Práticas de letramentos em um programa de formação inicial de professores de língua inglesa

Abstract

This research seeks to investigate literacy practices experienced/mobilized by teachers in initial education, participants of a community of practice (WENGER; TRAYNER, 2011), which promotes English teacher education and offers linguistic education to UFSM (under)graduates and to the Santa Maria community. This community of practice is a context of collaborative learning, in which relatively new members and relatively more experienced ones interact and learn (LAVE; WENGER, 1991). To understand this community of practice, we have analyzed the didactic material produced in this context, in order to identify the concepts of literacies (ROJO, 2004; MOTTA-ROTH, 2008; FREIRE, 1989) that subsidize the activities, using as semantic categories literacies as: a) decoding processing; b) cognitive processing and; c) critical processing. We have also analyzed the participants’ discourse (monitors, tutors and advisors), with the intention to map the literacy practices (STREET, 2014 [1995]) of this community. In this sense, the corpus of this investigation contains two didactic units, named “Lendo abstracts”, which focuses on writing comprehension teaching, and “Tourism”, focused on four skills teaching (oral and written production and comprehension). Moreover, it contains 11 semi-structured interviews organized by focus groups (monitor; tutor and advisor), which were analyzed based on the ideational and logic metafunctions of Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2014). In the analysis of didactic materials, we have identified that in the “Lendo abstracts” unit the concept of literacies as cognitive processing prevails, representing 75,6% of the activities, versus only 24,4% of literacies as critical processing. On the other hand, in the “Tourism” unit, the exploration of the literacies occurs in a more balanced way, 51,51% of the activities are linked to the critical processing and 48,48% to the cognitive processing. In both units, the reading practices more recurrent are of medium and low level of complexity, this is, more complex and abstract practices are not recurrent. In relation to the analysis of the participants’ discourse, we identify that the representations vary according to the focus group to which they belong. We have identified four groups inside this community: monitors, tutors, mentors and advisors. We highlight that the advisors’ and tutors’ discourse, when compared to monitors’, present a more comprehensive and complexified view of the literacy practices of this community, according to the different role attributed to the project, to the teachers in education and to the advisors. Finally, the analysis of discourses also enables us to identify that the community literacy practices seem to be based on two perspectives of learning: the cognitivist and the sociocultural, converging with the analysis of the materialization of literacy concepts that subsidize the didactic units analyzed.