Teaching spelling in Youth and Adult Education (EJA) with support from morphological aspects of Portuguese
pronominal subject; variation; orality-literacy continuum.
Sociolinguistic studies on the oral modality of Brazilian Portuguese have shown a growing filling of the pronominal subject (Duarte, 1993; Bravin dos Santos, 2006; 2010). However, the writing practiced by literate Brazilians in literacy events still retains the null subject, since it is influenced by normative instruments that prescribe ellipsis. Based on the theoretical assumptions of Variationist Sociolinguistics (Weinreich; Labov; Herzog, 2006 [1968]) and its contributions to teaching (Bortoni-Ricardo, 2004, 2005), this work aims to contribute to the approach to linguistic variation in Portuguese language classes, according to the recommendations of the National Common Curriculum Base (Brazil, 2017), in order to contemplate not only cases with strong social evaluation, but any variable phenomenon, even those not stigmatized, such as the realization of the pronominal subject. As a specific objective, this study seeks to develop a didactic mediation anchored in linguistic and epilinguistic activities (Franchi, 2006) as a way to address linguistic variation regarding the realization of the first-person singular pronominal subject in texts distributed along an oral-literacy continuum. The methodological approach adopted was action research (Tripp, 2005; Thiollent; Colette, 2014). The results showed that the pedagogical mediation was successful, since there was a considerable increase in the frequency of the null subject in the students' writing, from 34% in the diagnostic text production to 67% in the final production, so that they approached the writing practices of the literate Brazilian society.