Portuguese teacher training under the Didactic Transposition: how linguistic knowledge meets the school

ABSTRACT The significant distance between the spoken and the written language impacts Portuguese speakers in a way that they do note recognize their mother language once they start school, as students face rules and prescriptions that do not match the language they already know. As a matter of fact, schools still value traditional grammar over other variants of Brazilian Portuguese (BP), despite what linguistic research says. Basic education can only meet the advances linguistic research has achieved as teachers become aware of the problems and debates behind BP teaching in schools and perform the Didactic Transposition of this knowledge properly. This work aims to analyze the path a linguistic object of knowledge walks from academia, where it emerges, to school classrooms and to identify where along this path teachers may act in order to combine the knowledge present in students’ I-Language to that already taught in BP classes. To meet that aim, we have selected two phenomena from BP: unaccusative and unergative constructions and synthetic passive voice, so that we are able to enrich reflections on the structure of the I-Language from students and teachers and understand how they interact in the classroom. Through those phenomena, we were also able to analyze the contradictions present in BP speakers’ I-Language as a result of acquiring and learning spoken and written grammars and present an activity that will introduce those topics in school, promoting a critical and scientific reflection on their mother tongue. KEYWORDS: Didactic Transposition; internalized grammar; Portuguese teaching; core grammar; peripheral grammar.