Utilização de ferramentas tecnológicas nas práticas pedagógicas e sociais de linguagem com foco em comunicação oral em língua inglesa

Abstract

The present work aimed to identify, test and evaluate technological tools and verify their contributions to the development of oral communication in English through online activities, carried out within and outside the school context, which afford meaningful interlocutions with opportunities for negotiation of meanings. It was designed as a qualitative research, using the case study method, with 72 participants, high school students of the Preparatory School of Air Cadets, in Barbacena-MG, who took part in interactions in applications and online games. The activities in the voice and video chat apps intended to meet foreign English speakers from all over the world; in WhatsApp messenger, the goal was to talk in a group in a spontaneous and natural way, according to learners’ own needs; the activities in the online games had the purpose to interact in their voice chats for oral discussion of strategies in order to win the matches and other recurrent dialogues in these recreational environments. The data were generated between February and December, 2019, through records in field notes, questionnaires, interviews, informal conversations, photographs and participant observation. Data analysis was based on theories that defend interaction (Constructivism, Socioculturalism, Enunciation and Interaction Hypothesis) and on Complexity Theory, supported by the Communicative Approach and the Connectivism. The results have shown that voice and video chat softwares, the WhatsApp messenger and online games promote the development of oral communication in English, representing environments that afford natural synchronous and asynchronous interaction among real English speakers. Furthermore, the findings have pointed out that technological resources stimulated new worldviews, changes in beliefs and attitudes, deconstruction of the “I”, breakdown of stereotypes, fight against prejudices and respect and tolerance for diversity. It has also been demonstrated that the digital/mobile platforms are dynamic interaction networks of distributed knowledge that provided learning agency, in which each student contributed to the whole by sharing experiences among classmates and foreigners, being able to manage, teach, criticize, assist, co-building knowledge through collaborative actions. In addition, the results have revealed that the methodology mediated by technology was seen by students as leisure, and not as study, which motivated them to participate in the activities, facilitating linguistic acquisition. For this reason, in these informal environments, learning occurred naturally, so that the students did not actually realize that they were learning. It is concluded, from the results, that the more diversities there are, the more connections are established, the more distributed the networks are, the more complex the system is and the easier it is for changes. It is expected, with this research, that more teachers make use of applications and online games in order to enable a successful, meaningful, contextualized and fun learning for digital native students born in the 21st century.