O ensino do "simple past" em materiais didáticos de inglês como língua estrangeira : o que se faz, como se poderia fazer

Abstract

Modern and globalized world has, each time more, driven individuals in order to seek for belonging to the selected group of people who make use of a special jargon, or, in order to seek for professional development. Within this use of a special jargon and this professional development, there is the knowledge of a foreign language. The most wanted, as a result of its extent, is English. This way, any research which seeks to contribute for a better quality teaching is relevant, in order to answer the objectives of language courses, teachers or, what is most desired, the students objectives, because they are the guarantee of the continuation of this teaching-learning universe. The objective of this paper, besides the contribution to a more creative language teaching and not so dependent on the didactic book, is to analyze four books, with international extent, which are used in the English as a second/foreign language context, levels start/elementary and pre-intermediate (I and II) as a sequence of the same series which are adopted for teenagers, as well as the same levels (I and II) of a different series used by adults. The verb tense Simple Past was selected as the object of analysis in each one of the four books, concerning the presentation of this grammatical structure. Also, the exercises which precede or succeed the presentation of the target language structure were analyzed, with the intention to observe the prescriptive-proscriptive, descriptive, productive character of those activities, as suggested by Halliday et al. (1974).For a theoretical basis for the mentioned analysis, this research brings a short description of the types of language teaching, suggested by Halliday et al. (1974), as well as considerations of renowned linguists and scholars of the relation between foreign language teaching-learning, also concerning the analysis and production of didactic materials. In the sequence, there is a presentation of the Argumentation Theory (AT) and its phases, initially developed by Jean-Claude Anscombre and Oswald Ducrot (1983) and nowadays by the last one and Marion Carel (2005) with The Semantic Block Theory (2005). These theories give support to the following section, because it presents activities that can be incorporated into the material used in class, if the teacher considers it appropriate and possible, with the intention of promoting a more creative and efficient teaching, regarding activities able to develop in the students an enlargement of the communicative possibilities that they can make use of at the moment of language interaction. For the development of those activities, the concepts of linguistic argumentation, internal and external argumentation of words, argumentative statements, argumentative aspects and, mainly, the argumentative connectors (PT) and (DC), were selected. The final results meet the hypothesis which stimulated this research, the hypothesis that the activities concerning the presentation and practice of the target grammatical structure of the language are too connected to the prescriptive character of language teaching and do not seem to be efficient considering a communicative approach of language teaching