Inglês como língua franca: reflexões no contexto de formação inicial de professores de inglês da Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz

Abstract

There is a consensus among English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) scholars that research carried out within the field has already produced enough scholarship to solidly inform English classroom practices (Sifakis; Tsantila, 2019; Dewey; Panero, 2020; Diniz de Figueiredo, Siqueira, 2021). As ELF researchers also note, the context of teacher education is a privileged locus for exploring possibilities to destabilize established beliefs in the area of English language teaching (ELT) (Gimenez; El Kadri; Calvo, 2018). In view of this, the study presented here had as general objective to investigate the meanings of ELF in the web of relationships that circulate in the context of Portuguese/English teacher education course at the State University of Santa Cruz (UESC), in the south of Bahia, tracking the possible limits and potentialities of ELF found by student-teachers in the exercise of translating their perceptions of ELF into their future classroom practices. In the theoretical framework of the study, Kumaravadivelu’s (2003, 2006, 2012, 2016) reflections on the coloniality of English and the processes of marginalization and self-marginalization of ELT coloniality were taken up. To expand these reflections, contributions from decolonial studies (Castro-Gómez; Duboc; Menezes de Souza, 2021; Menezes de Souza, 2019a, 2019b, 2021; Mignolo, 2010; Mignolo; Wash, 2018) and Epistemologies of the South (Sousa Santos 2007, 2018) were brought to the theorization of language in Applied Linguistics ((Makoni; Pennycook, 2007; Pennycook; Makoni, 2020; Menezes de Souza, 2019c; Rajagopalan, 2019, 2020). Regarding the ELF area, the study is mainly based on the most recent Brazilian academic production on ELF, which has been called ELF feito no Brasil (Duboc; 2018, 2019; Duboc; Siqueira, 2020; Jordão; Marques, 2018; Jordão, 2019a, 2019b, 2023; Rosa; Duboc, 2022). The study was an ethnographic and had the collaboration of five professors and twelve student-teachers. Data were generated through class observations of three curricular components: (1) Supervised English Language Practicum I and (2) Methodology of English Language and Literatures II; and Supervised English Language Practicum II. In addition to class observations, questionnaires were administered, and semi-structured interviews were carried out with the participants. The investigation made it possible to infer that, in the context of English teacher education at UESC, the contact of student-teachers with ELF studies depends on the initiative of professors who recognize the importance of these studies for reflections on the role of English in the world scenario as well as to rethink English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and the native speaker model aimed at inner circle countries. Based on the data generated, it was also possible to verify the presence of conflicts regarding the understanding of what ELF is, since while ELF was seen as a use of English in certain contexts, there was also reference to ELF as a specific variety. Regarding the integration of ELF premises into EFL classroom practices, student-teachers demonstrated different levels of perception of what such integration entailed, being evident the direct relationship between the ELF perspective and an intercultural and critical perspective on the part of some of the student-teachers.