Questões Militares de Inglês - Ensino da Língua Estrangeira Inglesa

      “It’s a very nice book and very lively, but in the section on ‘Processes’ for example all the exercises are about unusual things for our country. We are a hot country and also have many Muslims. The exercises are about snow, ice, cold mornings, and making wine. I can tell you I can’t do making wine and smoking pot in my country!” (Experienced school teacher from the Ivory Coast, Africa)

      “Previous materials were not based on life in Brazil which is why I don’t think they worked very well …” (Brazilian teacher of English in school)

      “Sir … what is opera?” (Iraqi student in mixed nationality class using materials designed to practise reading narrative)

     The implications of these three quotations are not simply linguistic; rather, they address the problem of appropriate contextual realisation for materials. For the teacher in the Ivory Coast, the materials offered would be outside the cultural experience of his students (possibly even threatening) and thus effectively useless; conversely, for the Brazilian teacher, the choice of Brazilian settings and familiar mores would have clear advantages over distant foreign contexts as they are essentially more motivating. The quote from the Iraqi student suggests that complete unfamiliarity with the notion of opera may reduce the efficacy of the reading exercises, but in this case the student is curious and likely to regard the material as exotic rather than merely alien.

        Many assumptions of a communicative orientation towards language teaching need questioning in a global context. Ozóg (1989) discusses the idea of the ‘information gap’, which is supposed to induce students to speak. ‘Are we as Europeans’, he asks, ‘not making a cultural assumption that speakers the world over are uneasy in silence and that they have an overwhelming desire to fill gaps which occur in natural discourse?’ (p.399). Silence is a salient feature of conversation in the Malay world, he points out, a feature that has also been noted in Japan and a number of other cultures.

       Indeed, the whole question of requiring others to speak needs to be questioned in terms of both cultural and gender differences. The point here is not to exoticize some notion of cultural difference, but rather to suggest that language is a cultural practice, that both language and thinking about language are always located in very particular social, cultural and political contexts. How language (including silence, paralanguage, and so on) is used, therefore, differs extensively from one context to another, and thus any approach to language teaching based on one particular view of language may be completely inapplicable in another context. If particular language teaching practices (advertised and exported as the best, newest and most scientific) support certain views of language, then such practices clearly present a particular cultural politics and make the English language classroom a site of struggle over different ways of thinking about and dealing with language.

      Um conceito essencial para o trabalho com gêneros de texto é o de capacidades de linguagem. A primeira delas é a de ação. A capacidade de ação trata das representações que o agente produtor do texto tem sobre o contexto em que o gênero será produzido.

       A segunda capacidade de linguagem envolvida na produção textual é a discursiva. Pode-se dizer que ela diz respeito aos tipos de discurso e aos tipos de sequências predominantes que um determinado gênero apresenta. A terceira capacidade é a linguístico-discursiva. É com ela que o aluno desenvolverá seu texto lançando uso correto das coesões nominais e verbais, da coerência ao longo da produção, da modalização do discurso e do paralelismo presente na sua construção.

        Most teachers recognise the need for the students’ awareness about the potential relevance and utility of the language and skills they are teaching. And researchers have confirmed the importance of this need.

        In ESP (English for specific purposes) materials, for example, it is relatively easy to convince the learners that the teaching points are relevant and useful by relating them to known learner interests and to ‘real-life’ tasks, which the learners need or might need to perform in the target language. In general English materials this is obviously more difficult; but it can be achieved by researching what the target learners are interested in and what they really want to learn the language for. An interesting example of such research was a questionnaire in Namibia which revealed that two of the most important reasons for secondary school students to wish to learn English were so they would be able to write love letters in English and so that they would be able to write letters of complaint for villagers to the village headman and from the village headman to local authorities.

        Perception of relevance and utility can also be achieved by relating teaching points to challenging classroom tasks and by presenting them in ways which could facilitate the achievement of the task outcomes desired by the learners. The ‘new’ learning points are not relevant and useful because they will help the learners to achieve longterm academic or career objectives, but because they could help the learners to achieve short-term task objectives now. Of course, this only works if the tasks are begun first and the teaching is then provided in response to discovered needs. This is much more difficult for the materials writer than the conventional approach of teaching a predetermined point first and then getting the learners to practise and then produce it.