Material didático para o ensino de Inglês

Abstract

This work aims to develop the four communicative skills in the English language: reading, listening, speaking, and writing. There are two teaching units, accompanied by a teacher's guide. The grammar is practiced in an inductive way, through written and oral texts brought from real world scenarios, with the goal of achieving a discourse-based, more realistic, and effective understanding. The contents of the units were created for students of English as a Second Language in their teens or 20s, both age groups with upper intermediate-levels of proficiency. To bring interesting and appealing contents to such an audience, the internet world was chosen as the unit’s source of language material. The critical literacy focus of this work is the complicated relationship between virtual connection and real-life personal interaction, so both units invite students to think about how connected and disconnected we can be in today's world. In this context, the memes (in Unit I) and social media advice boards (in Unit 2) were used as real scenarios in which students can experience very lively and up-to-date English, and as examples of how written text can have a speaking quality. A meme is Unit 1’s theme: "Forever Alone" - a virtually invisible lonely young man who tries, always unsuccessfully, to be noticed by others. This genre is utilized to practice the usage of indefinite pronouns, articles, personal and possessive pronouns, and conjunctions. The popularity of social media advice is used in Unit 2; twenty-first century teenagers and young adults use these virtual environments to ask for all kinds of suggestions, a sign that their lives do not have the presence of family members or intimate friends, with whom they could discuss their issues in a more direct and comforting way. It proposes the study of a very frequent word, like, to report speech and thought, and a very frequent expression, sort of, as a hedging expression. To achieve that, it highlights the use of a corpus as an extremely useful tool when teachers deal with teaching vocabulary. In addition, there is also a traditional grammar content: relative pronouns. A combination of genre awareness and meaningful discussions is the path chosen by this teaching material to show students how native speakers strategically organize conversations and written discourse, proving to be a powerful way to increase learning.