Manuais escolares e saberes linguísticos

The objective of this article is to discuss the way in which the discourses about language knowledge transfer are constructed in textbooks, to deal with the crisis in Portuguese language teaching and school failure, from the second half of the 20th Century on, having as theoretical and methodological references the History of Linguistic Ideas and Discourse Analysis. It was observed, in this process of didatization of linguistic knowledge, the predominance of a pragmatism centered on the uses of language, under the aegis of the theory of communication, to the detriment of knowledge about the language, making it, in its own, indistinct in relation to other languages. It is also observed, as a learning effect, a homogenization and a reduction of the language to a textual empiricism, which hinder the appropriation of a new way to understand and to learn/teach the language in its heterogeneity.