Abstract

BAJARD, Élie. Nova embalagem, mercadoria antiga. Educ. Pesqui. [online]. 2006, vol.32, n.03, pp.493-507. ISSN 1517-9702.

In view of the institutional interventions of the proponents of the phonic method in literacy, and aiming at its substitution in the path promoted by the National Curriculum Parameters in Brazil, this article analyzes two texts representative of this new front: the report delivered to the Brazilian House of Representatives, and a text prepared by the Observatoire National de la Lecture (ONL), an institution referenced in the report. The two texts analyzed, expressing the views of the ONL, define the act of reading as a sequence of two separate processes: an extraction of the pronunciation, followed by an extraction of understanding. Recovering the Saussurian view that considers the written language as a mere representation of oral language, the ONL sees in the graphemes only the translation of phonemes, and in the reading the transposition of the former into the latter. To those authors, the specificity of reading is to be found in the "decoding". By deferring the understanding to a later stage, they transform the reading into an activity that, operating outside the sphere of meaning, ceases to be an act of language. From such a vision of writing, the pedagogical proposal consequently promotes a two-stage approach to be followed by each and every child, disregarding their individual previous experience. However, partially literate through their contact with children literature and by listening to texts of fiction, children not always start with the "extraction of pronunciation", thereby eluding the program predicted by the ONL. This return to a proposal that resembles the method of the primer, with its deciphering-fluent reading sequencing, cannot be the answer to the needs of a country that wishes to eradicate functional illiteracy.

Keywords : Didactics; Literacy; Graphical System; Alphabetical System; Understanding.

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