Questão de Inglês — Ensino da Língua Estrangeira Inglesa — COPEVE-UFAL 2026
InglêsEnsino da Língua Estrangeira Inglesa
- Código
- qg664115
- Banca
- COPEVE-UFAL
- Órgão
- IFAL
- Ano
- 2026
- Nível
- Superior
- Cargo
- Professor EBTT - Língua Inglesa
Attitudes to classroom conversation and casual chat have varied over the years. In the heyday of audiolingualism, one writer, Louis Alexander, warned that the traditional conversation lesson is of no value at all if the student is not ready for it. The student must first be trained to use patterns in carefully graded aural-oral drills. Only in this way will he finally learn to speak.The chat stage of the lesson, if it occurred at all, was simply there as a curtain raiser to the main event – the controlled practice of sentence patterns. Until recently, one London language school was still advising its students that the teacher and the student must not chat during the lesson. They must only ask and answer the questions in the book. Chatting is a waste of time. Such a view sits uncomfortably with the finding that conversation, i.e. casual talk that is primarily interpersonal, is by far the most common and the most widespread function of speaking. Moreover, there is a school of thought that argues that, in L1 acquisition, the development of conversational skills precedes the development of language itself. As Evelyn Hatch put it, language learning evolves out oflearning how to carry on conversations, i.e. out of learning how to communicate. By extension, it has been argued that conversation in English as second or foreign language is not the result of language learning, but it is the site where learning occurs. lt is also, of course, a fact that many language learners feel that their most urgent need is to develop conversational competence, and they regularly choose conversation as their principal objective when answering needs analysis surveys. For this reason, many language schools offer conversation classes as a way of complementing more traditional, grammar-focused, classes. However, these offer a challenge to teachers and course designers since it is difficult to plan or programme something as inherently unstructured and spontaneous as casual conversation. As one writer puts it, genuine conversational interactions cannot be the outcome of planned lesson agendas, they have to emerge - and so, by definition, cannot be planned. One way that teachers get round this is to organize conversation classes around a set of themes. Ideally, these should be negotiated with the learners in advance, through the use of a questionnaire or by means of a consensus debate. Themerelated texts can be used to trigger conversation, either in open class or in groups. Or individual students take turns to make a short presentation on the pre-selected topic, which is then followed by open discussion. Pre-planned lesson content can take the form of teaching useful conversational formulas and routines, such as how to open and dose conversations, how to interrupt, change the subject, ask for clarification, and so on.THORNBURY, Scott. How to Teach Speaking. Cambridge: Longman, 2005, pp. 110-1. (Adapted).In this excerpt, the author states that “By extension, it has been argued that conversation in English as second or foreign language is not the result of language learning, but it is the site where learning occurs”.After reading the passage as a whole, choose the best alternative that explains how to cope with this matter.
- AUsing conversation is one of the great challenges in oral practice, because teachers do not know how to control the flow of conversation and consequently teachers avoid at all costs conversation practices in their classrooms.
- BAlthough it is agreed among students that conversation is an essential part of learning English as a foreign language, teaching conversation demands a good deal of preparation as it is hard to control the flow of interaction.
- CAlthough there is a great effort from the part of language English teachers and schools to promote the use of orality in class interactions, there is a general agreement that orality only emerges from contact with natives.
- DIt is widely accepted that conversation in foreign language classes is an important part of oral practice, but this perspective is not completely regarded as important by teachers and by most language students.
- ETo achieve oral fluency in English it is not enough to learn language as it was thought before; nowadays things have changed considerably and no-one else believes that language is solely structure.