Questões Militares Sobre ensino da língua estrangeira inglesa em inglês

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    One pathway for converting explicit to implicit knowledge is suggested by skill acquisition theory, a branch of cognitive science studying how people develop skills. In this theory, knowledge is first seen to be declarative (conscious); then, through practice and the application of learning strategies, declarative knowledge becomes proceduralized so that it becomes automatic. Automatic processes are quick and do not require attention or conscious awareness. Many second/ foreign language learners memorize and practice vocabulary items or “chunks” of language such as greetings, idioms or collocations. Frequent practice in using these forms helps the language items to become automatic in the sense that the learner can use them quickly and unconsciously.

    Pienemann (1989) proposes that second/ foreign language learners will not acquire a new structure until they are developmentallly ready to do so. If there were no connection between the development of explicit knowledge about a grammar point and the eventual restructuring of the unconscious linguistic system to accommodate the point in the learner’s interlanguage, then, indeed, grammar instruction would not be of much use. However, it has been suggested that there is a connection, so grammar instruction is ultimately useful. Further, practice of language points can lead to automatization, thus bypassing natural order teachability considerations.

(FOTOS, Sandra. Cognitive Approaches to Grammar Instruction.

In Marianne Celce-Murcia. 3rd ed. Teaching English as a second or foreign

language. 3rd edition. Boston, Massachusstes: Heinle&Heinle. 2002.

Adaptado274)

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    This study reviews the findings of earlier translanguaging research in Saudi Arabia. Notably, Saudi Arabia is striving to adjust to the multilingual immigrant workforce on its soil, while encouraging a larger role for its people on other soils. In this changed paradigm, strengthening the Saudis’ English communicative proficiency is an emergent need. To make pertinent pedagogical recommendations on the use of translanguaging in language learning, the study gathered data using a questionnaire administered to 72 participants from King Faisal University. All participants were given fictitious names in order to protect their anonymity. Findings revealed that the Saudi EFL students strongly support the use of translanguaging in the EFL classrooms, but they are worried that it may not bring their proficiency to the desirable standard. They, thus, showed greater faith in the conventional language learning approach, viz., using only English in the EFL classes. The study concluded that learners‟ exposure to translanguaging is apparently not adequate for them to fully appreciate its benefits, and teachers who, so far, strictly keep to the English-only approach, too need to be oriented and trained in its use.

(Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 18(Special Issue 1),

556-568; 2022. Adaptado)

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    It is adequate do say that pedagogical practices “become less and less preoccupied with limited and unified actions typical of content transmission in teaching-learning processes, and increase the instances of social practices that create possibilities of student engagement in the world.” (Magalhães & Carrijo, 2019, p. 215). We could broaden this and state that it is essential that education be less concerned with limited and limiting actions that look at the other - the student in general - but especially the student who is somehow different from the educators’ or the policy makers’ expectations as just that: a monolith of difference. This notion of difference as a monolith makes us see all SIEN¹ students as one single individual or block of individuals (i.e., as if they all had the same features); all deaf students as another monolith; all students in the autism spectrum as still another. But we are not equal. People vary in every aspect of humanity (the way they dress, speak, eat, think, learn). As Adichie (2009) stated in her famous TED: “The single story has a consequence: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult.”

(Magalhães, M.C.C. et al. Viable-transformative inclusion: diverse means of agency by an adolescent with Specific Intellectual Educational Needs (SIEN) and his educators. In: Delta: Documentação de Estudos em Linguística Teórica e Aplicada, Volume: 38, Número: 1. 2022)

¹SIEN students: students with specific intellectual educational needs

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    The disjunction between method as conceptualized by theorists and method as conducted by teachers is the direct consequence of the inherent limitations of the concept of method itself. First and foremost, methods are based on idealized concepts geared toward idealized contexts. Since language learning and teaching needs, wants, and situations are unpredictably numerous, no idealized method can visualize all the variables in advance in order to provide situation-specific suggestions that practicing teachers need to tackle the challenges they are confronted with every day of their professional lives.

    Not anchored in any specific learning and teaching context, and caught up in the whirlwind of fashion, methods tend to wildly drift from one theoretical extreme to the other. At one time, grammatical drills were considered the right way to teach; at another, they were given up in favor of communicative tasks. At one time, explicit error correction was not only favored but considered necessary; at another, it was frowned upon. These extreme swings create conditions where certain aspects of learning and teaching get overly emphasized while certain others are utterly ignored, depending on which way the pendulum swings.

    The limitations of the concept of method gradually led to statements such as “the term method is a label without substance” (Clarke, 1983, p. 109), and that it has “diminished rather than enhanced our understanding of language teaching” (Pennycook, 1989, p. 597). This realization has resulted in a widespread dissatisfaction with the concept of method.

(Kumaravadivelu, B. Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for language teaching. Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. Adaptado)

Quanto às distinções entre tipos de texto e gêneros de texto/discurso, a mais famosa a esse respeito é a de Marcuschi (2002), que os define como

I. Usamos a expressão tipo textual para designar uma espécie de construção teórica definida pela natureza linguística de sua composição {aspectos lexicais, sintáticos, tempos verbais, relações lógicas}. Em geral, os tipos textuais abrangem cerca de meia dúzia de categorias conhecidas: descrição, narração, dissertação/ argumentação, exposição e injunção.

II. Usamos a expressão gênero textual como uma noção propositalmente vaga para referir os textos materializados que encontramos em nossa vida diária e que apresentam características sócio-comunicativas definidas por conteúdos, propriedades funcionais, estilo e composição característica. Se os tipos textuais são apenas meia dúzia, os gêneros são inúmeros.

        Tipos de textos vem sendo ensinados na escola há pelo menos uma centena de anos, o que faz deles gêneros escolares. Na escola, escrevemos narrações, na vida, lemos notícias, relatamos nossa vida, recontamos um filme. Na escola, redigimos “uma composição à vista de gravura” (descrição) fora dela, contamos como decoramos nosso apartamento, instruímos uma pessoa como chegar a um lugar desconhecido. Os gêneros de texto, ao contrário, não são classes gramaticais para classificar textos: são entidades da vida.

(ROJO, R. H. R.; BARBOSA, J. P. Hipermodernidade, multiletramentos e gêneros discursivos. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial, 2015. Adaptado)

        Language-centered methods are those that seek to provide opportunities for learners to practice preselected linguistic structures through form-focused exercises in class. The assumption is that language practice will ultimately lead to a mastery of the target language and that learners can draw from this formal repertoire whenever they wish to communicate in the target language outside the class. According to this belief, language development is largely intentional rather than incidental; and language learning seen as a linear, additive process.

         Learner-centered methods are those that are principally concerned with language use and learner needs. These methods seek to provide opportunities for learners to practice preselected, presequenced grammatical structures as well as communicative functions (i.e., speech acts such as apologizing, requesting, etc.) through meaning-focused activities. Proponents of learner-centered methods believe in accumulated entities, represented by structures plus notions and functions.

        Learning-centered methods are those that are principally concerned with learning processes. These methods seek to provide opportunities for learners to participate in open-ended meaningful interaction through communicative activities or problem-solving tasks in class. The assumption is that a preoccupation with meaning-making will most likely lead to grammatical as well as communicative mastery of the language and that learners can learn through the process of communication. In this approach, unlike the other two, language development is a nonlinear process and considered more incidental than intentional. Proponents of learningcentered methods believe that language is best learned when the learner’s attention is focused on understanding, saying and doing something with language, and not when their attention is focused explicitly on linguistic features.

(Kumaravadivelu, B. Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for language learning. Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2003. Adaptado)

        If styles are general characteristics that differentiate one individual from another, then strategies are those specific “attacks” that we make on a given problem, and that vary considerably within each individual. They are the momentby-moment techniques that we employ to solve “problems” posed by second language input and output. Chamot (2005, p. 112) defines strategies quite broadly as “procedures that facilitate a learning task.”

        Second language acquisition has distinguished between two types of strategy: learning strategies and communication strategies. The former relate to input — to processing, storage, and retrieval, that is, to taking in messages from others. The latter pertain to output, how we productively express meaning, how we deliver messages to others.

(Brown, H.D. Principles of Language Learning and Teaching. 5th ed. White Plains, NY: Addison Wesley Longman, 2006. Adaptado)

The regional accentism that secretly affects life prospects

        At age 22, Gav Murphy was living outside his home country Wales for the first time, working in his first job in media production in London. His South Wales Valleys accent was very thick, he recalls. He’d say ‘tha’ rather than ‘that’, for instance. He was perfectly understandable; yet a senior colleague overseeing his work insisted Murphy change his accent so all the broadcasters sounded uniform on air. The effects of adaptation were far-reaching. “It sort of broke my brain a little bit,” says Murphy. “I thought about literally every single thing I was saying, literally every time I was saying it. Moving to standard English was just laborious.”

        Foreign-accent discrimination is rampant in professional settings. But discrimination can also extend to certain native speakers of a language, because of the judgements attached to particular accents. While many employers are becoming very sensitive to other types of bias, accent bias remains challenging to root out. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

       While the cognitive shortcuts that contribute to accent bias may be universal, the degree of accent awareness and prejudice varies greatly. For instance, “The UK has a very, very fine-tuned system of accent prestige,” says Devyani Sharma, a sociolinguist at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s a combination of a very monolingual past, where English developed as a symbol of the nation, and the very acute social class hierarchy historically.” She adds that overt accent bias in the US is based more on race, whereas in the UK, it’s more tied to class.

        In some cases, accent bias is directly related to government policy. Since the 1860s, the Japanese government has modernised the country with a focus on Tokyo, says Shigeko Kumagai, a linguist at Shizuoka University, Japan. “Thus, standard Japanese was established based on the speech of educated Tokyoites.” In contrast, the Tohoku dialect spoken in northern Japan became “the most stigmatised dialect in Japan”, says Kumagai. Its image is “rural, rustic, old, stubborn, narrow-minded, backward, poor, uneducated, etc”. Young women from Tohoku are often given discriminatory treatment that makes them feel ashamed of their accents.

        A pesquisa de Kumagai mostra que a forte estereotipagem do dialeto Tohoku é perpetuada pela concentração da indústria de mídia na capital japonesa. De fato, em todo o mundo, a mídia tem um impacto enorme na percepção dos sotaques. Portanto, entendemos por que a preponderância de emissoras do Reino Unido em Londres provavelmente contribuiu para a marginalização do sotaque galês de MurphyKumagai’s research shows that the strong stereotyping of the Tohoku dialect is perpetuated by the concentration of the media industry in the Japanese capital. Indeed, the world over, the media has an enormous impact on perceptions of accents. So we understand why the preponderance of UK broadcasters in London likely contributed to the marginalisation of Murphy’s Welsh accent.

(Christine Ro. www.bbc.com, 08.05.2022. Adaptado)