Stella Maris BortoniRicardo University of Brasilia Nwav 33

Stella Maris Bortoni-Ricardo (University of Brasilia) Nwav 33, 2004

Ø Variationist studies of Brazilian Portuguese were begun in the late 1970’s. ØA large body of research has been carried out and a digitalized database has been organized for on several university campuses.

Ø Despite these advances, a systematic application of these studies to education did not follow a parallel development even though the linguistic educational literature has benefited from the academic discussion of general sociolinguistic concepts such as communicative competence and cultural relativism.

Ø Since 2000 as the Brazilian Government started to apply nationwide reading assessment tests for 4 th and 8 th graders — SAEB —, the Ministry of Education and society at large have been concerned with the high percentage (national average of 59%) of reading underachievers. This percentage varies according to the levels of human development throughout the country. As a result of this situation, policy makers have resorted to linguists to provide reading resources for school use and teachers training programs.

Ø Illiteracy is one of the most serious national chagrins in Brazil. Ø Literacy statistics show an improvement from 66% in 1970 to 80 % in 1991. Ø Still the estimation of illiteracy reduction is modest: illiteracy is expected to decrease only 0. 09% by 2010 and 0. 06 % by 2020.

Ø Differently from many developing countries, the high numbers of illiteracy in Brazil cannot be accounted for by extensive multilingualism. 99. 9 % of the population are native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. The causes for the high illiteracy rates therefore are to be found in social inequalities and in poor school performance. Linguistic heterogeneity is indeed an important variable in school achievement in our society.

Ø Rural and rurban school children as well as children from social netwoks with a predominant oral tradition show the lower levels of reading and writing achievement and therefore the contribution of sociolinguistically-based educational studies can be relevant for educational policies.

Ø In the last decade the Brazilian government has started a few distance education projects of Literacy and Primary School Teachers Training. Ø Despite these efforts the nationwide 4 th and 8 th grade (SAEB) test results in the last two years are indicating a decline in the pupils’ achieved rates in reading, writing and arithmetic skills.

Ø Accordingly, the results of the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which assess reading, mathematical and scientific literacy, for Brazilian school children are extremely low as compared to those of other countries.

Ø Almost 60% of the 4 th grade students are below grade level in Reading literacy and 22. 2 % of them have serious reading difficulties. Ø My focus in this paper is on an on-going nationwide government project — PRALER — “For reading” (sponsored by the World Bank) that provides sociolinguistically-based complementary material for teaching reading and writing to children that are behind grade level.

Ø The PRALER was designed in order to enhance teachers and pupils’ linguistic awareness and draws heavily on Classroom Ethnography and Variationist Studies. Ø Teachers’ attention is brought to bear on the way experiential and referential social networks can influence the local linguistic and cultural repertoires.

Ø Teachers and pupils carry out ethnographic investigation of variable rules such as noun phrase concordance and subject-verb concordance. ØA working assumption in the PRALER project is the use of the pupils’ oral repertoire as a basis for teaching reading and writing.

Ø Categorical and variable oral features of the language, such as the rhythmic units on the speech flow, unstressed /e/ and /o/ raising, the tendency toward open syllables and consonant cluster simplification are duly emphasized as an agenda for explicit and contextualized phonics teaching. Ø Phonological variable rules are not treated as residue information as it usually happens in similar materials.

Ø What follows are fragments of the PRALER material that illustrate the use of sociolinguistic categories in the Program. Ø The translation in English is not very detailed, it is just a gloss.

Some of the examples also come from a recent book of mine – Educação em Língua Materna – A Sociolingüística em sala de aula) – Education in he Mother Tongue – The Sociolinguistics in the Classroom.

Ø “When every child arrives at school, at age 6 or 7, s/he has already developed to a great extent her/his communicative competence because s/he can interact with her parents, brothers and sisters, friends, neighbors and peers. Ø The speech s/he uses to interact with all these people is very cohesive, coherent and meaningful. We can say his speech is cohesive because all the linguistic components of his utterances are well related to each other, like, for instance, the agreement between the subject and the verb.

Ø We say that they are coherent because they reflect the logical state of things as they appear in the world. Ø Finally, we say they are meaningful because they are representative of the experiential universe of the child and allow for his efficient communication with other people. Ø This ability to communicate properly is called Communicative Competence.

“We want to think with you about the concept of community. Each person is a member of several communities that are nested one within the other. The smallest one is the nuclear family: The father, the mother and children and other variants: mother, children, grandparents etc.

Ø The families belong to larger communities, such as the population of a city, of a state, a region, the country etc. If a community is small and spatially limited, their members can interact on a person to person basis. In the larger communities such as a city, or a state, everybody doesn’t interact on a person-to person basis. The links people have in communities can be experiential or virtual. Virtual communities are defined, for example, by the language a person speaks, his/her religion, the football team s/he roots for; the political party s/he votes with etc. (many examples follow)

“Let’s read a poem of Cecilia Meireles: The fishermen and their daughters

Os pescadores dormiam The fishermen slept Cansados ao sol, nos barcos Tired, in the sunshine, on the boats Os pescadores dormiam The fishermen slept Cansados de seu trabalho Tired from their work As filhinhas dos pescadores The little daughters of the fishermen Brincavam na praça de mãos dadas Played on the square, hand by hand As filhinhas dos pescadores The little daughters of the fishermen Falavam de beijos e abraços Talked about hugs and kisses

Have you noticed that every time we had the subject of the sentence in the plural, the verb was in the plural as well? “Os pescadores dormiam” Let’s talk about the plural of nouns and verbs. This is an important issue because in our colloquial talk, when we are not monitoring the speech, I mean, when we are not paying attention to our speech, we don’t use too many plurals. In fact, plurals are marked in Portuguese in a very redundant way.

See the example: “Os pescadores dormiam. We have three marks of plural: In the article “Os”, in the noun: “pescadores” and in the verb “dormiam”. In our non-monitored oral speech, when we are not paying attention to the way we speak, we tend to mark the plural only once.

See the examples NON MONITORED LANGUAGE WRITTEN OR ORAL MONITORED LANGUAGE Levei meus menino no Levei meus meninos médico. no médico. Meu pai botou cinco rês no pasto. reses no pasto. Os médico do posto Os médicos do posto não veio trabalhar. não vieram trabalhar.

Ø On the left-hand side plural is marked only once. On the right hand side, in formal speech, plural is marked redundantly. Ø There is another thing that you must be aware of. The more similar the forms of singular and plural of a word, the more we tend to substitute the singular for the plural. Researchers that have studied this tendency have provided a scale of the probability of us using the plural of nouns.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. ”amigo/amigos”, “escola/escolas” – The plural mark is just the “s” The probability of any of us using the plural forms is very little. “Pescador/pescadores” - To make the plural we add a syllable to the singular form. The probability of using the plural forms is a little higher “Rapaz/rapazes” Like in number 2, we make the plural by adding a syllable to the singular form, but notice that the singular form ends in a sibilant sound. “Real/reais”, “cão/cães” Here the forms of the singular and the plural are quite different. They are known as irregular plurals. “fogo/fogos” Like in 4, the forms of the singular and of the plural are different. The plural forms of nouns as in 4 and 5 are the ones that we use most often.

Think about this scale and pay attention to your own speech and to the speech of your pupils.

Ø Do they tend to use marks of plural in the nouns of type 4 and 5 of the scale more often? Ø Do they use the plural marks less frequently with the nouns of type 1, 2 and 3 of the scale?

Another important thing to note is how your students are using the plural marks when they write. Ø We have always been told that irregular plurals should require more attention but we are seeing now that in the Brazilian Portuguese we tend to use the irregular forms of the plural more often than the regular ones, that is, the more different the singular and the plural forms the more we ‘remember’ the plural forms when we need them. Ø

Ø Therefore we should dedicate more time in the classroom to practice the plural of the regular forms. Ø The ones that make the plural just by adding as “s”. Whenever plural noun phrases appear, in the classroom discourse, as in the poem of the fishermen and their daughters, we must draw the attention of our students to the plurals of nouns and to the verb-noun agreement.

This is an important issue in our language and we will come back to it many other times in the PRALER units.

Stella Maris Bortoni-Ricardo stellamb@zaz. com. br