Percepções acerca da linguagem na formação docente do Sistema Socioeducativo de Rondonópolis

Abstract

This research aims to promote some reflection on the concepts of critical literacy applied to language teaching area. The current study, theoretically based on emancipatory perspectives, was undertaken in a teacher education course offered to teachers of the Socioeducational Center, in the city of Rondonópolis-MT, along 2015. Enlighted by authors as Janks (2010), who belives that the language can be used to different purposes and that texts have social effects, as well as by Papa (2008), who defends emancipatory pedagogical practices must be connected to all the spheres of the school context, I worked to favour the critical consciousness of language to those teachers who work in the referred educational unit. The data generated in this study comes basically from interviews with the teachers who took part in the Teacher Education Course, during and after it (in some additional classes). This qualitative reasearch has the theoretical-methodological support of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CHOULIARAKI; FAIRCLOUGH, 1999; FAIRCLOUGH, 2003) – through representational meaning categories, according to Systemic-Functional Linguistics by Halliday (1994), and the construct of social actor representation by van Leeuwen (1997). The main outcomes pointed out that the Teacher Education Course provided the teachers of that educational unit with some sort of awareness regarding the language, even though they have not reached a more critical level of reflection, nor enough provisions for emancipation. The study highlights the need of more continuous and regular basis teacher education courses within critical perspectives. Such courses are especially needed in social contexts of vulnerability, as an attempt to allow critical thinking to take place, giving teachers more chances to identify traces of ideology, hegemony or oppression in discourse practices and reflect upon them, aiming those discourses might be critically questioned, problematized, or even deconstructed.