Livro didático e práticas em sala de aula para alfabetização em Parkatêjê

Abstract

The indigenous peoples of Brazil are heavily threatened with extinction. Consequently, their language and cultures are also in danger of disappearing. Throughout more than 500 years of contact, provoked by the arrival of the Portuguese, the number of indigenous peoples and languages have reduced (SEKI, 2000). Contact with non-indigenous cultures has led these communities either to a process of extinction or monolingualism in Portuguese. Thus, safeguarding measures are urgently required for the preservation of indigenous peoples and the revitalization of their languages. In the current scenario, indigenous school education, involving the formal and systematized teaching of the traditional languages of these communities, has been understood by the natives themselves as a strategy for the preservation and invigoration of these languages. But for the schooling process to fulfill such purpose, methodologies for teaching and learning indigenous languages and textbooks used in the classroom must be consistent with the reality and specificities of the people they are intended to. Based on this assumption, this study aimed to contribute to the formal teaching-learning process of the Parkatêjê, a language of the Timbira Dialectal Complex, spoken by the Parkatêjê Indigenous Community, located in southeastern Pará. In the current context, as a result of the intense contact with the surrounding society, Parkatêjê has become the inherited language of the indigenous children's generation, who are monolingual in Portuguese, but with great potential for language learning and capable of reversing the situation of linguistic obsolescence. In this sense, this research carried out within the Parkatêjê community was motivated by the need for investment in studies that favor the strengthening of endangered languages. Through this study, we sought to investigate a theoretical-methodological contribution which has proves efficient for teaching-learning of the Parkatêjê language at a literacy level that subsidizes the production of indigenous textbooks, classroom practices and school curriculum. The theoretical-methodological hybridism based on the concepts of Textual Genres, the Communicative Approach and the Psychogenesis of Written Language was appointed as an alternative to support school activities that promote, concurrently, the development of oral and written skills in children enrolled in the 1st/9 year of the Escola Indígena Estadual de Educação Infantil, Fundamental e Médio Pẽptykre Parkatêjê. Consistent with the particularity of the action research, the results of this investigation culminated in a proposal for a curricular reference matrix for the teaching of the Parkatêjê Language at the literacy level to Parkatêjê children; a proposal for the conception of an indigenous textbook for teaching this language at the local level, with activities developed in didactic sequences aimed at the 1st of the three school years / grades that comprise the Ciclo de Alfabetização [Literacy Cycle]; and a proposal for an indigenous textbook for reading the illustrated Parkatêjê alphabet. A bibliographic, documental and field nature research was developed. The study has also employed techniques consistent with the qualitative approach and applied data collection based on the theoretical assumptions of Applied Linguistics, Descriptive Linguistics and Education.