PORTUGUESE LANGUAGE TEXTBOOK IN CAPE VERDE: WHAT DO THE LEGAL DOCUMENTS SAY ABOUT TEACHING, WHAT DOES THE WORK SAY?

Abstract

Within the scope of the new curricular reform carried out by the Ministry of Education in Cabo Verde, this article seeks to analyze the most recent Portuguese language textbook for secondary education. Using the legal and printed documents that support teaching, the article examines how the teaching of the second language is configured in the first year of secondary education, or ninth grade. Thus, in the first place, a sociolinguistic contextualization (Lopes, 2016) of this archipelago is made, which highlights the need for the country's education system to be guided by didactic-pedagogical policies and approaches aimed at bilingual education (Garcia; Woodley, 2015). And, in order to understand how the organization of language teaching is designed, we take as a reference the legislative documents that demonstrate that the country's linguistic policies and planning are not yet fully adequate to the Cape verdean sociolinguistic context. Secondly, taking the textbook as an empirical basis, its organization and how the components are taught/approached are discussed: reading, writing, orality and linguistic analysis (Marcuschi, online), assuming that in the teaching of Portuguese, the second language, the learner's mother tongue should be used, at least, to differentiate the two linguistic systems based on the notion of dialogism (Bakhtin, 2011). Finally, attention is drawn to the limitations of the textbook, intended for the teaching of a second language, which is not guided by the necessary support in the learner's mother tongue and the teaching approach adopted that starts from a point of view of teaching Portuguese as a mother tongue and not as a second language.