Grammatical norms and linguistic analysis: the place of grammaticality judgments in the Portuguese language classroom

Abstract

This paper departs from Tescari Neto and Souza de Paula’s (2021) tenet that grammar teaching in Basic Education features two main fronts: the teaching of (and reflection on) grammatical norms and what is ordinarily referred to as “linguistic analysis”. Our main goal is to discuss the place of grammaticality judgments (methodology employed by generative linguistics) this time in grammar teaching, in Basic Education, when addressing issues on these two fronts. In view of the recommendation by the National Curricular Parameters (Brasil, 1998, 2000) and the National Common Curricular Base (Brasil, 2018) that linguistic analysis activities be articulately developed with activities of reading and textual production, we firstly discuss—from the perspective of text genres continuum (Marcuschi, 2004) and that of stylistic monitoring continuum (Bertoni-Ricardo, 2003)—the place of standard and grammatical norms (in the sense of Faraco, 2008) in Portuguese language teaching. Once that discussion is done, we argue, in the sequence, in favour of a grammar teaching methodology which takes advantage of grammaticality judgments both in the context of the teaching of standard norms—by a comparison of structures from student’s internalised grammar (those to be judged) with structures from the norm—and in the context of linguistic analysis.