Portuguese Language’, including the history of literature, was established as an essential content of public education only in the mid-19th century, with the founding of the “Liceus”. Its epistemological justification was based on the science of Philology, which was the main legacy of classical culture and of the European and humanist tradition cultivated in universities.

After the 1960s, there were vast and fast changes in school attendance, in the function of education, and in syllabus and teaching methodologies. “Liceus” and “Philologies” were discontinued, arts and visual semiotics developed, scientific theories multiplied, and literary and linguistic terminologies changed. There were also other crucial transformations such as removal of Latin from the school curriculum, occupation of reading time by audiovisual recreation, devaluation of daily spoken interaction, and a drastic obliteration of classical literary memory at school and in the public sphere.

Simultaneously, the revision of the school curriculum insists on a teaching doctrine almost exclusively based on theories of language and in elementary drilling of language structures, deprived of literary complexity and interaction. The separation between language and literature is polarized, without any noticeable advantage for the teaching of language, while the richness of the literary legacy is forgotten.

What is obvious is that literary texts feedback on the creative and functional affordances of language. The lusophone literary legacy is a great treasure of the creative uses of language, providing many instances of appealing reading and undeniable effectiveness for the development of language competence at all levels of education and for all types of discourse.