Level of literacy of the teacher: implications for the work with genre in the classroom

Abstract

The present work discusses the level of literacy of Portuguese teachers at the public schools of Santa Catarina State measured from their reading and writing texts belonging to the genre of the social sphere of the teacher’s work. The guiding question refers to the teacher’s difficulty for didactically transposing theory to practice by means of reading the state’s official text on education (the Proposta Curricular of Santa Catarina). The research is based on theories of literacy by Soares (1998, 2001), Kleiman (1995), Rojo (1998, 2000, 2002), Leite (2001), among others, and on the Bakhtinian notion of discourse genre, as it has been discussed by Rodrigues (2000, 2001), Rojo (2002) and Schneuwly (s.d). The analyzed corpus resulted from a question related to genres and textual types made to four teachers of the Escola de Educação Básica Dom Joaquim de Braço do Norte, Santa Catarina. From the results it was possible to conclude that the level of literacy of teachers of Portuguese is not sufficient for them to understand and discuss that chapter related to the Portuguese Language in the above mentioned text; at least not enough to constitute reflexive practices in their professional routine from what has been proposed to them. There is a total lack of planning classes that deal with textual genres in the Course Plans of the teachers researched. None of the teachers were able to tell the difference between genre and textual type.