Do discurso à prática: textualização de pesquisas sobre o ensino de inglês mediado por computador

Abstract

Research in the field of computer assisted language learning and teaching has discussed the necessity of defining a research agenda in area. Because of this, some of these studies have focused on the analysis of research reports to identify the objectives of studies, the methodologies and the themes in order to identify the state of the art. By using a methodology of a research synthesis, this work describes the research practice of the Computer Assisted Language Learning and the discourses which come out this investigation field in relation to what researchers from this area conceive about language and about English as a foreign language teaching and learning. To do that, I collected 123 research articles from specific international journals in the field of Computer Assisted Language Learning and 14 reports from Brazilian journals in the same field which were published from 2005 to 2009. By analyzing the research articles, I have also analyzed the content of the selected articles, the methodology and the results. Then, after the textual analysis, I elaborated an interview through e-mail with the authors of the articles to confirm or deny the data obtained in the textual analysis. The textual and contextual analysis is theoretically based on Genre Analysis and on Critical Discourse Analysis, which helped to describe the theoretical-methodological procedures adopted in this investigation field. The results suggest a field oriented by the investigation of four main themes which are: language, participants, technologies and online pedagogy. The investigation discourses in CALL suggest the existence of an area interested in the analysis of practices such as teach, read and write, virtually speak and communicate, which are done through the Internet. However, the predominant discourse about language in the research has been conceived as a cognitive and social phenomenon. The description of the Research Agenda suggested in this dissertation describes the main themes investigated in CALL, the social and discursive practices which are realizable in the cyberspace and examples of researches oriented by different language concepts.