An analysis of the pedagogic discourse in a Brazilian curriculum proposal for Portuguese language teaching

This chapter presents an analysis of the official guidelines for Portuguese language teaching in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. Grounded in Bernstein's theory, it focuses on sections of the proposal relating to Portuguese language teaching. We aimed to identify excerpts that emphasise either instructional discourse or regulative discourse (RD). We examine whether RD serves here not only to legitimise a particular model of teacher, student, and theory of instruction but also to reinforce a constitutive feature of the historical process of constructing national languages, both by disciplining their linguistic systems and shaping the teaching and learning of them. We argue that a consequence of this could be to restrict students' potential access to powerful knowledge in schools.