“To be or not to be”: a produção da docência de Língua Inglesa em documentos legais

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how English language teaching is produced in legal documents that govern the elaboration of curricula of initial formation and the pedagogical practice of English Language teacher. The study is inscribed in the fields of English Language Teaching and Post-Structuralism, with specific contributions by Michel Foucault. The concept of discourse is used as a theoretical-methodological tool to treat, organize and analyze the volume of information produced from the examination of the following legal documents: National Curricular Parameters - Foreign Language (1998), National Curriculum Guidelines - Foreign Language Skills ( 2006), National Curricular Framework for Modern Languages (preliminary proposal, 2016), National Curricular Guidelines for Language Courses (2001), Curriculum Guidelines for Basic Education Teacher Education (2002), National Curricular Reference - Language - Foreign Language - Bachelor's Degree (2010) and National Curricular Guidelines for the Initial and Continued Training of Teaching Professionals for Basic Education (2015). Articulating teaching and speech, I tried to show how the legal documents describe, guide and institute a way of being and making the English Language teacher. The analyzes showed that: 1) the emphasis on the specific knowledge that the English Language teacher should develop in the course of the initial training courses is very naturalized by the legal documents that end up regulating the English Teacher's training without making a clear distinction between knowledge, content and expertise, suggesting that in some measure such concepts are given. 2) when approaching the responsibility of the English Language teacher for his/her training, the documents ask the English Language teacher to produce his/her subjectivity motivated by aspirations of self-realization, causing the teacher to take it as something naturalized, responsibility for his/her professional training; 3) legal documents present an overview that places English language teaching in public schools in a poor place in the school curriculum, and also reinforces that learning objectives in public schools are different from the teaching objectives of language courses. The emphasis on the interests of the student as a starting point for teaching means that teaching/learning undergoes to a process of content reduction, being focused only on the contexts that surround student the English Language Teacher being and making are conformed.