Motivações e emoções de alunos de inglês do PROEJA

Abstract

According to Dörnyei (1998b), motivation to learn a foreign language (FL) is understood as the initial force which leads an individual to decide to learn a language; it is also the force which will maintain an individual’s engagement and commitment to his/her learning process. Given that Sociocultural Theory is a theory of mind, and that language is part of the higher functions, central concepts in this study are the self-regulatory process adult learners go through, in addition to mediation, peer collaboration, the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffolding, which means offering assistance to the individual in the learning process at the ZPD. Emotion is a difficult element to measure and, being a recurrent variable in the FL classroom, might bring about either positive or negative effects on the motivation for learning the FL. Therefore, this research comprises an inquiry into the narratives of a group of six English students from the Programa Nacional de Integração da Educação Profissional com a Educação Básica na Modalidade de Educação de Jovens e Adultos - PROEJA (National Program for the Integration between Professional and Basic Education for Young people and Adults). The research is qualitative and interpretative because it used narratives as the basis for data generation and analysis. It was developed at Instituto Federal in the south of Brazil. Among the concepts of the Sociocultural Theory, the self-regulatory process, in this study, appears in four participants’ narratives, while mediation and scaffolding are seen as inseparable elements in the English learning process. The emotions reported by this group of PROEJA English students were anxiety, insecurity, shyness or inhibition, satisfaction and confidence (and self-confidence). Negative emotions – anxiety, insecurity, inhibition or shyness – are predominantly related to speaking a FL. The negative emotion anxiety might cause negative effects in classroom motivation, but insecurity and inhibition might bring about either positive effects – such as language learning awareness – or negative ones – such as lower participation in the classroom and an unfavorable learning environment.