VARIATIONIST SOCIOLINGUISTICS IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL THROUGH SHORT STORIES

Abstract

This paper reports an intervention conducted in a 6th grade class of an elementary school in the rural area of Ceará, Brazil, in the year of 2015, as part of a dissertation research of a Professional Master"™s degree in Letters (PROFLETRAS, UERN, Mossoró Campus). The research was performed in three interventionist phases: the first consisting in the intervention through an activity that addresses the diatopic variation which we deal with; in a similar methodology, the second addresses the stylistic monitoring continuum and the third approachs the linguistic prejudice via the production of short stories. The aim of phase 1 was to intervene in the considered group, in order to raise awareness about that dependent variable. The conception of language as a heterogeneous reality postulated by Labov (2008) led theorists, such as Ilari and Basso (2000) and Bagno (2007), to conceptualize regional or diatopic variation as a variable language phenomenon due to differences among places where the same language is spoken. Our proposal consisted in the interpretation of a short tale from our authorship, concerning the variation between the speech of a boy from the state of Ceará and boys from the state of Rio Grande do Sul. We have theoretical contributions from Bagno (2007), Bortoni-Ricardo (2014), Brazil (1998), Ilari and Basso (2000), Labov (2008), Tarallo (2007), Thiollent (2009) and Weinreich, Labov and Hezog (2006). The results were satisfactory, since the intervention promoted the understanding of the concept of linguistic variation and woke in the community the sense of regional linguistic variation.