Entre a idealização e a contingência: representações de língua inglesa e seus efeitos no processo de ensino-aprendizagem de alunos do programa Idiomas sem Fronteiras

Abstract

The aim of this research was to analyze representations from students attending the Languages without Borders Program (LwB) about the teaching-learning process of English and about the LwB program itself in order to discuss the different ways in which these representations may or may not influence their learning experience, as well as the potential movement engendered in their discursive memory during their stay in the program. The guiding hypothesis is that their representations may be destabilized as they attend classes, being able to abandon common sense assumptions and to lean toward an understanding of the many different aspects that are implicated in the teaching-learning process. With the purpose of investigating these questions, discursive and psychoanalytical concepts are employed in this work, such as the notions of language, subject, discourse and discursive heterogeneity. The main presuppositions that conduct this research propose representations as subjective processes which intend to give significance to the objects that demand meaning and these processes are composed of ambivalent identifications. Methodologically, the research was established from interviews conducted with students from the LwB program, in order to map their representations and to analyze the potential meaning effects that emerge from them, taking these meaning effects as the focus of the corpus analysis. It was possible to verify that students that had finished more than one course in the program represent learning English more critically, indicating that LwB acts as a destabilizing agent of dominant discourses about what learning English is. It was also observed that the clash between students’ discursive memory and the program classroom contingency caused them to take a stand through identification and resistance that reverberated in the role they attribute to the LwB program, which still struggles to discursively establish itself as a legitimate place in which the teaching-learning process can thrive.