Stylistics as a practice of mother tongue teaching

Struggles between grammatical forms and the liveliness of the creative language

Abstract

In the educational context of mother tongue teaching, the question of language form overlaps with stylistic questions. However, a stylistic approach to grammatical forms is possible and, more than that, necessary, in the educational practice of language teaching. In order to understand how stylistics can contribute to the process of (re) birth of the student's linguistic individuality in response to the hegemony of the impersonality of language, this paper is constructed by comparing the proposals of Mikhail Bakhtin (2013) with regard to stylistic issues in the teaching of language and the propositions of João Wanderley Geraldi (1997; 2006) in relation to the basic units of Portuguese teaching, more specifically to the practices of linguistic analysis. For this, we deal with three points: 1) the opposition made by Bakhtin between a purely grammatical analysis and the stylistic approach of the mother tongue in the classroom; 2) an exercise of comparison between Bakhtin's stylistic approach and Geraldi's propositions about practices of linguistic analysis in mother tongue teaching; 3) some understandings about the stylistic approach in mother tongue teaching as a response to the hegemony of language impersonality. This paper seeks to update Bakhtinian thinking, as it puts into dialogue the theoretical-methodological propositions about the relationship between semantic and stylistic aspects of the language constructed by Bakhtin - developed in the context of Russian language teaching within the educational system in the Soviet Union in the years 1940 - with practices of linguistic analysis as one of the basic units of teaching Portuguese in contemporary times. Comparing these two propositions allowed us to understand that the two authors build, through theoritical-methodological propositions of mother tongue teaching, a confrontation between an education that recognizes and reproduces concepts and terminologies and teaching language in use, in a creative way, in the sense of build, with the students, a view to their creative potential in the face of the language, a potential to say their own word from the choices of linguistic forms.