O latim, uma língua morta?: uma metáfora em análise: o olhar da lingüística aplicada e suas implicações para o ensino

The focus of this research is the teaching of the Latin language. Due to the fact that its teaching has been facing a growing crisis in the last four decades, which currently persists, we ponder about external and internal causes of its decline, aiming at pointing out an alternative that enable us to find a way out of this situation. So, our research questions mainly concern how the teaching of Latin is viewed amongst the academic society, also investigating if it has kept up with the development of the scientific reflection about human language and the new approaches on language teaching. Furthermore, we analyse the contribution that the study of Latin can provide to the academic formation of language teachers and try to identify the areas of knowledge that can contribute to a reshaping of its teaching. Based on these guidelines, we have established as the goals of this research: 1) to reflect about the current situation of the teaching of Latin and the causes of its decline; 2) to determine its social representation among teachers and students of the Language Courses, as a way of defining the role it fulfills in the academic formation of teachers; 3) to accomplish an exploratory study of some handbooks that show alternative proposals on how to teach Latin, in order to detect their adequacy to current times and to the goals of the academic study of languages; 4) to offer an alternative proposal on how to teach Latin that takes into account the principles of Applied Linguistics, considering the socio-historical and cultural aspects of the language, enabling it to meet the requirements set by modern times. This research is divided into two parts. The first part presents the theoretical framework. We map the studies about Latin teaching inside and outside Brazil and argue against the concept of Latin being a dead language, presenting arguments set on changing this view. Then we describe and comment the notions of literacy, genre and culture, which helped us understand the reasons for the decline of the teaching of Latin and to point out suitable ways to overcome the crisis. The second part is dedicated to reflecting on the literacy practices in Latin teaching. We began by examining the answers to the questionnaires given to students and teachers about the view of Latin in the Language Courses; then we reflect on the teaching-learning of Latin as an academic literacy practice followed by an analysis of the didactic material used in teaching Latin. Finally, we suggest an approach of the familiar letter genre in ancient Rome as a means of teaching Latin in a contextualized way

As estratégias de negação variantes no inglês falado: uma comparação com o português

The general aim of this work is to verify the occurence of variant forms of negation in spoken English with the purpose of making a comparative study between the English and the Portuguese languages. As for Portuguese, we used as a matter of reference a study already made on negation. As for English, we analized a corpus of the North American English variant organized by a university in the United States. This study is based on the North American Functional Linguistics theoretical perspective, which considers relevant the study of language used in real situations of communicative interaction. The data analisys proved that there is at least one form of negative variant in spoken English which is not allowed by prescriptive grammar. This phenomenon turns out to be similar to Portuguese, which includes three variant strategies. According to the data obtained, it was possible to verify that the variant strategy used in English, from a contrastive point of view, corresponds to a negative strategy ruled by Portuguese prescriptive grammar. Finally, we discussed about the different conceptions of language, grammar and teaching, giving suggestions to colaborate to a productive and reflexive teaching of first or second language

A intercompreensão em Línguas Românicas nas aulas de Espanhol: o que querem e o que podem essas línguas?

The official documents that guide the teaching and learning process of a Foreign Language in Brazil, Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais de Língua Estrangeira, suggest a linguistic and intercultural communication as the main objective of teaching a foreign language inorderto contribute withareflexive formation of the students.Toachieve this goal, a Virtual Interchange was realized connecting distant places like Córdoba, in Argentina, and Natal in Brazil, between High School students through Moodle platform and Facebook. The Interchange is based in the Intercomprehension in Romance Languages(IC) guidelines, inthiscase between Portuguese and Spanish, according to which every student speaks their own language and makes an effort to comprehend the others througha collaborative process thatgo es beyond the limits of mere linguistic objectives and favors the students’ reality acceptance before the diversity. This qualitative study with thno graphic characteristic stries to know whe ther differentiate projects can increase students’ interest to learn the target language. It was also set as an aim of this study to develop the intercultural competence of our students and foster the respect for different cultures. In the case of Argentinian and Brazilian students, wetried to promote reflection about social representation trying to destroy stereotypes between both groups. As methodological resources, we used interviews, questionnaires and intercomprehension activities during the Project, as well as a participant observation of the interactions betweenthe students of both countries.Webe lieve tobe contributing towards the integral formation ofth student asacriticalcitizenthatthinksa bouttheir posture before the world, which is one of the formal education aims according to Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais. Our theoretical foundation is based on Intercomprehension in Romance Languages (IC) as a plurilingualism didactics, (JAMET AND SPIŢĂ 2010; ARAÚJO AND SÁ et al., 2003; CAPUCHO, 2010; ANDRADE etal.,2003), some the oriesaboutinter culturalisman didentity(Vallespir, 1999;DUARTE&SANCHES,2004; REVUZ,1998;SILVA,2000;CHAUÍ2006; SERRANI-INFANTE 1998), motivation and second language learning (DECI & RYAN, 1985; DÖRNYEI AND OTTÓ, 1998; DÖRNYEI, 2000, 2001; 2011) and Significant Learning Theory (AUSUBEL, 1968). The results show an increase of students’ motivation when in contact with the target language through dynamic activities in an IC context. Moreover, we noticed that a deeper thinking aboutthe Argentinian culture helped to deconstruct previous cultural representation.

Práticas de letramento digital de professores em formação: demandas, saberes e impactos

Over the last decades, the digital inclusion public policies have significantly invested in the purchase of hardwares and softwares in order to offer technology to the Brazilian public teaching institutions, specifically computers and broadband Internet. However, the teachers education to handle these artefacts is put away, even though there is some demand from the information society. With that, this dissertation chooses as an object of study the digital literacy practices performed by 38 (thirty-eight) teachers in initial and continuous education by means of the extension course Literacies and technologies: portuguese language teaching and cyberculture demands. In this direction, we aim at investigating the digital literacy practices of developing teachers in three specific moments: before, while and after this extension action with the intent to (i) delineate the digital literacy practices performed by the collaborators before the formative action; (ii) to narrate the literacy events made possible by the extension course; (iii) to investigate the contributions of the education course to the collaborators teaching practice. We sought theoretical contributions in the literacy studies (BAYNHAM, 1995; KLEIMAN, 1995; HAMILTON; BARTON; IVANIC, 2000), specifically when it comes to digital literacy (COPE, KALANTZIS, 2000; BUZATO, 2001, 2007, 2009; SNYDER, 2002, 2008; LANKSHEAR & KNOBEL, 2002, 2008) and teacher education (PERRENOUD, 2000; SILVA, 2001). Methodologically, this virtual ethnography study (KOZINETS, 1997; HINE, 2000) is inserted into the field of Applied Linguistics and adopts a quali-quantitative research approach (NUNAN, 1992; DÖRNYEI, 2006). The data analysis permitted to evidentiate that (i) before the course, the digital literacy practices focused on the personal and academic dimensions of their realities at the expense of the professional dimension; (ii) during the extension action, the teachers collaboratively took part in the hybrid study sessions, which had a pedagogical focus on the use of ICTs, accomplishing the use of digital literacy practices - unknown before that; (iii) after the course, the attitude of the collaborator teachers concerning the use of ICTs on their regular professional basis had changed, once those teachers started to effectively make use of them, promoting social visibility to what was produced in the school. We also observed that teachers in initial education acted as more experienced peers in collaborative learning process, offering support scaffolding (VYGOTSKY, 1978; BRUNER, 1985) to teachers in continuous education. This occurred because of the undergraduates actualize digital literacy practices were more sophisticated, besides the fact being integrate generation Y (PRENSKY, 2001)

Um estudo sobre o ensino-aprendizagem das demonstrações matemáticas

Demonstrations are fundamental instruments for Mathematics and, as such, are frequently used by mathematicians, math teachers and students. In fact, demonstrations are part of every Mathematics teaching environment, because Mathematics considers something true when it can be demonstrated. This is in contrast to other fields of knowledge that employ observation and experimentation to validate truth. This dissertation presents a study of the teaching and learning of demonstrations in Mathematics, describing a Teaching Module applied in a course on the Theory of Numbers offered by the Mathematics Department of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte for mathematics majors. The objective of the dissertation was to propose and test a Teaching Module that can serve as a model for teaching demonstrations. The Teaching Module consisted of the following five steps: the application of a survey to determine the students‟ profiles and their previous knowledge of mathematical language and techniques of demonstration; the analysis of a series of dialogues containing arguments in everyday language; the investigation and analysis of the structure of some important techniques of demonstration; a written assessment; and, finally, an interview to further verify the principal results of the Teaching Module. The analysis of the data obtained though the classroom activities, written assessments and interviews led to the conclusion that there was a significant amount of assimilation of the issue at the level of relational understanding, (SKEMP, 1980). These instruments verified that the students attained considerable improvement in their use of mathematical language and of the techniques of demonstration presented. Thus, the evidence supports the conclusion that the proposed Teaching Module is an effective means for the teaching/learning of mathematical demonstration and, as such, provides a methodological guide which may lay the foundations for a new approach to this important subject

Alternância no uso dos modos indicativo e subjuntivo em orações subordinadas substantivas: uma comparação entre o português do Brasil e o francês do Canadá

The purpose of this work is to analyze the use of the indicative mood, instead of the subjunctive prescribed by the normative grammar, in complement clauses introduced by the conjunction que in Brazilian Portuguese. Contexts of use of the subjunctive according to grammatical prescription, and contexts of fluctuation on the use of that verbal mood were analyzed, in an attempt to investigate what interferes on the choice of the mood by the user of the language. This study is based on North-American Functional Linguistics theoretical perspective, oriented to analyzing language in use, in the light of the principles of grammaticalization and markedness. The results obtained support that the contexts that favor the indicative over the subjunctive are those composed by a complement clause functioning as a direct object the unmarked clause of all complement clauses and by a verb on the main sentence that belongs to the semantic field of low certainty, corresponding to the epistemic sub-mode the unmarked category of the deontic sub-mode. The results indicate that pragmatics and semantics factors influence the language user on the choice of the verbal mood. This research also presents comparative data on the use of the indicative mood in place of the subjunctive in Brazilian Portuguese and Canadian French, aiming to providing suggestions on language teaching

Aí marcador de especificidade de SN indefinidos: um estudo funcionalista com implicações para o ensino

This body of work aims to describe and analyze the behavior of the Aí specificity marker of indefinite Noun Phrases (NP), one of the many functions this linguistic item is developing in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese. From the Functional Linguistic theory perspective, the North American declivity, this project intends to outline the possible grammaticalization trajectory taken by the Aí specificity marker. It will be followed from its function as a spatial deitic up to its integration of indefinite NP, and the action of the fundamental principles of the theory, such as iconicity and informativity, will be observed on the use of this item. Following this, Aí specificity marker behavior will be described in respect to various linguistic and social factors: type of text where the occurrence is encountered, language modality in which the latter is produced, syntactic function developed by the NP specified by Aí , the existence or lack of material intervening between Aí and the NP nuclear noun, informational status of the NP adjugated to Aí , and finally, sex, education and age of the speaker. The occurrence of conversational implicatures will also be verified (GRICE, 1982) within the contexts of Aí specificity marker use. Reflections on the teaching of grammar will be made, as well as on the possibility and validity of working with noun phrase specificity markers in elementary and high school Portuguese language classes. The data used in this research project stem from Corpus Discurso & Gramática A língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998), and from Corpus Discurso & Gramática A língua falada e escrita na cidade do Rio de Janeiro (VOTRE; OLIVEIRA, 1995)

O gênero crônica na sala de aula do ensino médio

In this work we present the results of a research that aims to study the chronicle gender produced in a class of native language. The texts were written by students of a high-school class, under the orientation of the teacher who conducted a didactic sequence in order to explore this gender. In our analysis we observed aspect such as the structure of the general structure of the texts, types of speech and linguistic sequences, some mechanisms of textualization and the characteristics of the gender. In order to attain that, we adopted the theoretical presuppositions of Textual Linguistics and of the Socio-discursive Interactionism, grounding the study of texts and gender in Bronckart (2003; 2006) and Koch (2002; 2004). As a background of the Chronicle Gender we used the studies of Coutinho (1987); Moisés (2003); Sá (2005); Bender; Laurito (1993); Melo (1994); Cândido et al. (1992) among others. The corpus, made up of 15 texts, showed that the narrative is the most used linguistic sequence in the producing of the texts, the discursive world prevailing in the narrative and some instances of the world of exposing. As for the gender characteristics, the daily life was used in order to amuse the reader and make him to reflect upon the daily life. Humor, irony, social criticism and colloquial language were also observed in the texts produced by the students. Although some texts presented the characteristics of the gender, explored in the classroom, some were typically school narratives. That make us believe that a work with textual production under the approach of a text gender is viable, but it is not consolidated yet in many schools as the main object of the central teaching of the Portuguese language. This make us defend a better systematization of the teaching contents having as the main point the reading practice and text production in order to contribute for the growing of the students´ discursive potentialities and, therefore, their effective participation in the language social practices

A relação gramatical objeto direto : implicações para o ensino de língua materna

This paper attempts to investigate the discourse manifestations of the grammatical relation direct object with respect to the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties that underlie this element. The research adopts theoretical orientation of the functionalism from North American and Brazilian schools inspired in Givón (1995, 2001), Hopper and Thompson (1980), Chafe (1979), Furtado da Cunha, Oliveira, Martelotta (2003) inter alia. From functionalism, the research uses principles of iconicity, markedness and informativity and it analize categories of transitivity, grounding and animacy. This research is anchored in prototype model (TAYLOR 1995); construction grammar model (GOLDBERG 1996, 2002). Both theoretical orientations share the view that language is a malleable living organism subject to socio-cultural context. Grammar is then the result of created, maintained, and systematized linguistic patterns developed from and used for language use. According to a functional linguistics and cognitivist linguistics verbs are stored in the speakers lexicon in syntactic-semantic frames which are more frequent. These frames carry information concerning obligatory and optional arguments and the semantic roles these arguments take in the clause. The analysis focuses on the semantic type of the verbs and its relationship with the argument encoded as a direct object observing the aspectual nature of verbs. Direct objects are classified according to their morphology (lexical or pronominal noun phrase), semantic role, informational content and animacy. This study discusses pedagogical implications with relation to how the grammatical concepts touched on this paper are treated in school textbooks. The empirical data come from Corpus Discurso & Gramática: a língua falada e escrita na cidade do Natal (FURTADO DA CUNHA, 1998). This corpus is composed of texts that contain spoken and written modalities. These modalities are in turn organized according to different types: personal narratives, retold narrative, description of preferred place, procedural place, procedural description and report on argumentation. The sample data totals 40 texts produced by four language consultants of the last graduation date. The paper shows that the same syntactic structures (formed through Subject-Verb-Object) correspond to different semantic-pragmatic structures in relation to specific communicative purposes even verb is an event, process or state. The argument structure are not aleatory but are related to experience; that is the way humans conceptualize the world and talk about it

Referenciação anafórica :as anáforas não-correfereciais no livro didático da língua portuguesa

On recent years, it has been observed an increasing interest on referentiation processes, which involves an important field of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis studies. The existence of a significant number of international and national publications which focus on this perspective corroborate this finding. Given the textbook importance as a teaching instrument, and the relevance of the referentiation processes to text production and comprehension, we realize that the study of these two topics articulation is taken as a relevant research theme, with consequences to the improvement of Portuguese Language teaching. Taking this into consideration, we intend to analyze the non-coreference anaphors in texts of Portuguese Language textbooks from fifth to eighth grades, adopted in many schools of Pau dos Ferros RN, considering the frequency, genre, kind of anaphor and manifestation form. This study is classified as a documental and qualitative research. We have found out that the indirect anaphor was used in more than a half of the corpus. We have found out, as well, that the literary and press genres do not favor the use of labeling and metadiscursive anaphors. On the other hand, concerning the indirect anaphor, it is clear its abundant use in the literary genre. In what concerns the manifestation forms, we have verified that on labeling and metadiscursive anaphors it is significant the predominance of demonstrative pronouns working as determiners. On the indirect anaphor, we have verified that most of the occurrences do not present a determiner, and for the ones which present it, the majority occurs under the form of definite and indefinite articles. We believe that this work can contribute to the activities which involve questions related to text production and comprehension, since the referentiation processes are intimately related to them

O ensino de língua inglesa em um instituto federal : uma análise das recomendações documentais e da perspetiva dos professores

This work aims to understand the teaching of English at the Federal Institute of considering the recommendations of official and technical documents for the integrated secondary school and the perspective of the English teachers settled in one of the campuses of the Institute. It is also an objective of this research to infer as to what extent the perspective of teachers is articulated to the documental recommendations. For this purpose, several official and technical documents (LÜDKE; ANDRÉ, 1986), such as the PCNEMs (BRAZIL, 2000), the OCNEMs (BRAZIL, 2006) and the Political-Pedagogical Project of the Institute (IFRN, in press) were gathered, and a questionnaire was submitted to six teachers of English from one of the campuses of the institution. The theoretical references of the research include, among others, Bakhtin (1997; 1999), Widdowson (1991), Almeida Filho (2011; 2004), Celani (1988; 2009), Hutchinson and Waters (1987) and Dudley-Evans and St. John (1998). The results show that the teaching of English according to the documents predicts the instrumental use of the foreign language, but suggests the development of competences and skills as contextualized social practices, aimed at the education of the student as a professional-citizen. The perspective of teachers, in turn, points to a concern that the teaching of English serves as a tool for improving student life through the instrumental use of language as a means of accessing information and professional training. This finding reveals that the articulation between the documental recommendations and perspective of teachers does not go beyond what refers to the instrumental language teaching, since teachers do not show, when reporting their practices, the teaching of language as social practice, as mentioned in the legal texts

Conectores sequenciadores em artigos de opinião escritos por vestibulandos: uma questão de marcação linguístia com implicações para o ensino

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior

Práticas de letramento digital de professores em formação: demandas, saberes e impactos

Over the last decades, the digital inclusion public policies have significantly invested in the purchase of hardwares and softwares in order to offer technology to the Brazilian public teaching institutions, specifically computers and broadband Internet. However, the teachers education to handle these artefacts is put away, even though there is some demand from the information society. With that, this dissertation chooses as an object of study the digital literacy practices performed by 38 (thirty-eight) teachers in initial and continuous education by means of the extension course Literacies and technologies: portuguese language teaching and cyberculture demands. In this direction, we aim at investigating the digital literacy practices of developing teachers in three specific moments: before, while and after this extension action with the intent to (i) delineate the digital literacy practices performed by the collaborators before the formative action; (ii) to narrate the literacy events made possible by the extension course; (iii) to investigate the contributions of the education course to the collaborators teaching practice. We sought theoretical contributions in the literacy studies (BAYNHAM, 1995; KLEIMAN, 1995; HAMILTON; BARTON; IVANIC, 2000), specifically when it comes to digital literacy (COPE, KALANTZIS, 2000; BUZATO, 2001, 2007, 2009; SNYDER, 2002, 2008; LANKSHEAR & KNOBEL, 2002, 2008) and teacher education (PERRENOUD, 2000; SILVA, 2001). Methodologically, this virtual ethnography study (KOZINETS, 1997; HINE, 2000) is inserted into the field of Applied Linguistics and adopts a quali-quantitative research approach (NUNAN, 1992; DÖRNYEI, 2006). The data analysis permitted to evidentiate that (i) before the course, the digital literacy practices focused on the personal and academic dimensions of their realities at the expense of the professional dimension; (ii) during the extension action, the teachers collaboratively took part in the hybrid study sessions, which had a pedagogical focus on the use of ICTs, accomplishing the use of digital literacy practices - unknown before that; (iii) after the course, the attitude of the collaborator teachers concerning the use of ICTs on their regular professional basis had changed, once those teachers started to effectively make use of them, promoting social visibility to what was produced in the school. We also observed that teachers in initial education acted as more experienced peers in collaborative learning process, offering support scaffolding (VYGOTSKY, 1978; BRUNER, 1985) to teachers in continuous education. This occurred because of the undergraduates actualize digital literacy practices were more sophisticated, besides the fact being integrate generation Y (PRENSKY, 2001)

As construções adverbiais em mente: análise funcionalista e implicações para o ensino de língua materna

This research aims at investigating the constructions with adverbials in ly, based on the view of contemporaneous linguistic functionalism, such as proposed by Givón, Hopper, Thompson, Traugott, Furtado da Cunha, as well as the cognitivist notion of language, through construction grammar support upon the patterns of Goldberg and the prototypes theory. The cognitive functional approach adopted here considers the change as a proper and inherent phenomenon of language and understands the linguistic phenomenon as resulting from effective use of language. Another aspect to be considered to the realization of this study is the fact that the formation adjective + ly is a word construction mechanism really productive, which generates interests on linguistic description. In a particular way, our leading objective is to exam the constructions with adverbials in ly in the context of language in use, in its oral and written forms, looking for to apprehend the meaning multiple manifestations forged in the use. Bearing this in mind, we worked with data from the Corpus Discurso & Gramática (Natal). There are, in the data, adverbs ended in ly that take the signification of mode, as foreseen in traditional models, but there are also other significations, for instance, the modalizador in its different manifestations. The results show that this adverb is a linguistic mark that carries in its constitution the multissêmico and multifunctional character, which interferes extremely in the ordination of this category, assuming a position sometimes pre-verbal, sometimes post-verbal. Other aspect observed refers to the relationship between the adverb and the verb, with emphasis on the compatibility or restriction between them, option which is related to the semantic aspect. The data in analysis legitimate the use in different constructions with adverb ended in ly in various genres, as follows: personal experience narrative, retold narrative, local description, proceeding account, opinion account, both in oral as in written language

A aula de português no ensino médio: o ensino que se deseja, o ensino que se faz

Settled within the realm of a problematization towards teaching and learning the Portuguese language, this study aims to investigate the way how the Portuguese Language discipline is dealt with in Secondary School. We propose specifically to analyze the orientations of the official documents concerning the educator practice, examining the way the PCNEM proposal is approached in the didactic book, identifying the treatment given to language questions, analyzing the way the teacher uses the didactic book and verifying the relations between the official approach and the pedagogical practice. The analysis takes into account the several discourses concerning school literacy, considering the various political-educational instances which institutionalize the teaching of the mother tongue - where we locate the teaching that is wanted . In what teachers and students say in their activities and concerning them - the realm of the teaching that is performed - we presuppose that there are signs of the principles - or conceptions - that orientate what they understand by language, teaching and learning. Such evidences are considered within the interrelation of the enunciative places where this literacy is promoted: the public policies concerning education - focusing the language questions - the academic researches about those questions, the educator formation and capacitation and the very school practices in the complexity of their discoursive inter-subjectivity. The principles - or conceptions - are pursued in what is said (or not) about what is done (or not) in the classroom when dealing with the Portuguese Language. The corpus is made up of oral and written texts produced in Portuguese classes in the Secondary School at a public school in the city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Situated in the realm of Applied Linguistics, the research is conducted in a qualitative and interpretative perspective, following the ethnography of communication procedures and the contributions of the Functional Linguistics. In the observations, language conceptions were discerned, among others, besides beliefs and representations where the theoretical and practical aspects, professional roles, expectations and uncertainties were diluted.