Aprendizado incidental de línguas e desenvolvimento de bilingualidade do aprendiz em contexto escolar

Abstract

The ongoing process of globalization (KUMARAVADIVELU, 2006), characterized mainly by the popularization of the internet around the world has been influencing directly the way we understand and live experiences involving language contact in our everyday life. Paradoxically, although we need to use different discursive practices while interacting with others, it seems that the relation between foreign language and schools in Brazil is still controversial. Thus, it is extremely important to think about new strategies and approaches to work with foreign language as a discipline inside the classroom in order to make it closer to our reality. It is necessary, though, to change the idea that the learner needs to be “proficient” in a language and focus on make them capable of (inter)act in the contexts they belong to – using what we would call bilinguality (SALGADO, 2008). This paper proposes that such development might be encouraged by a bilingual education setting with dynamic orientation (GARCIA, 2009) since the beginning schooling. The focus should be on the learner and the potentiation of interactions called incidental in the classroom - what means interactions in which the main goal is not the goal of the class and because of that it presents to the learner opportunities of learning that could not be predicted by the teacher when preparing the class. Thus, this work aims to describe and analyze strategies of development of bilinguality of learners in school settings through incidental learning (KERKA, 2000; VAZQUEZ et al., 2014; GRIM-FEINBERG, 2015). More specifically, it also discuss 1) the consequences of having the learner as the focus of the learning process; 2) how to foster incidental learning in the classroom and 3) the importance of developing the agency of the learners in their process of building their knowledge. For doing so, it was analyzed the documentation (for the records, expanded notes, videos and reports) produced from two different contexts in which children learning a foreign language had classes elaborated and applied in this model of bilingual education. To understand how the process worked, the interactions documented were divided in three categories: interactions learner-learner, interactions learner-context and interactions learner-teacher. The analysis of the data suggests that 1) besides the development of bilinguality in these learners, it was possible to notice the development of other skills, such as their literacy in the foreign language; 2) even considering the specificities of both contexts, the learners seemed to be engaged and available to the classes, what contributed significantly to their linguistic development and 3) the incidental learning seems to be an important tool in the process of developing the bilinguality of the learners inside school settings and it is advised to be fostered though the methodological approaches chosen by each institution.