ACROSS GENRES: JOHN DOS PASSOS’S BRAZIL ON THE MOVE

This article analyses how John Dos Passos’s Brazil on the Move (1963) exemplifies the conventions of travel writing, on the one hand, and how it departs from them, on the other, in its representation of a foreign country and of its culture. I intend to discuss the relevance of this combination of literary genres in this book, considering the writer’s background, his writing techniques and the ideology/ies underlying his work.

PROPOSTA DE UNIDADE TEMÁTICA PARA O ENSINO DE INGLÊS EM AMBIENTE DIGITAL

Based on a sociocultural perspective (LANTOLF, 2000; 2010), the present article aims at presenting a thematic unit especially designed for an advanced leveled English group. This thematic unit has been elaborated in the virtual learning environment  http://pbworks.com , proposing twenty hours of collaborative tasks for the students, and it counted with varied textual genres and diverse digital tools. The objective of this thematic unit is to stimulate the collaboration between the students, focusing on the culture of English speaking countries in relation with crafts, setting up relations with the History of crafts in Brazil and working with the oral and written comprehension and production.  By creating a thematic unit that proposes the study of cultural aspects of other countries, an opportunity for the students to experience the culture of others is created, and for them to notice that culture is not apart from language. Such aspects are noticeable in foreign language classes due to the fact that by dealing with language, individuals also deal with cultural, identitary, and social aspects. Taking into consideration that oral and written comprehension and production are inseparable abilities, the proposed tasks in the thematic unit have been designed considering the students’ context, their necessities, the groups’ interests, and also the three types of knowledge according to Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais (1998): systemic, world and genre knowledge, besides the Oxford strategies (1990).

DICT IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: CHALLENGES IN ITS APPROPRIATION BY BEGINNER-LEVEL TEACHERS IN TRAINING

Our work is primarily concerned with the challenges involved in the appropriation of DICT by beginner-level participants of the Institutional Program for Scholarships for Initiation in Teaching in Brazil. Although the current generation of beginner-level undergraduate students may be seen as “digital natives”, their use of digital technologies, however frequent, takes place only outside the school environment. The technology skills which they acquire in their daily lives are not transposed to the classroom when they find themselves in the position of teachers. It is still challenging to understand their difficulties in appropriating technology to educational purposes, since educational agents seem all to agree on how important digital technologies are in school, while failing to put it to actual classroom use, and while simply providing access to digital technology is far from sufficient. These skills should be understood and applied in schools by meaningful teaching practice, which should go beyond the mere instrumental use of technology. Therefore, we here focus on the process of elaboration of digital technologies assisted teaching practices in the foreign language classroom. Our corpus is composed of classroom activities and classroom interventions, elaborated and staged by beginner-level teachers in training, who are the project participants, during the course of a school year. These activities comprise the development of an intervention project, which consists of an activity plan, its critical discussion, its application and further reflection.