“A gente acaba percebendo muita coisa no momento, ali em sala de aula, e aí?”: narrativas de professores de inglês como língua adicional sobre o contexto de ensino de inglês para very young learners nas Escolas de Educação Básicas

Abstract

The teaching of additional languages in early childhood, especially the English, in regular schools, has been developing exponentially. Data from the Brazilian Association of Bilingual Education (ABEBI) suggest that, in the recent decades, it is estimated a growth of 6 to 10% of bilingual institutions in the country, in addition, 1,200 institutions that are not bilingual are already starting to offer bilingual programs. That way, it is necessary to emphasize the look at this new audience that is gradually taking up space as additional language learners in regular schools. As well as for the training of professionals who will work with this new audience. This research aims to understand, from oral narratives, as an instrument of analysis, what the English language teaching scenario is like for very young learners, according to the narratives of teachers working in the area. Therefore, we seek to highlight what the narratives of the participants reveals about the teaching of additional languages for very young learners in regular schools of the region, considering the gaps of learning of the graduation course, and to analyze possible similarities and differences between the narratives of the participants, that allow us, partially, to know and understand this teaching scenario. The methodology of this research is qualitative, having as analytical theory the narrative approach of Labov (1972), (1997), Bastos (2008), Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008), Bamberg (2012), De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2015) and the analysis slides by Biar, Orton and Bastos (2021). The data for this study were generated from unstructured narrative interviews with voluntary participants, conducted by the researcher. The narrative interviews were conducted remotely, recorded in audio and transcribed based on the principles of textual-interactive oriented conversation analysis, according to the transcription conventions proposed by Marcuschi (1986) and Mira (2016). The data were analyzed according to the narrative approach of Labov (1972), among others, and the analysis slides of Biar, Barton and Orton (2021). This research is justified by the gaps of learning how to teach additional languages for very young learners in regular schools, present in the Letters and Pedagogy courses of the region, in addition to the scarcity of academic productions to support this teaching. The results of the study indicate that the teaching of English language to children requires an experiential and academic knowledge of the teacher that goes beyond that promoted by graduation. In addition, similar experiences regarding the entry into teaching of very young learners reveal a need to emphasize the look at this training issue, in order to prepare a new professional for this new audience.