Oralidade em inglês na escola pública: entre condições reais, crenças e práticas de resistência a partir do gênero vídeo-minuto

Abstract

Considering that learning English as a lingua franca serves as a vehicle for constructing a globalization that takes into account the interests of its speakers, enabling learners to access discourses about the world and about who they are or can be, thus allowing them to interact with different cultures and societies not only by absorbing them but also by exposing their own discourses to the world, this research aims to problematize the development of English orality competence among students in public schools in Santa Luzia-MA, Brazil. Based on the application of a Didactic Sequence (DS) that resulted in minute-videos that promoted the use of the English language, the present study starts from the assumption that the teaching of orality in a foreign language is a problem in the Brazilian public school. The sequence was designed based on the reflections of Dolz, Noverraz, and Schneuwly (2004) and is articulated using digital technologies (Moran, 2007, Kenski, 2007 and Abrantes 2021). The production of the minute-video genre by 6th and 9th-grade students was carried out considering a collaborative cycle between the researcher and the participants and aimed to answer the question: In what way can the use of a DS that combines digital technological resources, through the production of a minute-video using the CapCut application, challenge the structural limitations of English language teaching in Brazilian public schools and promote the development of oral competence in an equitable and meaningful way, in addition to fostering a critical mindset about English in the world? For this purpose, the work adopts Applied Linguistics as its theoretical and methodological basis from the perspectives of Moita Lopes (1996, 2006 and 2011), Fabrício (2006), Pennycook (2006), Kumaravadivelu (2006), among others, just as we consider the critical perspective in Rajagopalan (2003) and Mattos (2018). Throughout the application of the DS, we sought to adopt a stance dissident from the theoretical tradition, primarily considering marginalized subjects and competencies: public school students and orality. Thus, we used Action Research as the methodological design (Burns' cycle from 2015, cited by Paiva, 2009). This method, with the collaborative cycle between participants and the researcher (Two teachers and 60 students - one 6th-grade class and one 9th-grade class from different public schools in Santa Luzia - MA), revealed not the external view of the researcher, but the internal view, from the perspective of its participants. In this way, some diagnoses created from the field research justified the need for research in this area, such as: the privilege given to writing, reduced English language workload, the high number of students with different proficiency levels per classroom, the scarcity/absence of didactic resources for learning, and gaps in teacher training. The data analysis reinforces the importance of reflections for developing a critical/indisciplinary stance regarding the challenges of teaching and learning orality in English by public school students and teachers.