This work is a study about teaching approach of reading and writing in textbooks of early childhood education. Through content analysis proposed by Bardin (2011) we examined the two most adopted textbooks by the Brazilian public schools for the 2013/2014/2015 cycle– "Ápis" and "Porta Aberta" (1st grade). The research aimed to answer how the didactic proposal of textbooks approaches the terminology related to phonetics and phonology and how the proposal incorporates two distinct approaches to the initial teaching of reading and writing: the first focusing on systematization and school intervention and the second focusing on the learner. Thus, a focused approach to the systematization and school intervention aims to lead the student for a fully guided process by a teacher who knows a lot about the writing system. In this approach, teaching steps are usually planned in accordance with an order of increasing difficulty and thus the students become able to textual activities of reading and writing when they know, minimally, enough to encode and decode the writing. On the other hand, a learner-focused approach considers the student as an active participant in the knowledge construction. The knowledge to a learner-focused approach is an interaction between what is already known and the new knowledge acquisition. So, learning is not an answer to the school intervention or an answer to a method. To a learner-focused approach the students hardly arrive at school without any knowledge about writing. So they should be encouraged to write and try their hypothesis even if they do not know how to trace the letters. The main theoretical framework was the studies of Morais (2000), Cagliari (2009, 2006, 2005, 2001), Faraco (2005), Bortoni-Ricardo (2006) and Ferreiro & Teberosky (1999). The results show that (1) most of Brazilian schools adopted textbooks that approaches the contents in order to focus on the students and their ability to build and rebuild knowledge. (2) The analysis of sections and alphabetic writing content in textbooks showed that the official documents, especially the PCN, have great influence on the didactic approach of these books and (3) this influence is reflected in the emphasis on the social use of language, especially with regard to the approach of speaking, reading and writing and in the emphasis on epilinguistic activities during the approach of alphabetical notation, so the use of terminology occurs only in the guidelines to the teacher.
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