Reading practices in Portuguese language teaching in East Timor: an exploratory study

• Autor(a) principal: Camargo, Renata Tironi de
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Guimarães, Joice Eloi
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Scripta
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/scripta/article/view/25723
• topic: Práticas de leitura; Língua portuguesa; Timor-Leste; Dialogismo

This paper presents a discussion on reading practices in Portuguese language teaching in East Timor. Since 2002, Portuguese appears, along with the Tetun language, as the official and instructional language in that country. Since then, Timorese teachers and students have dealt with difficulties related to the process of teaching and learning Portuguese in schools and these obstacles are due to some factors arising from the country’s socio-historical constitution, such as language policy problems, scarce human and structural resources, lack of specific education in teaching Portuguese as a non-native language, among others. From this context, the purpose of this paper is to identify and comprehend the strategies related to reading in Portuguese that Timorese teachers appraise positively in the classrooms of East Timor. To this end, we applied a questionnaire to teachers working in basic education and analyzed the data generated based on Dialogic Theory of Bakhtin’s Circle. In general, the analysis showed that the appreciation of the practice of reading in Portuguese in the classrooms of East Timor is related to the relationship historically established in the country between the Portuguese language and the written word. In the methodological field, what teachers appraise positively lies on practices traditionally used in the teaching of reading, and on practices that are sensitive to the context of teaching Portuguese as a non-native language and that consider the dialogue between texts.