Is there a more effective method of literacy? – 10/16/2023 – Education

On page 115 of her recently released book “Is any way to teach literacy worth it?”, pedagogue Eliana Borges Correia de Albuquerque, professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), defends “the non-existence of just one way of teaching literacy that it’s worth it.” And this seems to be an opinion shared by many experts in the field in Brazil today.

In other words: the contemporary view of scholars on the subject contradicts the belief disseminated during the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, whose Ministry of Education categorically defended that the best method of literacy should be the one called phonic — which starts from the sound of words to teach reading and writing.

Experts agree that more important than the method itself is understanding the student’s learning process, which can vary according to their conditions. And that the best teaching is one that manages to extract the advantages of various methods, in a process that intelligently mixes approaches throughout teaching.

“In the past, everything was reduced to a discussion about methods. Today this is not the most important thing. Literacy cannot be reduced to methods”, argues pedagogue Neide de Aquino Noffs, professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC- SP). “The method is one of the issues of learning. We want to know how writing and reading are constructed.”

The discussion about the method, although it already seemed outdated, was reignited with recent controversies. “I believe that the last government [federal] was the one that was most ostentatious and authoritarian in imposing a single vision of literacy”, comments lyricist Ludmila Thomé de Andrade, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).

According to her, the previous administration used various means “to impose its vision”. “In a completely different way, we had been working on proposed policies […] who have always sought to open new theoretical and epistemological horizons, focusing on articulations with what was already considered historically.”

“Fortunately, PNA [Política Nacional de Alfabetização] was revoked by the current government [que assumiu neste ano]but the textbooks approved in the last two editions of the PNLD [Programa Nacional do Livro Didático]and who will remain in public schools for four years, needed to follow the PNA’s prescriptions”, highlights Albuquerque.

Former director of the Literacy, Reading and Writing Center at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), pedagogue Francisca Izabel Pereira Maciel gives the context. According to her, until the 1990s the conflict was between defenders of analytical and synthetic methods.

While one started from the general, that is, from small texts so that syllables and sounds could be identified in them, the other started from the traditional beabá and taught the child how the combination of letters graphically formed the representation of sounds and, from from the joining of syllables, words could be constructed — the phonic method incorporates this idea.

Maciel points out that this dispute was resolved with a mixture of approaches. “When we think about children and teachers in our Brazil, it is not possible to think about defending a single method for teaching literacy”, he says. “You can’t say ‘either this or that’. Analytical, synthetic and mixed principles are used in the process. The important thing is that the issue of literacy is not reduced to the definition of the method.”

Three methods

Noff recognizes that the choice of literacy proposal today is up to the school, but emphasizes that the phonic method, although “still has great influence”, is something that has been outdated. She recalls how constructivism ended up becoming strong in Brazil in recent decades, with the idea of ​​”construction of writing through contact with the reality of written materials, reality and the child’s attempt to write”.

“Brazil spent many years using booklets, like Caminho Suave. They worked, but today we have the reality that the great literacy project is the context, the reality, not from the booklet, which had silly phrases. Today we need have sentences that make sense to the child”, he adds.

As Andrade explains, in contemporary Brazil there are three methods that coexist when thinking about literacy. Constructivism is one that “stimulates the child’s exposure to writing, to written objects present in life in society, and provokes the learner’s interaction with situations in which he or she is asked to write.”

The phonic method, “attested by the last government, now extinct, as the only and mandatory way of becoming literate”, starts from the exhaustive exercise of phonemes, that is, the sounds of words. “It’s a throwback, a direct return to the 19th century”, she criticizes.

Finally, there is the discursive perspective of literacy. “It is affirmed. Textually as a guiding principle to be pursued in the current policy of the government program Toda Criança Alfabetizada”, says Andrade, explaining that the method “focuses on the child’s expressiveness from the initial moments of acquiring writing, and on the duration of this learning , as well as in the diversity of aesthetic and multisemiotic forms of language, which she uses to accompany her writing”.

Reality taken into account

Pedagogue Maria Elisa Pereira Lopes, professor at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, reminds us of the importance of always considering the student’s reality.

“If they arrive in the classroom without knowing anything about the language, it is necessary to work from a perspective. But if, as a teacher, I understand that they already have enormous knowledge of the spoken language, then we start from that prior knowledge”, she comments.

“It’s very different from what was done at the beginning of the last century, when there was a traditional perspective of literacy. Today we understand that the language is alive and children need to build a use, not a distance, from the Portuguese language. And it only This will be built when the school offers spaces for her to approach the Portuguese language as her own, as a future writer and reader of the language.”

“From a pedagogical point of view, traditional methods, as well as the booklet systems that are very present today in different Education departments in our country, propose teaching that disregards the heterogeneity of knowledge of students in a class”, criticizes Albuquerque.

“Pedagogical practice is centered on the method, in the sequence of activities present in didactic manuals that prescribe what the teacher should do daily with the students. This way, it is not guaranteed that all children learn, since the activities are not adjusted to your knowledge.”