Didactic proposal for the teaching of temporal adverbial subordinate clauses: logical-semantic reflections on the conjunction 'while'

This article aims to develop a didactic proposal for a linguistic reflection on the temporal conjunction enquanto (‘while’) based on a methodology adopting a formalist perspective. We demonstrate how Formal Linguistics, assuming a biological perspective, can promote greater student engagement by val...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Souza, Érica Azevedo de, Mendes, Luciana Sanchez
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2025
Country:Brasil
Institution:Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP)
Repository:Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos
Language:Portuguese
OAI Identifier:oai:ojs.periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br:article/8676988
Online Access:https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/cel/article/view/8676988
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Aspect
Teaching
Temporary adverbial subordinate clauses
Aspecto
Ensino
Orações subordinadas adverbiais temporárias
Cláusulas subordinales adverbiales temporales
Enseñanza
Description
Summary:This article aims to develop a didactic proposal for a linguistic reflection on the temporal conjunction enquanto (‘while’) based on a methodology adopting a formalist perspective. We demonstrate how Formal Linguistics, assuming a biological perspective, can promote greater student engagement by valuing their prior knowledge and, as a scientific proposal, stimulate critical thinking and analytical skills through inductive and hypothetical-deductive methods. We take Formal Semantics as a guiding theory to elucidate the concepts of tense (Reichenbach, 1947; Klein, 2009), grammatical aspect (Klein, 1994), lexical aspect (Vendler, 1967), and their relationship with temporal conjunctions (Sæbø, 2011), and then employ the essential learning properties posited by Lobato (2015), such as (i) discovery procedure, (ii) elicitation method, and (iii) results techniques, along with epilinguistic activities (Franchi, 1987) as tools for a language teaching that explores a semantic reasoning and the expression of students’ language faculty and, consequently, promotes their linguistic awareness when producing  texts.