The Portuguese language area in secondary education curriculum : contemporary processes of reconfiguration

Abstract

In Portugal, the last decade has been characterised by important reforms in the educational system particularly of secondary education. The Portuguese Language Area, comprising different subjects, was submitted to deep changes concerning its aims, content, methodologies, and assessment. In this paper, it is my purpose to analyse some of those changes, focusing on their underlying principles, their main features and their impact both in the pedagogic field and in the public sphere. I consider firstly the political and educational circumstances in which the reconfiguration of the Portuguese Language Area in secondary education took place. Then, I proceed to describe the main features of the official pedagogic discourse that gives expression to such reconfiguration through an examination of the Portuguese Language Syllabus. After that, school textbooks are focused on, in order to understand how they interpret the official discourse and how they conceive pedagogic practice. Subsequently, as a means to capture continuities and discrepancies between pedagogic and public spheres, the analysis deals with a corpus of texts from the media that give voice to positions concerning the teaching of Portuguese. In the last section, according to the analysis previously developed, I discuss the tensions that lie across the Portuguese Language Area and that will probably regulate the directions of its development.