English collocations extracted from a corpus of university learners and its contribution to a language teaching pedagogy

Taking into consideration the relevance of foreign language teaching and the learning of collocations (ALTENBERG; EEG-OLOFSSON, 1990; FONTENELLE, 1994; MEUNIER; GRANGER, 2008), this paper aims at showing results of an investigation on whether the teaching of collocations should be implicit or explicit to the Brazilian university students. Furthermore, the research has the purpose of presenting some collocational aspects from a corpus of the written language learners made up of intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced university students' argumentative essays at a public university in Brazil. With the help of WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 2007), it was possible to raise students' most frequent collocational choices and patterns, the most/least used type of collocations, the influence of the mother tongue on their choices, among other aspects. With the purpose of motivating and involving students in classroom research, it was also introduced The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), created by Mark Davies. By doing so, students could compare their collocational choices with the patterns found in the online corpus, extract more collocational patterns and, consequently, be aware of the potential of corpora for the foreign learning process, specifically for raising language awareness, with focus on prefabricated chunks.

GRAMMAR and COMMUNICATION IN PORTUGUESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE A Study in the Context of Teletandem Interactions

This paper presents a study about the role of grammar in on-line interactions conducted in Portuguese and in English, between Brazilian and English-speaking interactants, with the aim of teaching Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL). The interactions occurred by means of chat and the MSN Messenger, and generated audio and video data for language analysis. Grammar is dealt with from two perspectives, an inductive and a deductive approach, so as to investigate the relevance of systematization of grammar rules in the process of learning PFL in teletandem interactions.

Competences in the classroom in the perspectives of foreign language teachers

In this article we raise some considerations about teachers’ competences, from the perspective of teachers in the Brazilian public sector. The theoretical framework includes articles by Paulo Freire (2001), Philippe Perrenoud (2012), Edgar Morin (2003) and Maurice Tardif (2002) and, based on these authors, we reflect upon issues concerning teachers’ competences taking answers provided by the Brazilian language teachers as a departing point. In a teachers’ course, followed by the same teachers, we posed the main question in our study: Which competences are necessary for a teacher to be considered a good professional at present? From the answers given individually and group discussions we proceeded to a comparative analysis with the adopted framework, and other issues concerning teachers’ competences were considered as well. All the participants mentioned the same two competences, the use of technology and sound knowledge of the course content, and other competences were pointed out by the various teachers as well. Such procedure, besides providing data for our study, also helped as a self-reflexive activity for the teachers involved, about their own professional performance. Given the issues raised in the theoretical texts and the answers provided by the teachers, we expect to revisit the competences necessary for foreign language teacher efficient performance.

The interlanguage development in the spanish learning as foreign language in Teletandem under the View of the Complexity Theory

This article presents, under the perspective of Complexity Theory, the characteristics of the learning process of Spanish as a foreign language in Teletandem. Data were collected from two pairs of Portuguese-Spanish interagents, who were engaged in a systematic and regular interaction, based on the tandem principles. It was found that the learning experience is developed with the peculiarities that arise from the context, agents, members and their nuances, which revealed the presence of a shallow space between the systems of native and foreign languages.

Subtitling as a pedagogical tool for language teaching in journalism

This study was designed to present and discuss some results produced by a research involving the use of English subtitles of some news videos from the webiste Reuters.com (http://www.reuters.com) with pedagogical reasons in a Brazilian context (Academic English for Journalism). We have developed the research during two semesters at UNESP (Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho). The professor in charge of the study has chosen the students of Journalism as the audience to whom the videos were presented. The assumptions of many theorists and experts in Audiovisual Translation were adopted as our Theoretical Sources. The first step of the study was the assessment of the syllabus of each course. This was very helpful as a guidance in order to choose the most relevant and interesting videos for students. After the evaluation of academic and professional interests, we chose some videos to insert appropriate subtitles, according to some strategies suggested by Panayota Georgakopoulou and Henrik Gottlieb. Finally we presented the videos during the English classes. At the first time, they were presented without subtitles just to notice the comprehension level of the students. After that, the videos were presented with English subtitles. As we first assumed, the students haven’t had the whole comprehension of specific details during the first presentation, they have just used their previous knowledge and the visual aids to help them in a superficial understanding of the news. As the subtitles appear, the process of communication was finally accomplished.

Vizinhança global ou proximidade imposta? Impactos da comunicação intercultural mediada por computador sobre o papel da cultura no ensino de língua inglesa

Muitas práticas educacionais no ensino e aprendizagem de línguas parecem ainda dominadas por uma visão de cultura essencialista, na qual os alunos, suas habilidades e atitudes de aprendizagem são caracterizadas por estereótipos problemáticos e/ou imaginários de suas culturas religiosas, étnicas e nacionais. As novas ferramentas e aplicativos para comunicação trazidos pela internet têm contribuído para o aumento de práticas comunicativas entre indivíduos de diferentes culturas e o uso da língua inglesa entre falantes não nativos, o que também tende a trazer impactos sobre a maneira como entendemos e ensinamos cultura na aprendizagem de tal língua. Este artigo pretende explicitar a visão de cultura presente nos conceitos de competência comunicativa e competência intercultural, e discutir a necessidade de reformulação do componente cultural no ensino e aprendizagem de línguas, para que ele objetive a exploração da complexidade advinda do pragmatismo dos encontros interculturais na contemporaneidade.

Estudo acústico da pronúncia de pares mínimos vocálicos do inglês por falantes nativos, professores brasileiros e alunos de nível intermediário e avançado

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

O ensino de lingua estrangeira (inglês): as relações entre as crenças e as práticas pedagógicas

Pós-graduação em Educação - FFC

O ensino de língua inglesa e o uso de portais de conteúdo para a construção de ambientes de aprendizagem

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

A gramática em contexto teletandem e em livros didáticos de português como língua estrangeira

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Teletandem e formação contínua de professores vinculados à rede pública de ensino do interior paulista: um estudo de caso

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Falar ou não falar?: eis a questão

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Cultura, linguagem e ensino da língua estrangeira: um estudo acerca desta inter-relação

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE

Para uma abordagem enunciativa no ensino de língua estrangeira: paráfrase e atividade epilingüística

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Teletandem: sessões de orientação e suas perspectivas para o curso de letras

Pós-graduação em Estudos Linguísticos - IBILCE