Teaching Portuguese as a pluricentric language

From linguistic awareness to awareness of linguistic variation

Abstract

In this article, I will try to start from episodes that made me think about my practice and keep changing, in a movement of questioning from the teaching pratice in the classroom to the search for a linguistic foundation in the pedagogical way of acting. Therefore, I do not have theoretical recipes to apply, but concerns that made me have a broader perspective of cultural and linguistic tolerance (Duarte, 2008: 15), placing linguistic plurality at the center of teaching and learning grammar. If the development of linguistic awareness is a core curriculum objective to turn children's intuitive linguistic knowledge into explicit and metalinguistic knowledge, the starting point must be children's prior knowledge. This prior linguistic knowledge, which students bring to the language class and which should become an object of reflection, is “in the heads of children” (Hudson, 1992: 10) and it corresponds to their linguistic experiences: the knowledge of the familiar language(s) they have acquired, in the geographic and social varieties they use to name their world, interact with others, think and dream. What language or dialect does each of my students think and dream of?