Desenvolvimento de competências de professores de língua inglesa por meio de diários dialogados de aprendizagem

Abstract

English language teaching demands preparation of critical and reflective professionals capable of developing a teaching practice that could enhance the language learning process. For this reason, it is necessary that Teacher Education Courses provide them opportunities for building competences to improve the quality of their work in many different educational contexts. This research aims at presenting an English Teacher Preparation Course of a Public University in which recent changes in the curriculum were made based on new demands from the Brazilian Ministry of Education for Teacher Education Programs. Focusing on developing prospective teacher s linguistic competence through theoretical and professional competences, reflections about language learning process were included since the first semesters of the course. To favor both building and development of these competences in future English teachers, dialogue journals were used in order to provide reflections about English language learning and teaching and also to offer theory and practice in a coherent manner as hold by Reflective Teaching. Benefits of the use of dialogue journals described in this study reveal that these personal logs can cater to continuous learning that many other resources might not provide, since teacher candidates can use their previous language learning experiences as language learners to understand their own process, as well as that of their future students. Results indicate that dialogue journals are meaningful tools to make future teachers integrate new information from theory in the course content to their background knowledge, enabling the development of linguistic, theoretical and professional competences. It is possible to suggest that keeping this ongoing written dialogue with future teachers is relevant because it is by means of reflection and introspection required in this task that they can be stimulated to engage in critical thinking to foster continuous professional growth.