This paper discusses how teaching content is used in Portuguese language classes, as observed in practical situations. The study follows a research aspect at the confluence of language and education studies and seeks answers to a problem involving current Brazilian public education policies, teacher training, and studies on mother tongue teaching, in view of the imperative need to improve current Brazilian levels of literacy for children, youth, and adults. In this context, the purpose is to identify how language issues are handled, analyze how the teacher uses the textbook, and examine relationships between the official approach and the pedagogical practice. The work is conducted under the Applied Linguistics domain, and adopts qualitative and ethnographic approaches and techniques. The corpus, focused on a class' development phase, comprises information taken from a state high school. The results point to the need for interventions in teacher education, deepening curriculum components related to language and its didactization. We conclude that there is need for research and effective actions aimed at teacher training, so that functional relations are established between theoretical and practical content.
Portuguese; High school level; Portuguese language class; Language conception; Teaching practice; Teaching content; Classroom speech
