A relação entre língua e cultura em aulas de língua estrangeira.

Abstract

This research is a contribution to the discussion concerning the relationship between language and culture in Foreign Language Classes (FLC). It discusses the place of cultural issues in FLC and how they can contribute to a more efficient learning of a foreign language and also to the formation of critically aware students/citizens. The discussion about language and culture is related to issues like globalization, hegemony, linguistic and cultural mutability, but it is especially related to the educational field. This work takes into account analyses, theoretical perspectives, studies and books that deal with this theme, being mostly based in Applied Linguistics, relying on researchers and linguists such as Bhabha, Crystal, Fiorin, Hall, Porto and others as a support to this research. The research corpus is composed of an analysis of an English schoolbook, transcripts of 18 English classes and a questionnaire applied to the teacher and to the students of the observed classes. The qualitative ethnographic perspective is adopted in order to support this work. The analysis of the schoolbook aimed at verifying a possible relationship between language and culture within its units and how that relationship occurs. The class observation s purpose was checking the place and the importance of cultural issues in the teacher s teaching practice as well as checking the kind of knowledge the students were offered. The questionnaires, handed by the end of the observation period, intended to analyze the teaching practice and the teacher s beliefs concerning the relationship between language and culture, as well as to consider the students purposes and their beliefs about the role of the English language in their lives. This study concludes that a) the teacher was not acquainted with theories and approaches that support the teaching of foreign languages; b) the students were mainly taught lexicon and how to analyze (in order to be able to correct) linguistic structures, but they were not able to use, in simple conversations, what they were taught in classroom; c) mostly traditional approaches were used in different kinds of exercises; and d) the analyzed schoolbook, despite its discourse of teaching real-live English , through dialogues that supposedly depicted real Brazilian everyday situations, was actually concerned with the teaching of lexicon and the practicing of grammar rules in situations that were either incomplete, incoherent or that pointed to an English reality.