International Journal of Language & Linguistics

The Presence of Traditional Grammar in English Language Didactic Materials
Tatiana Ramalho Barbosa, Francisco Eduardo Vieira

Abstract
Brazil’s National Curricular Common Base (NCCB), a document that establishes the core guidelines for basic education throughout the country, is in line with the vision of linguistic functionalism by recommending that the teaching of both Portuguese and English languages be guided by the use that speakers make of them and, essentially, that the contents are exposed in a contextualized way, in addition to bringing examples close to the students' daily lives. Despite this, the “traditional paradigm of grammatization” (Vieira, 2018) still prevails in many classrooms, with its epistemological guidelines that privileges the metalinguistic teaching of the “correct” and “ideal” language. The empirical material for analysis of this research consists of the English textbook for the 9th grade of elementary school, from the Ari de Sá Teaching System, widely used by private schools in João Pessoa, capital of Paraíba, in northeastern Brazil. It was sought to verify if the explanation of a specific topic, the Reported Speech, was restricted to a prescriptive formalist perspective or if functionalist characteristics were also included, associating the language with the communicative act in a contextualized way. The results demonstrate that, when approaching this content, itis highlighted the traditional paradigm of grammatization, centered in the uncontextualized utterance, with no insertion of linguistic knowledge of the text and discourse.

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