Autonomy: a Requirement in the Education of Teachers of Languages for Specific Purposes

Autonomy, seen as a sociocognitive competence to think and act through one’s own resources, is an essential requirement in the education of teachers of languages for specific purposes, due to the typical characteristics of the approach. The building-up of autonomy comprises several inter-related factors: awareness raising, critical reflection, appropriation of theoretical and methodological knowledge, decision making, and self-management of the knowledge presupposed in the competence of teaching languages for specific purposes. Within this context, knowledge appropriation and construction emerge as factors with a strong impact on the education of the autonomous teacher, a teacher who is able to create and implement courses of study and subjects for specific purposes

Writing for life: materials might make a difference

This paper aims at identifying in two English textbooks, High Up (2013) and Freeway (2010), suggested by the Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD), which activities have greater potential to promote writing abilities for communication. To achieve such objective, both books were analyzed and compared taking into consideration the conceptions of language, text genres, teaching sequence, and writing as a process in English as an additional language. The conclusion of this examination shows that there is a distance between the textbooks authors’ intention of dealing with written language, in an interactionist perspective, and the teaching material. Throughout the article, some suggestions were put forward in order to improve the sequences by adjusting them to the theoretical views of the books. The findings reveal that one of the books explored activities that consider aspects of genre, audience, text purpose, and writing as a proces

A Pedagogical Route for the Reading of the Press Opinion Article

A teaching sequence for the university level, focusing on the press opinion article as a genre, based on genre assumptions (Bakhtin, 1992, Bronckart, 2003) and on teaching sequences (Dolz, Noverraz e Schneuwly, 2004), comprehends the following activities: pre-reading (previous knowledge activation; hypotheses raising); reading (production conditions; constitution of text meaning; reading strategies); post-reading (relationships between text and reality; critical awareness). These were followed by chain genres production (press opinion article and related genres), promoting interaction among text, reader and writer, complemented by metacognitive reflection. Applied to two groups of freshmen, the sequence showed statistically significant results in the development of reading competence