A Experiência de Aprendizagem de Inglês Fundamentada na Teoria dos Appraisals

Abstract

English education in Brazil has received a lot of attention because of some demands from professional and academic environment. It is assumed that teaching English needs using methods and methodologies that privileges the student as the center of attention, but, very often, the use of those methods to teach languages emphasizes the method itself, making the learning content more important than the student’s need. On the other hand, the way an individual behaves, their needs, including the user who looks for any kind of service, is a design interest. In this sense, design experience has already been consolidated as a field that accepts projects of experience from the perspective of the user and the value of the product or service. Expanding this area and developing technology to improve the user experience is based on a methodology that regards past experiences. Thus, design is set up as a process centered on the human being, an area that develops and visualizes creative ideas and creates scenarios for the future. The emotional design, another field also consolidated, helps designers to design and to provoke certain emotions intentionally to avoid others. Given the above, the general objective is to understand how design can reflect on the process of building English students’ concerns based on a theory from the emotional design. The way languages are taught can influence and encourage students in various ways. A student’s will to learn languages must be a worry throughout the teaching-learning process. Therefore, this research tries to make a connection between design and teaching English language. The cultural probe, a kit that aims to support the involvement of participants of a design process, is a method that can be adapted easily and that has been used to designate a set of varied needs (BERKOVICH, 2009). This cultural probe was developed in a workshop and given out to participants from this study, who were also interviewed by the researcher. The collected results show a certain balance between pleasant and unpleasant emotions. These students’ concerns, in this study, refer to English four skills. The observations on the results found here were presented at the end of the final considerations of this research.