O papel da percepção consciente de conectivos concessivos na produção escrita e na reformulação da interlíngua

Abstract

The investigation described in this dissertation has shown the importance of dealing with the attention construct with adult learners, already English language teachers in public schools, who were attending a continuing education program. The quantitative design of the research made it possible for an experiment to be implemented, in which participants were divided into treatment and control groups (TG and CG), to produce written articles for a magazine. The study was carried out in three phases over a period of 15 weeks. The treatment chosen for the pedagogical practice of the TG consisted of many different activities aimed at triggering the noticing of the concessive connectives, linguistic target of the investigation. As a result, the activities were planned so as to direct the attentional focus of the TGs participants to those targets in various contexts. The data, analyzed with statistic tests, show interlanguage (IL) improvement and reformulation. The more frequent use of those connectives, gradually more oriented to the use in the target language, became evident in the written production along the series of tasks. In other words, the activities promoted noticing and were responsible for meaningful changes in the use of concessive connectives by the TG. It is expected that enabling the participants to notice the discourse regularities in English (L2), when compared with their own individual production, can possibly result in the long term reformulation of their interlanguage.