Teaching writing and the school time in Portuguese language textbooks (1930-1984)

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to verify how textbooks, in its linguistic form, reproduce and constitute the times reserved to school writing. To do that, I investigate the relation between Portuguese language textbooks, teaching writing and school culture. As the theoretical framework, I assume a discursive approach in the language studies, in which language conserves society and history, as Pêcheux (2010) and Voloshinov (2019) defend. Through the notion of school time, I propose a linguistic-discursive analysis of a preface and an ensemble of writing exercises, both present in textbooks published between 1930 and 1984, destined to middle school. The obtained results show that the materialization of school time reserved for writing by the textbooks varied according to the relation between books, teachers and students, mediated by the teachers’ working conditions. Between 1930 and 1960, considering the better working conditions for teachers, the school writing temporalities were established according to the relation between teachers and students. In this period, it was expected the textbook would only designate the moment when the exercises had to be done and, in its form, they did not show any temporal indications, because these indications used to be set by the teacher. From the 1970s onwards, with the ongoing teachers’ proletarianization, Portuguese language textbooks and teachers became competitors in instituting the school writing temporalities. Directed by the relation between books and students, the exercises started to include temporal markers, as “before” and “after”, both to establish and to order the temporalities of school writing.