O uso de aplicativos móveis para o ensino de leitura em língua inglesa : uma experiência com alunos concluintes do nono ano do ensino fundamental público.

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to make use of applications called “Madefire and Ewa” that present dynamic and ludic texts in English, specifically through volunteers who are graduates from the 9th grade of elementary school II in public schools in the city of Rio de Janeiro, with the purpose to verify if and how the mentioned applications can help on the comprehension of texts in English and on the students’ motivation. According to the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) (BRASIL, 2017) it is essential that the teacher presents methodological alternatives in the classroom, avoiding a technical approach and focusing more on the discursive use of language, with varied materials that meet the different needs of their school and social context, such as digital media. The main objective is to find out whether applications that focus on reading in English might contribute to the process of developing the ability to read in a foreign language for students who are about to enter high school. Another premise of the research is to identify the teacher's role as a facilitator with regard to the implementation of pedagogical activities with such devices, to observe if the use of the mobile device in English classes promotes more interest and engagement to the students (PEREIRA,2006) and to verify whether digital reading, along with the concept of multimodality (DIONÍSIO, 2005), brings greater involvement of the learner when compared to conventional reading, which would be the specific objectives of the work. Furthermore, it aimed to verify how this dynamic can be profitable for the student, in the development of reading in English, and for the teacher himself, who can make use of this technological resource as a tool for foreign language teaching. For that, the qualitative methodological approach will be implemented for the analysis of the generated data, due to a gradual construction of a theoretical framework on the studied social phenomenon (GODOY,1995), and the research technique used was the action-research (THIOLLENT, 2011), because it seeks to solve social and educational problems raised in the context of the public education system, such as the lack of wireless internet access for the students, the teachers’ struggle to cope with students who overuse their cellphones for non-educational purposes, the lack of interest of students in foreign language classes and the lack of legislative support for the use of the mobile devices in the classroom. Information concerning the data gathered in the research will be presented to point out the difficulty of learning a foreign language by the ones who study in the Brazilian public education system, who end up graduating without having developed properly the reading ability in English. The proposal was to show that m-learning – a pedagogical concept based on the use of cellphones at schools for educational purposes – may be useful for both the English language teacher, when it comes to dynamism and attractiveness of classes, and the student, when it comes to motivation and the improvement in the reading of small texts written in the target language mentioned above.