Abstract
Literature plays a core role in the class of Portuguese Language, a specialised context for teaching literacy competencies. This text reports a study about knowledge and skills privileged in literary texts’ reading in national exams. A document analysis of seventeen exams of Portuguese, used by the Ministry of Education between 1996 and 2012, was conducted to identify the “reading objects” chosen for the exams, the text structures that were the focus of the questions and the reading operations requested. The results show that besides the central role of the national literary canon in the assessment, contemporary poetry texts are the preferred “reading objects”. This allows the conclusion that questions about literary contents aim to evaluate student’s critical thinking regarding works by canonical authors. The study also showed that reading literature is perceived as the act of understanding and (re)constructing the meanings of a text by an active and competent reader.
Highlights
In recent years, the teaching of Portuguese has been at the centre of a searing debate that has provoked a dynamics of rupture with syllabi, grammatical terminologies and the textbooks
The teaching of literature in language classes is usually viewed as constituting a rather pacific matter. This argument cannot presently be sustained in relation to its present status within the subject of Portuguese Language. The overhauling that this subject has undergone as a consequence of the Curricular Revision of 2001 allows us to acknowledge that the new syllabus (Coelho, 2002) reconsiders the position of literature in the instruction of secondary school pupils and encourages the aperture of Portuguese language classes to a range of plural discourses
In the last year of the 3 years that make up Secondary Education, the Ministry of Education and Science will carry out an External Summative Assessment on all the learning of students
Summary
The teaching of Portuguese has been at the centre of a searing debate that has provoked a dynamics of rupture with syllabi, grammatical terminologies and the textbooks. The teaching of literature in language classes is usually viewed as constituting a rather pacific matter. This argument cannot presently be sustained in relation to its present status within the subject of Portuguese Language. Under this context, the overhauling that this subject has undergone as a consequence of the Curricular Revision of 2001 allows us to acknowledge that the new syllabus (Coelho, 2002) reconsiders the position of literature in the instruction of secondary school pupils and encourages the aperture of Portuguese language classes to a range of plural discourses. In the last year of the 3 years that make up Secondary Education, the Ministry of Education and Science will carry out an External Summative Assessment on all the learning of students
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