Crenças e motivações de alunos do 1º ano do ensino médio de uma escola estadual sobre as aulas de inglês online no âmbito do programa aula Paraná durante a pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic impacted society in several ways in the year 2020. One of the consequences was the interruption of face-to-face classes in schools in Brazil. As a result, governments had to quickly seek solutions for the continuity of the school year and for the continuation of classes remotely. In the state schools of Paraná, the government put into practice the Aula Paraná program, which consists of the following fronts: recorded classes with content transmitted by Digital TV and YouTube, Aula Paraná app, printed activities for students without Internet access and the use of Google Classroom and other G Suite for Education resources whose focuses are one online activities and which encourage interaction between teachers and students. Faced with this unprecedented scenario, there was a fear of how public school students would be able to follow classes online and what difficulties they would encounter. Studying five classes of the 1st year of High School of a state school located in Rio Branco do Sul, in the Metropolitan Region of Curitiba, this research proposes to investigate the beliefs and motivations of these students about online English classes within the scope of the Aula Paraná. Part of the theoretical and methodological framework that serves as a backdrop for this research are the concepts of digital literacy according to Gilster (1997) and Lankshear and Knobel (2003, 2006), the conception of beliefs and theories about language learning according to Barcelos (2003, 2004, 2007), in addition to Cope and Kalantzis’ (2009) multiliteracies theory. The data obtained through two questionnaires applied to students in an interval of six months of online classes, showed that although they have, mostly, almost permanent access to the Internet using mainly the cell phone, this hyper connectivity is not reflected in devotion to online school activities. It was also observed some deep-seated beliefs about learning English and concluded that students’ motivation for classes has been decreasing over the months of the pandemic, despite all the actions taken by the State Department of Education.