English language in public schools: representations of future teachers

Abstract

The demand for the knowledge of English language has been increasing very much. English is considered the contemporary global language, it is a tool highly needed to communicate among peoples. On the opposite way of this need, the teaching of English has not shown much efficiency in regular schools in Brazil, mainly in the public field. There is a great number of factors that may be mentioned to justify this deficit, such as didactic material, short weekly time for the classes, poor formation of teachers, the discredit of this discipline for the internal and external community and the laws that always regulated the teaching of modern foreign language in Brazil. Because of this, it is important to know the social representations of future teachers who will teach in this context. The goal of this research is to find out the social representations of Letter students about the teaching of English in public schools. The specific goals are to find out the representations of the participants about a) their own learning English experience in the basic school; b) the reasons to be studying Letters; c) what their representation of public school is and d) the efficiency of teaching English in public schools. The results show that their representations are objected and anchored on words such as repetition, shallow, devaluation, basic, faulty, disorganized. About the pedagogic work when the students graduate, the participants object and anchor their representations on a researcher-teacher attitude, mentioning capacitation, updating, qualification, engagement and compromise as tools to support an efficient professional posture in the public context.