Refletindo criticamente sobre as necessidades do aluno de inglês instrumental à luz da condição pós-método

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes is the approach that supports the work done at the federal institute where I teach. Its primary premise is the process of teaching based on a needs analysis, i.e., everything that is taught/learned is in alignment with what learners need in their academic and professional environment. Because of myths and dogmas rooted over the decades, however, the approach became exclusively the teaching of reading and originated distortions from the original proposal. The study starts with the following research question: What do the students that participate in this research see as a priority in their learning of English in school? Other questions arose after dealing with the data: Why do students want to learn something and the school provide something else?; What is missing in the classroom to minimize the gap between the desire of the participant students and what the school provides?; and, What can we, teachers, do in relation to pedagogical proposals to fill this gap, in light of the collected data and the literature review? I then investigate the opinion of 65 apprentices in the 3rd year of high school, through questionnaires and a focal group interview with 5 participants, questioning what they see as a priority in learning English in school and then I reflect on pedagogical practices that could meet the needs identified by the participants. In the spirit of the (in)disciplinary Applied Linguistics and within a qualitative paradigm, the analysis of the responses was based on recurrent themes in the responses to the questions in the questionnaire and participation in the focus group. Themes that recurred frequently formed categories that were the basis for the discussion. I selected two questions for analysis: the question (9) "how do you expect the English teaching to be in high school?" and (10) "what language skills would you like to develop?" because of its direct relationship with the goal of this research. The category that emerged from the most recurrent students utterances was "oral communication" in a total of 62 entries. Another eight categories emerged from the data. I considered the quantity of 17 entries "high frequency", and therefore categorical. From these results, I argue in this paper that the student s voice (that screams urgency in learning oral communication) to be heard in this process, and that a new post-methodological pedagogy is implemented in the teaching and learning of languages in high/technical schools.