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This research focused on the process of digital inclusion within the context of English teaching and learning in two public schools in Uberlândia MG, in order to identify in which implementation stage these schools are in the present moment. We also aimed at analyzing how the process of digital inclusion was carried out in the context of English Language teaching in these schools, from the perspective of the director, the teacher and the student. Our study also investigated the policies and actions taken by the Administrators and participant schools, which intend to promote (and facilitate) the process of digital inclusion in the English Language setup. We noticed that, when it comes to English Language teaching, the public schools investigated have not effectively adopted the process of digital inclusion in pedagogical terms. This non-effectiveness seems to be the result of a tension between what the documents concerning the issue predict and what effectively happens in the schools in practical terms. This inclusion process is still facing different problems; ranging from practical, concrete issues regarding digitalization access, to those emerging from occasional negative convictions of people involved. Education managers, directors, teachers and students participated in our research. Data was gathered through interviews, questionnaires and classes observation. For the analysis of the corpus, we applied the method based on Carlo Ginsburg s Indiciary Paradigm (2007) and of the postulations proposed by Bax (2003), Chambers; Bax (2006), Sandholtz; Ringstaff; Dwyer (1997). It now seems possible that schools have already started their process of digital inclusion in their general practice. Regarding English Language however each school is in a different initial stage of digital inclusion.

Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior

The present study aims at investigating some aspects involved in teaching English reading through authentic texts, in a public high school, based on my experience as a teacher in such context. The paper, of ethnographic basis, will also consider theoretical postulates in relation to the authenticity of English texts, as well as in relation to the reading theories and to the English for Specific Purposes approach. The authenticity issue in the language classroom is a complex theme, even more so if we discuss the concept of "authentic". This paper, a selfanalysis, aims at carefully studying this concept and the use of such material in reading development in language learning. The research instruments include recordings of classes in video tape, the teacher-researcher s field notes, learners notes, interviews with learners and questionnaires. Data analysis, as it was triangulated, suggests that, according to students as well as teacher-researcher s reactions, the use of authentic texts in the English reading class, considering some aspects of a need for choosing the theme and negotiating meanings at the time of the reading, may contribute to a more meaningful and realistic learning, in this more specific context. Therefore, considering that the teaching and learning process is also based on elements other than just classroom material itself, there are other essential factors to this process, such as critical and reflexive teacher education and his or her conceptions of reading, learners contributions, as well as the content of the proposed activities.

The aim of this work was to build a lexical-semantic field of love of English with the lexical units found in the subtitles of the first and last episodes of each one of the five first seasons of the sitcom Friends. In the sitcom, the exposition, the conflict and the denouement and the climax all take place in an episode of less than half an hour. It is a lexical-semantic field which does not contain all the English lexical units related to the theme love, but only the ones found in the chosen corpus, and the research was restricted to the romantic and/or sexual aspects of love, specific of the relationships of couples. We used the terminology of Pottier (1978), who classifies the lexias (lexical units) as simple, composed, complex and textual, and we organized the lexical-semantic field in a taxonomic structure, according to the methodology described by Cruse (1986). In order to identify the common meaning traces that allowed the inclusion of the lexias into the lexical-semantic field and their grouping in subfields, one monolingual (English) unabridged dictionary, two monolingual (English) dictionaries for learners of English and one bilingual (English-Portuguese) dictionary were used, along with the analysis of the contexts of occurrence. 125 lexias were mapped and ten sub-fields were built: the sub-field flirt, the sub-field date, the sub-field relationship, the subfield feeling, the sub-field physical contact, the sub-field wedding, the sub-field marriage, the sub-field sex, the sub-field breakup and the sub-field people.

This study was based on the investigation of Short Message Service SMS as an aid in the English language classroom. Our goal was to analize the limits and possibilities embedded in the emergent context of learning with mobility: mobile learning or m-learning. The scenario of this research was a private language school. The theoretical framework of this study was developed by using the scope of teaching and learning languages and Information Tecnhonology IT, distance learning, especially based on the Mobile Assisted Language Learning MALL proposals. The references of this work are the studies of Kukulska-Hulme (2004), Waycott (2004), Mike Sharples (2005). We also used the concepts proposed by authors concerned with autonomy as Benson (2007), Leffa (2006), Macaro (1997) in addition to some ideas about new technologies. Data were analised qualitatively from the semistructured interviews with the research participants, a questionnaire answered by the students and the sent/received messages. In order to analyze the relation between the language and the process of building the answers, we used the theoretical support of Indiciary Paradigm, proposed by Ginzburg (1990). The results of this study show that the students supported the use of SMS. We feel that technological restrictions have limited the interactive and collaborative activities among the students. Some participants have demonstrated autonomy in the search for learning strategies. The ease of use mobile phones, the familiarity with SMS and the low cost of the messages are important indications to understand that the practice of mobile learning keep being proposed and investigated by teachers and/or researches.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior

This investigation was aimed at identifying, analyzing and describing the lexical aspects used by the members of folk groups from Montes Claros through the construction of a lexical-semantic field of the congado Montesclarense, verifying how much it reports the social, historical and cultural reality of Catopês, Marujos and Caboclinhos groups which yearly do their festivities in August in this city. This analysis didn t have the intention of exausting the lexias related to the Fests. It limited to those ones which were found out in the chosen corpus which are connected to the relation between the lexicon and the culture in the formation of the linguistic identity of people from Montes Claros. This study was aimed at presenting the relation between the lexicon and culture, conceiving culture as a system of practices. It is through the lexical analysis that it intended to detect the social practices of Montes Claros Congado groups and evidence their relation with the local culture. It was adopted a sociolinguistics approach and the theoretical principles of lexicology and semantics, emphasizing the process of meaning construction. It was evidenced that in the songs creation of each group the meaning is determined by liguistic and non-linguistic elements, showing a semantic peculiarity which represents the way of thinking, behaving and living of Congadeiros.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior

Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais

The aim of this dissertation is to critically describe and analyze: (1) an experience of learning to teach with the language of art; (2) the teacher education, specially the teachers educator, in the experience of learning to teach with the language of art; This research was developed in the stage of Narrative Inquiry (CONNELLY; CLANDININ, 1988, 1990, 1995, 1998, 2004, CLANDININ; CONNELLY, 1986, 1994, 1995, 2000, CLANDININ, 2007, MELLO, 1999, 2004) that presents life and educational experiences as a way to teachers reflection and in the stage of Art-based Research (EISNER,1991, 2002, DIAMOND, 1997,1999, TELLES, 1991, 1997, 1998a, 1998 b, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2007, DUARTE, 2001). The generation of field texts was motivated or resulted, in the most, by artistic activities and the research text was composed by means of many forms of expression of the language of art. In order to develop this research, part of the composition of the field texts took place during an Art-Based Education course, at a Brazilian university, with 28 teachers from many knowledge areas. The field texts were composed by the inscription forms, the teacher s educator course plans, audio records, reflective diaries, narrative analyses and analyses of the artistic and non-artistic productions of the course participants. The transformation of the field texts into research text took place with the creation of themes and the meaning composition based on the studies of Ely, Vinz, Downing e Anzul (2001). From the meaning composition of the field texts we were able to see art-based education as a space that makes possible the teacher education, working with diversity and valuing cognition and emotions. The meaning composition also showed us the language of art as an instrument that allows teachers to narrate, reflect and share their experiences of life and education using different forms of expression of the language of art.

This paper is based on the reflection and discourse analyses of the silence on Vidas Secas , by Graciliano Ramos. In this study it could be observed how linguistics approach is fundamental to understand the focus of book, considering the social, cultural, historic, politic and ideological conditions. This research aims to analyze the various silences demonstrations inside the speech, in order to emphasize the significance of silence. In this case, the communication difficulties of the character Fabiano, as well as his silence, are examples related to the dry land. The third-person narrative, unusual in Graciliano Ramos works, becomes an important element that proves how hard the communication is, thus many times the silence speaks for them. In this narrative, it can be observed that Fabiano and Sinhá Vitória s children do not have names, being called The Oldest Boy and The Younger Boy . There is a policy of silence constitutive of a sense which defends that to say something, it is needed not to say. The silence of the characters is responsible for the animal s process, which occurs with the man in Vidas Secas. In this situation, the dog of the family (Baleia) has a name, but not the children. Nevertheless, it is important to observe that silence is not a complement of the verbal language, it makes sense and has a meaning itself. This is a manifestation of the founder silence, as well as the lack or excess of silence. These beliefs about silence indicate the complexity of discourse analysis, observed by the contradictory effects of senses production, especially from the comments of silence and the way to impose the silence in the opposition to the spoken language.

This paper presents a survey conducted as part of a sociolinguistics study on the use of the preposition a , which precedes the object of syntactic structures with the verbs aim, watch and aspire, in written Brazilian Portuguese, with the purpose of analyzing the behavior of that preposition within the use of those verbs, considering the variation and conditioning factors which act in the realization of the variable. The work is based on theoretical assumptions of sociolinguistics proposed by Labov (1972), and studies of Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (2006). The approach used was that of Traditional Grammar, based on Cunha (1999), Cegalla (1999), Rocha Lima (1978) and Bechara (2001), and in some studies in generativism, proposed by Chomsky, based on Morais (1999), Oliveira (1999), Ramos (1992) and Stowell (1981). The corpus of 734 data was collected from four newspapers in Brazil: O Globo, Folha de São Paulo, Estado de Minas and O Estado de São Paulo.The analysis showed the rate of change in the distribution of the preposition in newspapers, as well as frequencies and percentages of change with respect to the conditioning factors. Based on statistical results, some assumptions could be proved: the adjacency of the complemention, the infinitive, pronoun, and clitic accusative; and pronominal PRO favors the absent of the preposition.

This work has the goal to investigate how the written genres from the argumentative order are seeing in a Portuguese didactic book Português, linguagens , 6th to 9th grades in Elementary School, seeing that this one is the most adopted at the Public Schools in Uberlândia. From the genre theory, specially the Bakhtin theoretical conceptions (1929/ 1988; 1979/ 2000) and the genre teaching proposal developed from Dolz and Schneuwly (2004), we tried to verify how the Bakhtin notions of circulation sphere and compositional construction were shown in didactic books, and so to analyze one of the aspects of this construction, the argumentative typological structure from the written genres, having, in this case, as reference the theory from Adam (1992) about textual typology. Beyond this, according to the proposal of genre group from Dolz and Schneuwly (2004), we kept to problematize how the didactic progression of these genres was done in the didactic book. In a general way, the genres are treated fragmented way, not dialogical, being, in truth, just as a pretext to base ways already institutionalized and crystallized in conceiving the contents.

This dissertation tried to identify the interferences Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has in the acquisition of English as a foreign language, through a corpus made up of fifteen interviews with advance level students of English. This research had as an objective, to investigate the difficulties native speakers of BP find when learning English as a foreign language, mainly when it comes to the acquisition of the high front vowels, that can be long or short and have the features [+ tense] or [- tense], that is [i:] and [I] respectively. The other objective was to analyze the phonological processes involved in the manifestation of such vowels. In order to achieve our goals, we made use of some concepts of the following theories: The Distinctive Features Theory (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), The Syllable treatment pattern proposed by Selkirk (1982) and the syllable analyses to the BP proposed by Bisol (1999). For the BP Vowels we used the proposal of Câmara Jr. (1970) and for the English Vowels Chomsky & Halle (1968). As the last theoretical model we reached for The Optimality Theory McCarthy & Prince (1993), Kager (1999) and Prince & Smolensky (1993) in order to confront the grammar of both languages. The data gathering to build up the corpus was made through fifteen interviews with advanced students of English as a second language who are native speakers of BP and have learned English without leaving Brazil. After the data gathering we analyzed the data through a statistics program GOLDVARB (Windows). During the data gathering we could study perception and production of the target phonemes in different contexts getting to the following results: the context (preceding and following) in which the segment lies influences its correct perception and production, and the factor that most encourages the production of the long vowel with the feature [+ tense] is linguistic and is the lateral liquid /l/ in following context; BP interference in the acquisition of English as a second language provokes alterations in the syllable structure in L2 and if the teacher of English as a foreign language has formal knowledge in phonology he/she may make it easier for the scholar to learn English.

This work, entitled The Self-Help as Interdiscursivity in The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho , has as a goal to establish how the self-help speech crosses interdiscoursively the corpus in analyses as an aesthetical asset/value to the construction of the literary discourse. To develop this study, the readings were based on concepts of the Discourse Analysis theory of the French school such as Interdiscourse, Discoursive Memory and Constitutive Discourse. Furthermore, support was found in the bakhtinian philosophy of language to understand Dialogism. The discoursive analysis of The Alchemist tries to detect how the self-help discourse crosses interdiscoursively the novel and the aesthetical effects built by this same discourse. It can be seen that the self-help discourse grounds the narrative events. Every time Santiago the young pastor weakens in the pursuit of the treasure seen in his recurrent dream, self-help statements are re-stated through the voices of other characters. Those characters are embodied with wisdom and the knowledge Santiago needs to start his journey towards personal fulfillment. Here, the self-help discourse uses constitutive discourses, including its own literary discourse, to be built. Therefore, the literary discourse being analyzed in this work is crossed for several other discourses, such as religious and economical-capitalist ones. When making up stories that create heroes who face same problems as regular human beings, Paulo Coelho stays away from what Russian formalists understand as being good literature . And that is what causes literary critics to consider the Brazilian author as a poor writer/novelist. However, by making his heroes suffer the same males as the ones suffered by the contemporary man, Paulo Coelho attracts the attention of the reader. He or she identifies with the hero feeling insecure, lacking self-confidence, boredom, long for self-fulfillment generated by historic, social and economical events that describe the contemporary world. Paulo Coelho uses the self-help discourse to build his hero because this is what helps the modern man in the search for identity.

The use of computers is a reality in the contemporary world and is present in several fields of professional activities, including educational environments. For the investigation hereby proposed, we have analyzed three Spanish as a Foreign Language course book series, published from 2001 to 2005 containing activities for online navigation with the presumed goal of leading the student to an immersion process in different Spanish-speaking countries and cultures, by using the Internet. Our research aimed at identifying, in the course books studied, coherence relationships and implications among the following aspects: the technical qualities of the corpus of sites suggested for online tasks, cultural themes developed in the lessons and the level of learning expected in the course books. As a basic methodological tool, we drew comparative charts containing the online navigation activities suggested by the three course books selected and analyzed them considering as reference: (i) a framework for the analysis of the technical qualities of the sites compiled, based on the studies supported by Gibaldi (2003), Alexander and Tate (1999), Tomaél et al. (2004), Ambre et al. (1999), Lázaro (2001), Henderson (2005), Blattmann and Fragoso (2003), Rodrigues (2000) and Araújo (2003); and (ii) a synoptic chart reflecting the Global Assessment Scale and Reference Chart of learning based on the guidelines presented in the Common European Framework of Reference for Foreign Languages (2001). The analyses developed were qualitative and interpretative in nature and suggest that although the online navigation activities proposed were, in gerenal terms, coherent with the cultural themes discussed in each lesson, they do not match the linguistic level expected from the students. In addition to that, the activities indicated in the course books studied do not stimulate the teacher to take on a critical posture while navigating in virtual contexts. The ability to evaluate sites critically must be developed by the teacher who is willing to incorporate online navigation activities in his or her classes; it is important for the teacher to know the basic criteria to consider while analyzing sites and selecting possible online activities for his students in order to be able to use the technology available critically and meaningfully. The thoughtful use of technology by the teacher may contribute to the learning process; otherwise, it may be reduced to the use of one more fashionable resource offered by the modern world.

At the aim of this study is to describe lived experiences in a context of Tandem practice, mediated by MSN Messenger, and to analyze how these experiences contribute to initial and continuing English teachers education. The place and space of this study was the Project-PIBEG: Stories of Teaching Portuguese to Speakers of Other Languages and Learning Foreign Language mediated by MSN Messenger, developed at a University in the Brazilian ―Triangulo Mineiro‖. This research is linked to the Narrative Inquiry Study Group and Education of Teachers - GPNEP - and based on the assumptions of Narrative Inquiry, Dewey (1938), Connelly and Clandinin (2004), Clandinin, (2000, 2007), and Mello (1999, 2005), which focus on the study of experience through stories that can be lived (living) or told (telling). The main reference for the study of Tandem, in this work, is Telles and Vassallo (2006), e Telles (2009). The documentary material was composed from different field texts, such as journals, field notes, MSN files, Yahoo discussion list files and other documents from the project such as minutes and reports. Documentary material analysis involved the composition of meanings, according to Ely, Vinz; Downing and Anzul (2001) work and Mello (1999, 2005). The results of this research show that the experiences in the context of Tandem practice, throughout this study, contributed to the construction of collaborative learning, to changing concepts in relation to the concepts of teacher training, and to the teaching and learning of language mediated by new technologies and autonomy. The context of Tandem practice was presented in this study as a virtual context, enabling both initial training and continuing education for foreign language teachers (TELLES, 2009).

This research subscripts on French Discourse Analysis (DA). Its aim is to analyze the construction process of discursive (s) subject (s) on The Ghost of Luis Buñuel (2004), by Maria José Silveira, and to search how the several voices, permeated by interdiscourse, have established the enunciative subjects identity construction on that novel. Thus, we propose to answer the following questions: 1) How do the different enunciative voices, passed by interdiscourse and the multiplicity of discursive subject, helped to compose the discursive inscriptions constituents and constituent in/from the book? and 2) What are the discursive subjects construction and identities building like? We propose an analytic-descriptive and qualitative research of an interpretative nature, in which materiality language cut will serve like a starting point to analyze how the discourse works. Through the evidence obtained in a theoretical framework guiding, we will do a detailed analysis of discursive sequences from the corpus. For this analysis, we will proceed to a description of events related to the polyphony and heterogeneity in the discursive manifestation of the corpus. Based on that theoretical and methodological proposal, which implies an entry in the discursive field of DA, we will focus on our study object. In that process, questions will be focused on: the relationship between the subject and the discursive crossings which involve its discursive practices; the historical and ideological consequences that, in a discursive continuum which cross discursive practices, cause the enunciative event of the novel; the interpellation ways of subject-positions, buoyed by interdiscourse; the relationship between institutional meanings and social meanings, observing the interdiscoursivity that marks the words of those enunciator-subjects that lived in a specific historical period (1968-2003); the discourses established like truths or dogma of a discursive, social and collective memory, set up ideologically; the power relations that involve the discourse in the work; and the discursive constitution processes of subjects and discursive crossings related to that constitution. To achieve our purpose, concepts like subject, discourse, discursive memory, enunciative heterogeneity, identity, power relations and polyphony will be recurrent, because they are necessary for a discourse analysis promotion of the sequences cut from the textual materiality of the corpus.