O livro didático no ensino de inglês em escolas de idiomas : aspectos lingüísticos e pedagógicos

Abstract

The aim of this work is to analyze the choice and use of the textbook of English that follows a communicative approach in language institutes in the west of Santa Catarina. We try to observe, mainly, the relationship between the choice and use of the textbook with the teachers knowledge and graduation (or not) in Languages at university, according to the aspects of the textbook and the methodology of English teaching at the school. Therefore, we have interviewed coordinators and teachers from four English institutes in that region and we have analyzed the textbooks used there. According to the results, we observe that the traditional methods are still used in the schools that follow the communicative approach due to the lack of knowledge about this approach, which demands a linguistic, discursive and pedagogical competence in order to exist, in the classes, an interaction among the students and the target language. We still observe that the use of the textbook in the communicative approach ends up mixing with the use of structured methods and they are used at random by the teachers, not caring about the important factors related to the approach and the second language acquisition. The textbooks analyzed show the possibility of using the grammar in a communicative way. However, such possibility does not happen because the way the teachers were taught and really teach English, as it seems they have internalized traditional patterns of teaching