Discourse Patterns in First Language Use at Hcme and Second Language Learning at School: an Ethnographic Approach

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Tbe degree of L2 use differs very widely in urban and rural areas and
across sexes and ages; in rural areas, where 86.8% of the population live
(£.£.£.,1983), the situations of communication in Portuguese are very
United, and often confined to the Classroon (Gonςalves, 1985); few old
people have been to school and youngsters are nore likely to have learnt
it; wonen have fewer opportunities to learn Portuguese at the workplace,
if not at school.

Inpressive literacy canpaigns and post-literacy courses have been
carried out after Independence, but their Inpact on the effective use of
Portuguese in rural settings is difficult to assess; they have nainly
been organized in collective enterprises like cooperatives and connunal
villages or women's groups (Marshall, 1985). It is likely that literacy
skills acquired in Portuguese with extreme difficulty, given the poor
training of the instructors and the scarcity of materials, disappear quite
soon, if not sustained through the use of the language in communicative
situations.

Children's exposure to Portuguese in rural villages may be limited to
contacts with a few fluent adults who use it on formal occasions
(political events, presence of visitors), with older children already at
school (when they like to show off), and to broadcasts. Going to larger
villages or nearby towns may provide more opportunities to listen to
spoken Portuguese, but 'gatekeepers' (Scollon and Scollon,1981) usually are
bilingual and respond in the language they are addressed, or use
interpreters. Sch∞ !children, however, are likely to be addressed in
Portuguese by nurses, shopkeepers, Government extension workers or staff
of development project who are from another area. In the family, the
presence of elders would Inhibit other members from using Portuguese even
if they knew it.

As for the type of Portuguese spoken in Mozambique, there is much
discussion about the Standard form (the 'Portuguese of Portugal') still
being considered the normative pattern and the local variants not being
recognized (HZ)#,1983b; Lopes,1986). The Portuguese spoken is in fact an
Interlanguage_l where the most varied syntactic and semantic structures

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