Teaching of argumentation in a textbook
Portuguese Language Teaching. Argumentation teaching. Textbook. Social practice. Discursive genres.
For 150 years, in Brazil, the Portuguese language has been taught. During all this time, changes have been operationalized by different institutional forces: official documents that parameterize this teaching, public policies for teacher education, academic research, textbooks. With the publication of the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BRASIL, 2017), some more changes have been proposed. Two of them are the formalization of work with competencies and abilities and the emphasis on the competency of argumentation, which becomes mandatory in all basic education. This tends to reshape Portuguese language teaching because the BNCC's concept of argumentation focuses on social interaction and, consequently, the uses of language in the most varied spheres of human activity. Therefore, during the schooling process, it becomes even more imperative to provide students with situations in which argumentation is the means of resolving conflicts, reaching consensus and working collaboratively towards goals to be achieved. Because of this, teaching materials and teaching actions need to be adapted. These adjustments involve incorporating argumentation as a teaching object and developing work based on social uses, which some Brazilian researchers have already studied, such as Ribeiro (2009); Liberali (2013); Aquino (2018); Azevedo; Tinoco (2019). To contribute to this reflection, in this qualitative and interpretive documentary research, we aim, in general, to investigate the proposal for teaching argumentation in the educational collection Geração Alpha Língua Portuguesa, approved in PNLD 2020, and specifically, to analyze the differentials of the work with the argumentation in the section Interação of the aforementioned collection. Methodologically anchored in the area of Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 1996; KLEIMAN; DE GRANDE, 2015), this dissertation is theoretically based on two central fields: literacy studies from a sociocultural perspective (KLEIMAN, 1995; TINOCO, 2008) and interactional argumentation perspective (GRÁCIO, 2010; PLANTIN, [1996] 2010; SANTOS; AZEVEDO, 2017). Data analysis highlights that the proposal of teaching argumentation through projects that bring together the axes of reading, text production (oral, written, multisemiotic), orality and linguistic/semiotic analysis encourages students to use argumentation in different social actions mediated by diverse languages. With this, argumentation is no longer just a teaching object to become a social practice, something which is experienced, in other words, is a competence that can support social action at school and beyond.