Acima de tudo eu sou professora, educadora, e posso mostrar para eles que eu faço com muito amor": um estudo das representações do professor de inglês sobre seu fazer por meio do Sistema da Avaliatividade

Abstract

This research aims at investigating the representations of teachers of English from a private language course in Rio when talking about their profession and other issues related to the teaching of this language in order to identify the way the discourse of these teachers builds their identities. We intend to point out how identity traits of these professionals are built and negotiated so as to understand the way they see themselves and construct the figure of a good teacher. Our analysis is grounded on The Language of Evaluation - Appraisal Theory proposed by Martin & White (2005), whose principals are related to the Interpersonal Function from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday, 2004), as well as on some important notions from Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 20003), particularly those regarding its concepts of language, discourse and their relation with social practices. The conception of representation in this dissertation is based on Minayo (1994) and Fairclough (2003), while the notion of identity is based on Fairclough (2003) and Hall (2000). As we recognize identities as being unstable, mutable, multi-faceted and unfinished, we understand that identities are not only represented in discourse but also constructed by it. The analyzed corpus consists of the transcription of a discussion in which 8 teachers of English took part and was collected by means of Focus Group technique. 20 passages of the whole discussion were selected to be analyzed and were gathered in three different themes: a) The native teacher / Experience abroad; b) Being a teacher of English / The value of the profession; and c) The way I see myself as a teacher of English. We analyzed evaluations belonging to the subtypes Affect and Engagement. The results showed that this group of professionals preferably uses negative evaluations of Judgement Capacity when talking about the native teacher of English, positive evaluations of Judgement Capacity and Tenacity when it comes to the non-native English teacher and, notably, positive evaluations of Affect when referring to their profession and their daily practice. In addition to other recurring items, these results point to a profile of a good English teacher in the participants perspective