“Para que(m) serve o inglês da escola?”: uma análise de representações discursivas sobre língua inglesa e ensino-aprendizagem em livros didáticos

Abstract

The teaching of the English language has been part of the basic curriculum of regular education in Brazil for over seventy years and, during that time, the motivation for its implementation has been changing in consonance with the historical-social scenarios that have modified the status of the English language globally and, consequently, its implications in the teaching-learning process. Today, the English language is considered a lingua franca (LF), no longer a foreign language, and occupies another place in the world and in language teaching and learning. In this paper, we start from the hypothesis that, although documents that prescribe guidelines for the teaching of the English language in Brazil (such as the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum - BNCC) and for the production of teaching materials (such as the edicts of the National Program of Textbooks and Teaching Materials - PNLD) try to squirm out of discourses that undermine the social political and ideological essence of language and promote a teaching-learning that does not reinforce homogeneous and excluding discourses in the teaching-learning process, this is done from a tense-conflictive process that is (un)veiled in textbooks. Thus, this paper proposed to investigate discursivities (re)produced in textbooks about English and teaching-learning from didactic proposals present in materials approved for high school by the PNLD in 2021. To this end, we (i) outlined discursive representations of the English language and teaching-learning in textbooks approved by PNLD 2021; (ii) problematized the notion of English as a lingua franca and investigated how it is presented in the textbooks; and (iii) discussed to what extent these representations present in the materials (do not) reinforce beliefs that undermine the political and social nature of language, which is historically, socially and ideologically situated, or/and (do not) contribute to the maintenance of interests, power relations, and world perspectives that are already dominant. First, we outlined a brief historical overview of the English language and teaching-learning, followed by a more local historical contextualization to understand the guidelines for teaching English in Brazilian public institutions of basic education, casting a special look at the BNCC and the PNLD 2021. To trace our theoretical path, we affiliated ourselves to the French-Brazilian Discourse Analysis and the Dialogic Discourse Analysis to explain our understanding of language, subject, and discourse, subsequently exploring some contributions of Dialogic Discourse Analysis and French-Brazilian Discourse Analysis to language teaching-learning studies. We also discussed textbooks use in the English language classroom based on studies in Applied Linguistics. In the analyses, it was possible to observe that, in the chosen textbooks, English is seen through the discourse of inevitability and completeness. At the same time, the teaching-learning process is promoted through the discourse of a transparent language. Therefore, we concluded that, despite being elaborated based on guidelines (BNCC and PNLD 2021) that reinforce other beliefs about language and teaching-learning and having been approved on this premise, other discourses that converge and disagree with each other are present in the textbooks, thus showing a tense-conflictive relationship between the documents that govern the elaboration of the textbooks and what appears in them.