Pronoun placement and mother tongue teaching in brazilian schools

Abstract

This article addresses the teaching of pronominal placement in Brazilian Portuguese and the challenges faced by teachers due to theoretical divergences. Sociolinguistics is presented as an essential field for understanding linguistic variation and the influence of social context on language. The study highlights that traditional normative grammar, based on European Portuguese, often does not reflect the reality of Brazilian Portuguese. The research analyzes how different grammar books approach pronominal placement, contrasting the prescriptive perspectives of Bechara (2003) and Cunha & Cintra (2001) with more descriptive approaches, such as those of Castilho (2010) and Azeredo (2010). The main difference between these works lies in the emphasis on proclisis in Brazilian Portuguese, while traditional grammars emphasize enclisis as the preferred norm. The article concludes that mother tongue teaching should be multidialectal, respecting linguistic diversity and promoting students’ communicative competence. It proposes an approach that values the Brazilian standard variety without disregarding linguistic variation, ensuring that students understand and use different registers according to the communicative context.