Questões Militares

        Many assumptions of a communicative orientation towards language teaching need questioning in a global context. Ozóg (1989) discusses the idea of the ‘information gap’, which is supposed to induce students to speak. ‘Are we as Europeans’, he asks, ‘not making a cultural assumption that speakers the world over are uneasy in silence and that they have an overwhelming desire to fill gaps which occur in natural discourse?’ (p.399). Silence is a salient feature of conversation in the Malay world, he points out, a feature that has also been noted in Japan and a number of other cultures.

       Indeed, the whole question of requiring others to speak needs to be questioned in terms of both cultural and gender differences. The point here is not to exoticize some notion of cultural difference, but rather to suggest that language is a cultural practice, that both language and thinking about language are always located in very particular social, cultural and political contexts. How language (including silence, paralanguage, and so on) is used, therefore, differs extensively from one context to another, and thus any approach to language teaching based on one particular view of language may be completely inapplicable in another context. If particular language teaching practices (advertised and exported as the best, newest and most scientific) support certain views of language, then such practices clearly present a particular cultural politics and make the English language classroom a site of struggle over different ways of thinking about and dealing with language.

     Fricatives are consonants with the characteristic that air escapes through a narrow passage and makes a hissing sound. The dental fricatives are sometimes described as if the tongue were placed between the front teeth, and it is common for teachers to make their students do this when they are trying to teach them the sound. The thing is, however, that the tongue is normally placed behind the teeth; the air escapes through the gaps between the tongue and the teeth. There is a distiction between fortis (unvoiced) fricatives, as in the word “thin”, and lenis (voiced) fricatives, as in “thus”. (Roach 2003)

(Mark Roach,. English Phonetics and Phonology.

Cambridge: CUP, 2003. Adaptado)

        Most teachers recognise the need for the students’ awareness about the potential relevance and utility of the language and skills they are teaching. And researchers have confirmed the importance of this need.

        In ESP (English for specific purposes) materials, for example, it is relatively easy to convince the learners that the teaching points are relevant and useful by relating them to known learner interests and to ‘real-life’ tasks, which the learners need or might need to perform in the target language. In general English materials this is obviously more difficult; but it can be achieved by researching what the target learners are interested in and what they really want to learn the language for. An interesting example of such research was a questionnaire in Namibia which revealed that two of the most important reasons for secondary school students to wish to learn English were so they would be able to write love letters in English and so that they would be able to write letters of complaint for villagers to the village headman and from the village headman to local authorities.

        Perception of relevance and utility can also be achieved by relating teaching points to challenging classroom tasks and by presenting them in ways which could facilitate the achievement of the task outcomes desired by the learners. The ‘new’ learning points are not relevant and useful because they will help the learners to achieve longterm academic or career objectives, but because they could help the learners to achieve short-term task objectives now. Of course, this only works if the tasks are begun first and the teaching is then provided in response to discovered needs. This is much more difficult for the materials writer than the conventional approach of teaching a predetermined point first and then getting the learners to practise and then produce it.