WHAT TEACHERS SAY WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Findings
Cognitive elements
Beliefs about EFL teaching/learning in Brazil
Among the “emergent themes”, some representations of teaching and learning, of public schools in Brazil and of private EFL courses in Brazil were identified in the STs’ utterances. A recurrent theme in the discussions is the notion that one of the main obstacles to applying DA in the classroom has to do with the impositions of a grammatical syllabus:
...because we also have that school syllabus, which we have to teach, that grammar...
And, exactly because of a very tight syllabus to be followed, which is the greatest obstacle, perhaps even greater than time constraints, because of this tight syllabus we have to follow...
The constraints imposed are not limited to the syllabus they must follow, as in the previous fragment, but include also the textbooks that they are supposed to use, as well as the pedagogical approach:
Besides, I have a syllabus to follow and I am obliged to use the material the school requires me to
... my [teaching] time is limited, I am obliged to use that material.
I have to follow not only the same content as they [other teachers] do, but also more or less the same approach; otherwise, the grades are very low.
The use of signals of the notion of duty in association with “syllabus” and “material” clearly point to external factors which prevent teachers from using discourse-oriented teaching and which seem to be perceived as institutional obstacles or even as threats to practitioners’ identities as professionals. In this respect, it is worth noting that I (standing for the speaker) and we (standing for teachers in general) often occur in the same fragment displaying a metonymic relationship of part/whole:
So, what I have been trying to pass on to them is really textual cohesion, that’s what I manage to do with my students. Why? Because we work for a language school, I mean, with a specific pedagogic material and real time constraints; so I can’t create anything, we end up following the textbook syllabus the way it is.
That’s why I said something can be done, but to a certain extent. There’s no way we can go deeper [into this] because of the students’ level, their knowledge.
In these examples, the smooth shift from I to we might signal that the individual and the group share the same frame of reference — that is, although voiced by the individual, these are the obstacles that bear on the work of a community, virtually impairing changes in teaching practices.
