The postulate established by theorists interested in contributing to transformations in Portuguese language teaching, according to which the text should be the basic unit of teaching, underlies the understanding that the systematic study of the structural levels of language is a dispensable task when it comes to developing reading and writing skills. Given this conception, the questions that motivate the research are the following: i) since the text is a structure made up of several levels, is it really unnecessary to develop systematic teaching-learning processes at these levels when it comes to building reading and writing skills? And what space does the study of the syntactic level occupy in the proposals of linguists, theorists and official curriculum guidelines? Based on the assumption that these questions divide the opinions of researchers and teachers, this research presents and discusses the syntactic structure of the Portuguese language, highlighting its contributions to the construction of textual structuring processes and meaning in reading and writing.