The question of reference in pedagogical-curricular proposals for literacy education in the 1980/1990s

ABSTRACT This article presents the results of a research study aimed at knowing the ways in which the semantic assumptions underlying the conceptions of language in competing discourses about literacy education were established. Based on concepts of French discourse analysis, two versions of the Curricular Proposal for the Teaching of Portuguese Language — 1st grade, published in the State of Sao Paulo in two distinct political-ideological contexts, before and after the re-establishment of the democratic rule of law, were analyzed. The results show a process of displacement regarding the conceptions of reference that underlie the conceptions of language in one and another edition of the document, according to the epistemological bases on which the theoretical-methodological and the pedagogical-curricular proposals for the teaching of literacy produced in the historical period in question were based.