Por uma educação linguística crítica: um estudo sobre política linguística educacional de línguas adicionais para crianças no sudoeste paranaense e no oeste catarinense

Abstract

This research was based on the interest in studying availability and quality issues in additional languages teaching for children (ALC) in public basic education (BE). In Brazil, the absence of official guiding documents to teach ALC (GIMENEZ, 2013; AVILLA; TONELLI, 2018) and the existence of documents that suggest the English language teaching (EL) for early childhood education and early years of elementary school (ES) make the additional languages teaching to be offered in an unequal way, working as a tool for social inclusion or exclusion (ROCHA, 2006, 2010; ASSISPETERSON; COX, 2007; PENNYCOOK, 1994). This is a qualitative and interpretative research of exploratory nature in which we sought to identify representations about the advances and limitations of Educational Language Policies (ELP) (SHOHAMY, 2006, 2007) of ALC in public BE (Elementary School Early Years), more specifically in the municipalities of Pato Branco (PR), Francisco Beltrão (PR), Caçador (SC) and Videira (SC), which are part of the mesoregions of Sudoeste Paranaense and Oeste Catarinense. For this purpose, based on the framework of the Policy Cycle Approach (PCA) (MAINARDES, 2006; BOWE; et al., 1992) and the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (SATO; JÚNIOR, 2013; FAIRCLOUGH, 2001; 2003; BATISTA JR et al., 2018), I investigated and analyzed local and global texts, laws, and guidelines regarding the ELP, which along with the historical, social, and economic characteristics of the municipalities in focus make up the context of influence and text production of these policies such as the UNESCO Guidelines (2003), the Common National Curricular Base (2018) (CNCB), the New National Curricular Guidelines for the Availability of Plurilingual Education (2020) (NCGAPE), the Pedagogical Curricular Proposal of LEM English (of Francisco Beltrão PR), the Elementary School Curriculum (of Videira SC) and the Common Municipal Curricular Base (of Caçador SC). We also investigated and reflected on the local appropriations of the ELP (context of the practices), in order to examine the practices engendered in regional contexts in question, through semistructured interviews with professionals linked to the municipal secretariats of education involved to different extents – with the implementation of ALC teaching in public schools. Aiming at equitable access to a critical language education guided by the idea of peaceful balance and social justice (MALTA, 2019; ROCHA, 2019), the study identified as advances of the ELP that three of the four municipalities in focus already offer at least one ALC, while one municipality soon will offer the teaching of one ALC, in order to guarantee equal access to education and the comprehensive development of children in municipal public schools. To this end, the three municipalities that offer ALC have developed local documents to support their practices and have also recognized in their practices that the teaching of ALC has had an impact on the child's human development. About the limitations, the research concluded that many of them are related to how the contexts of the municipal practices deal with the demands of teaching languages, such as: the predominance of exclusive EL teaching, the tendency of contradiction between English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and the influence of the native speaker and the ideology of monolingualism in texts and speeches, well as the lack of trained teachers and lack of adequate material, the low number of teaching hours and the high number of students per class, the bureaucracy in the elaboration of the documents, and the lack of knowledge about the functioning of Language Policy (LP). Bearing that in mind, despite of the recognition of its importance in the development of local documents, the practices still show little progress, especially due to the fact that the teaching of ALC is not part of the Curricular Matrix of early childhood education and the early years of ES as a subject. Such results have the potential to contribute to the definition of an agenda for the diffusion of the teaching of different languages and to the respective teacher training, offering subsidies for the elaboration of ELP under this scope.