CRENÇAS DE ALUNOS E PROFESSORES (INTER)AGINDO NA APRENDIZAGEM DE UMA LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA

Resumo

This paper deals with classroom interaction, including the views of teachers and students about language and verbal communication in EFL classes in Brazil. Nine teachers of English, four native speakers (NS) and five non-native speakers (NNS) and the students from one class taught by each teacher participated in the study. The students were mostly young adults, and their level of proficiency in English varied from lower intermediate to advanced. Three lessons from each class were observed and recorded on audio tape; the transcripts were analyzed for characteristics of the language and verbal interaction. The type of student verbal participation varied from mostly listening to the teacher to attempting to participate verbally in opening sessions. Some students were very talkative during the classes, while others spoke only in order to seek clarification for their linguistic doubts or in reply to teacher elicitations. Both teachers and students believe in the importance of teacher talk for classroom language development and, although most of the teachers and students surveyed advocate teaching in English most of the time, the majority agree on the use of the student L1 whenever this is absolutely necessary. Learners tend to prefer NS teachers because they expect both to be exposed to better English and to be motivated to speak more English in such a situation than in a NNS teacher-taught class, although neither of these expectations seems to have been supported by the classroom data. The predominance of English as the lingua franca in all classes corroborates teacher and student views about the contributions of communicating in the target language for language acquisition in FL contexts.