IS IT POSSIBLE TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL REALITY? PRESENTING ALTERNATIVE METHODS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEVELOPED WITH THE PARTICIPATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS FROM CEARÁ

Abstract

The English language is already part of the daily life of Brazilian children and young adolescents when they interact with social networks, software, games, cinema, music, radio, podcast, TV and other universes of communication with technological language. Going shopping at the supermarket, for example, consists of constant eye contact with the English language. However, when it comes to teaching and learning English in public schools, teachers and students encounter many material and didactic difficulties. Is it possible to learn the English language in a reality where most public schools do not have an English laboratory and/or tools such as TV, audio and internet for everyone? To answer this question, alternative methodologies for teaching and learning the English language were developed and experienced together with students from the public high school EEM Mariano Martins, located in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil. These methodologies were incubated in 05 different projects with the aim of fostering listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in the context of the student's socioeconomic, environmental and cultural realities. Researchers Kumaravadivelu (2003); Alves et al. (2009); Hook (2013); Bacich and Moran (2018); El Kadri (2020); Guilherme et al. (2022), among others, were important reference bases during the development of this work. To gain access to students' opinions about their experience in the classroom with these methodologies, a questionnaire was applied to a sample of 156 students (1st, 2nd and 3rd years of high school) at EEM Mariano Martins. Data were collected and treated statistically in the Excel program. The results showed that the majority of the sample of students interviewed (83%) think it is important to acquire the English language, as job opportunities and better wages with the acquisition of this tool are much greater. In this sense, traveling outside the country is a goal for an average of 87% of the sample of students interviewed. As for the success of the alternative methodologies experienced by them at school, 87% of the sample of students interviewed stated that they obtained improvements in identifying (seeing) and writing in English, but the difficulty of speaking in English still persists. The barriers that exist to train people to speak a foreign language in public schools, such as the low number of laboratories, notebooks, stereos and internet for everyone, mitigate the success of the work.