ABSTRACT

Portuguese language teaching at school is pervaded by a contradictory process established by the fact of understanding, along with the National Curriculum Parameters (NCP), that the text is the basic unit of language education, but adopting a perspective of grammar teaching which ignores, to a greater or lesser extent, the discourse-semantics stratum. Thus, we aim, first, to discuss this contradiction, from a systemic-functional perspective of language (HALLIDAY, 2004), proposing to conceive texts as social, communicative and interactional events, and language as a meaning potential, in order to present, afterwards, an initial path to a model of functional grammar teaching oriented towards textuality. Such a model aims to explicitly capacitate students to use lexicogrammar resources in terms of the discursive and semantic effects enabled by their instantiation during the production and interpretation of distinct texts from a wide range of genres. Therefore, this proposal is associated with a standpoint that conceives the teaching of grammar as a means to achieve language awareness (FAIRCLOUGH, 1997). To exemplify the application of the model, we will analyze an institutional propaganda from McDonald’s, published in magazines, in newspapers, in the internet and in the own restaurant, during the months of February and March 2013, and, afterwards, we will present some guidelines for the pedagogical approach to the intersubjective use of personal pronouns and adjectives in education environments.

Keywords:
language teaching; personal pronouns; adjectives.