TEACHING HOW TO READ AND WRITE: X-RAY OF A LESSON

Abstract

This paper aims to focus discussion on some aspects of the pedagogical work that involves teaching and learning how to read and write. It presents data collected in a research accomplished at an elementary school in a town in the state of São Paulo which focuses on teaching and learning the mother tongue. The data refer to a literacy class taught to a first series and they were collected in the form of a written record. The analysis is done by means of the historical-cultural theoretical approach and aimed to clarify some points of the pedagogical work with reading and writing that are essential to rethink a methodological approach suitable to deal with the problem of school failure in the field of literacy education for children of the first grades of elementary school. Data analysis shows that when the school teaches one thing — reading as decoding and writing as encoding — and asks for a different thing from the students — reading as comprehension and writing as a production of meaning within a specific genre — conditions are given for school failure with regard to learning the mother tongue, because, by means of that process, one is not really working with the written language.