Tem professor na rede: o uso do Facebook para trabalho com a língua/linguagem.

Abstract

There is a teacher on the network: the use of Facebook to work with language. Social network websites, socially consolidated as socio-interactive spaces, allow not only the effectiveness of interactive activities, but also the appearance and consolidation of legitimate social practices that are necessarily pervaded by the use of multiple languages. Among these recent and particular socio-interactive practices, one of them caught our attention and instigated us to develop this research: the practices of Portuguese teachers on Facebook. Recalling the recent insertion of these professionals in these environments, our general objective is to investigate how teachers use Facebook in regard to their teaching object (tongue/language). For such, we aimed to describe and interpret this doing by systematically observing their publications, as well as analyzing publications from pages aimed to this public, in the period comprehended between December 2012 and May 2013, and also interpreting, via the verbal interaction process made possible during the interviews, what these professionals‟ discursive enunciations reveal about their use of Facebook. This way, we defined the two questions of this research: 1) What do Portuguese teachers do on the network regarding their teaching object (tongue/language)? 2) What do the teachers‟ discursive enunciations reveal about their use of Facebook? From the observation, categorization and triage of the first part of our corpus, we established three analysis categories: a) the network as a grammar space, b) the network as a social interaction space, and c) the network as an affective interaction space. The second phase of this research, whose corpus constitutes of transcribed pieces from audio recordings, brought us to two discourse possibilities that reveal: a) acknowledgment of the network‟s pedagogical potential, and b) resistance to using the network. For a theoretical foundation compatible with the complexity and multiple facets of our study object, the theoretic-methodological works most relevant for this investigation were those that had a socio-historic perspective, comprising the enunciative and discursive language features of Bakhtin/Volochinov (1997 [1929]), focusing the verbal interaction, as well as searching for aid in similar areas such as Pedagogy and Communication, bringing to the discussion postulates from authors such as Pozo (2002), Recuero (2009), Demo (2009), Tardif and Lessard (2009), Kirkpatrick (2011), among others. In regard to the first research question, we noticed that teachers predominantly use Facebook in its more inherent and genuine form: socially interacting, which showcases the network‟s social function, via which teachers intertwine in social relationships both with their colleagues and their students. Regarding the second question, we observed that the teachers‟ discursive enunciations fluctuate between acknowledging the adoption of the social network in the school environment, and resisting the implementation of an effective work with language, claiming that they don‟t have the proper training, that the network distances the students from school themes that need to be taught, and that they prefer to keep some distance between their public and private lives, maintaining, thus, all aspects of their privacy.