Análise de atividades de compreensão e produção oral da coleção Way To English sob a perspectiva do inglês como Língua Franca

Abstract

The present work is an analysis of the listening and speaking activities of the textbook targeted to the 6th year of Elementary Education, from the collection “Way To English For Brazilian Learners”. The objective of the research is to investigate how the perspective of English as a lingua franca (ELF) and intelligibility are covered in the material in these activities. Therefore, the specific objectives focus on analyzing the presence of different varieties of English and not exclusively adopting models of prestigious native speakers (American and British), and reflecting on how the activities listed in the book dialogue with the proposal of the National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) for the teaching of the English language. To achieve this objective, the present research analyzed the 38 audio tracks, together with the listening and speaking activities of the material with the aid of a checklist composed of six questions. As main results, we identified that there are no explicit indications of how the teacher will teach aspects related to the nationalities of the speakers or different accents and pronunciations, and there is also no evidence that there are more non­native speakers than native speakers using English in the material's audios, moreover, we can state the opposite: in the activities focused on pronunciation practices, native speakers are more valued or it is not possible to identify a diversity of English speakers taken as models. However, we also found moments that favour students' communication in this language, placing them as protagonists of their own productions and where they play an active role throughout the contexts of language use. Such results point to a tendency of transition and adaptation of the materials to the perspective of ELF, leaving the teacher a large part of the development of a more targeted work in the classroom.