Inglês na escola pública de Juiz de Fora: fotografias em perspectiva

Abstract

This is a qualitative and interpretative work of ethnographic nature, which focuses on analyzing discourses of individual involved in the school environment – students, teachers, school managers, and functionaries – of two schools of the city of Juiz de Fora/MG, a municipal one, “José Calil Ahouagi”, in which the researcher acted in a scientific research project called Ensino de línguas para crianças na escola pública: abordagem CLIL (Foreign language teaching for children in a public school: CLIL approach), and a state one, “Delfim Moreira” (also known as “Central”), in which the researcher acts as an English teacher since 2013. Discourses directly or indirectly linked to English teaching in public education were registered in interviews and expanded field notes by the teacher-researcher and will be analyzed in this work. The aims of this research consist in: a) recognizing in the speeches traces of Discourses (related to beliefs) built through social relationships; b) observing how these recognized Discourses influence or not the process of learning and teaching of English; c) and, consequently, thinking about a possible proposal that could contribute for the improvement of this process. For accomplishing these aims, this work counts basically on this theoretical approach: Discourse Analysis according to Gee (1999); the notion of superdiversity, which refers to the worldwide connection among different languages, cultures and territories, mainly through technology of communication and the increasing mobility of people throughout the world (VERTOVEC, 2006); bilingual education as a way of educating children in this twentieth century (GARCÍA, 2008). We can understand through this research that what people say about a subject sometimes is not only an individual opinion, but a thought socially built, and it interferes in the manner groups of people think and act. So, the Discourses related to English teaching in public schools also become, somehow, responsible for the way it is established.