Use of Games in the Teaching-Learning Process of Portuguese Language

Abstract

This study discusses the use of games as a pedagogical strategy in the teaching and learning of the Portuguese language in High School, emphasizing formality, informality, and linguistic variation. The research is bibliographic, qualitative, and propositional, based on recent studies about playfulness, gamification, active learning, and language teaching. The proposal presented, entitled Language in Focus, organizes students into groups and uses contextualized communicative situations, classification cards, and rewriting activities, enabling students to analyze different uses of language in real social practices. The game seeks to connect grammatical content with students’ everyday experiences, promoting reading, oral communication, argumentation, cooperation, and linguistic reflection. The study highlights that Portuguese language teaching should not be limited to memorizing rules, but should enable the understanding of different linguistic registers and their adequacy to communicative contexts. Teacher mediation is presented as an essential element to ensure that the activity maintains pedagogical intentionality and does not become mere entertainment. It is concluded that educational games, when planned with clear objectives and aligned with the content, can contribute to more participatory, critical, and meaningful classes in the linguistic education of students.