Americanah: a literatura africana no ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira.

Abstract

Nowadays, studies have been developed about the necessity of non-dissociation of the literature in the scope of the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages, since the literary text has linguistic and cultural characteristics, which can favor the learning of the language more pleasantly. When we think of English-language literature, our thinking goes to American or British literature. However, this work seeks to go beyond the Anglo-American axis, in a perspective of pluralizing English teaching, trying to take other literatures and cultures into the classroom. For this, we chose the novel Americanah, by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as the object of study, in order to break with the stereotypes built by the West in relation to Africa. This research is justified, therefore, by working language and literature, in addition to bringing African culture to English classroom and contributing to critical education of students, expanding their knowledge of the world. The ideas of Bakhtin (2006) and Jakobson (2007) will subsidize the studies about the contributions of the literary text in English teaching, besides some researchers like Pinheiro-Mariz (2007), Lazar (1994), Corchs (2006), Sivasubramaniam (2006), who also discuss the importance of literature in the classroom. We will observe also the contributions of Hall (2003), Homi Bhabha (2010) and Woodward (2007), which establish a broad discussion about diaspora, identity and cultural differences in the postcolonial context. The main goal of this research is to reflect on the conjuncture of the teaching of the English Language in a perspective of non-dissociation between language and literature, giving focus to African culture / literature, from the reading of the novel Americanah. The subjects of present research are students in a third grade class of a public high school, Liceu Dr. José Gondim, localized in Iguatu’s city, Ceará. Most of the students had not in touch with African literature yet, especially in English class. We could observe that the reading of the novel contributed to increase the students' linguistic and cultural knowledge of the English language, as well as contributing to a critical view on cultural issues related to the African continent.