French language teaching in the schools in pará during the Vargas era (1930–1945)

Abstract

In 1931, Getúlio Vargas’ government enacted the Francisco Campos Reform, which implemented the long-awaited nationwide educational system. Among other things, the new legislation sought to modernize the didactic and pedagogical principles adopted in schools, formalizing, for language teaching, the direct method, whose central objective was to teach the target language (L2) without the mediation of the source language (L1), prioritizing orality. Implementing the legislation was not easy, as was the case in the state of Pará, which, since the rubber debacle, had been experiencing serious financial difficulties. The objective of this article is to understand how schools in Pará appropriated the reform’s methodological guidelines regarding specifically the French classes, based on the analysis of a variety of documents available in “Arquivo Público do Estado do Pará” and “Biblioteca Arthur Vianna”, following the methodological principle of Ginzburg’s (2003) evidentiary paradigm. The starting point was the attendance book of the teachers of Collegio Progresso Paraense, whose analysis was supplemented by several other sources, such as syllabi and tests from Gymnasio Paraense, as well as memoirs from some of its former students. Once the textbooks used were known and acquired, an analysis of these materials and existing evidence of how teachers appeared to use them in the classroom was carried out, seeking to understand how the legislation was locally adopted. Ultimately, given, among other reasons, the lack of adequate teacher training, this appropriation apparently did not have a significant impact on the process of modernizing language teaching in schools in Pará.