Formação de professores de Língua Inglesa: crenças docentes e discentes acerca do Bom Professor

Abstract

The aim to search for an ideal definition of a teacher dates from the genesis of the teaching profession. Due to its relevance, this issue keeps being focus of debate and reformulation. That can be justified by the fact that educational needs are transformed historically and socially and teacher identity is created and recreated through experiences lived by the professional, their choices concerning education and reflection upon the practice. This study aims to identify which knowledge and abilities are essential to a good EFL teacher according to the students and tutor s beliefs. This study is characterized as a qualitative case study focused on understanding the beliefs of student-teachers and university tutors concerning what it takes in terms of knowledge and competence to be a good teacher. The scenario investigated was the Letters course in a private. The data was collected through semi-structured interviews which inquired about what kind of knowledge, ability or competence is needed in order to educate properly an English teacher. Discourse Analysis supported this research by offering theoretical basis to analyze the data collected through the interviews. The analysis revealed, among other aspects, students lack of interest and information about the course. It has shown that taking private English Language courses, in addition to living and studying in one English speaking country, is considered as a good way of educating ESL teachers. This belief comes from their understanding that linguistic competence in the target language is an essential requirement to an English teacher. The tutors interviews have shown similar beliefs towards the importance of being fluent in English, also about the necessity of taking part in an exchange program abroad. In short, it was possible to find out in both discourses the feeling of dissatisfaction concerning the quality of education provided to these future teachers; that was captured from both students and tutors interviews. There is a lack of dialogue and synchrony from both parts which results in problems to the education of these students. By confronting the discourses exposed in the official documents from Ministry of Education and those from the university it was possible to realize that they are in consonance. Although, when contrasting the discourse in the interviews to those documents, it was possible to observe that there is a huge gap between them. Due to this fact, small isolated changes as increasing the number of hours, are not capable of solving the situation. Extensive and engaged debates on the problem, based on the causes already exposed in this study and in previous researches, may be able to promote relevant changes in the educational scenario. The main contribution expected by this research is to promote reflection among university tutors as well students in order to indicate ways to improve the process of English teachers education.