Inclusão digit@l na escola pública: uma proposta com o Kidlink

Abstract

This dissertation aims at investigating to which extent the existence of the computer lab of the Programa Nacional de Informática na Educação might facilitate the inclusion of Internet in English classes at the investigated public school. The participants of our research were the 7th graders of a public school in a town located in the region of the Triângulo Mineiro . Our dissertation is an ethnographic research which uses the perspective of the qualitative paradigm, and proposes to verify whether the inclusion of technology seen in the above mentioned laboratory, through the use of the website kidlink, is able to stimulate the participants in interactions via e-mail with foreign keypals, to develop possibilities of writing in the target language. We take as our theoretical reference the discussions about intercultural interactions via e-mail in the vision of Yu and Yu (2002), the institutional documents Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais de Língua Estrangeira para o Ensino Fundamental and Proposta Curricular de Inglês da Educação Básica de Minas Gerais , and the works of Almeida Filho (2005), Celani (2003), Freire (2002) and Moita Lopes (1996), among others. English classes were observed and an initial questionnaire was applied to both the students and the teacher. After being singled out, the students participated in activities through the website kidlink and occurrences of e-mail exchange between the participants and a north-american teacher were recorded and analyzed. Messages, the researcher field notes and a final questionnaire applied to the participants were also analyzed. The results indicate that even in a small environment, limited by institutional and operational difficulties, it is possible to apply the existing technology as a support to the learning of English, in an inclusive way. The final considerations suggest that the public school and its teaching staff should create appropriate conditions to the inclusion of computational technologies and Internet in English classes, since the activities done with the students signal evidences that point to the motivational role that the virtual context might play in the learning of English at the public school, which goes beyond the teaching of reading. In spite of the fact that we have analyzed only a small sample, and even realizing the underuse of the computer lab, it is possible to conclude that the exchange of significant messages via keypals might contribute to the development of writing production possibilities in the context of English teaching and learning at the public school.