Desenvolvimento de língua inglesa em uma oficina de criação colaborativa de memes com estudantes da EJA/EPT: uma pesquisa-ação à luz da teoria sociocultural e dos multiletramentos

Abstract

The English language curriculum in Youth and Adult Education integrated with Professional and Technological Education (EJA/EPT) is not pre-designed. However, the base document prescribes that the curriculum should be structured to help learners develop as individuals (Brasil, 2007). According to Gomes Junior et al. (2022), digital technologies are already recognized as effective in Brazil. Thus, they can be used to teach and learn English as an additional language. Furthermore, communication nowadays largely takes place by means of digital media, which demands a pedagogical approach based on multiliteracies (Cazden et al., 1996; Kalantzis; Cope, 2012; Kalantzis; Cope; Pinheiro, 2020) and on the sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, which in turn highlights the importance of interaction in human development (Vygotsky, 1978; Vygotsky et al., 2006; Lantolf, 2000; Lantolf; Thorne, 2006; Lantolf et al., 2015). Taking into account the context of modern interaction practices in which digital technologies play a role in mediating relationships, we sought to build the theoretical support of this thesis under the combination of the following assumptions: a) teaching and learning English as an additional language based on Sociocultural Theory; b) collaborative tasks and collaborative dialogue principles; c) multiliteracies and intersections with social semiotics, multimodality, and meaning-making as a design process; d) digital technologies, digital genres, and additional language teaching-learning; and e) concept of meme, remix, internet meme, and macro image meme. Thus, this study aims to investigate how collaborative tasks based on the digital genre meme, mediated by digital technologies, can help learners improve their English language skills in cyberspace. The methodology of this study is qualitative and interpretative, whose investigative procedure is action research, based on the formulation of analytical categories following the open model, as they were not given a priori, but emerged during the analysis. In this way, we sought to triangulate, analyze, and discuss the collaborative dialogues, the memes produced by the participants, their diaries, the stimulated recall, and evaluation sessions about a remote workshop in which EJA/EPT students read and produced the digital genre meme in English with the mediation of digital technologies. The results present evidence that the learners were involved in collaborative designing, as they advanced in the dynamic space of their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) in search of the collaborative redesign, memes in English. Therefore, the thesis provides evidence that the situated practice, in which participants constructed meaning from the digital meme genre, which served as a basis for them to reflect and use the meaning constructed in another context, enabled the development of a transformed practice, promoting them to digital content designers, as well as learners with a certain autonomy for learning English mediated by digital technologies.