Formas de manifestação de imperialismo linguístico em materiais didáticos de Língua Inglesa.

Abstract

The spread of the English language has reached significant dimensions and remarkable milestones, driven primarily by the advance of globalization. Among the many colonial languages, English gained prominence due to its economic, military, and cultural relevance, especially in the postcolonial period. Furthermore, the rise of the United States as a hegemonic power decisively contributed to the consolidation of English as the dominant language on the global stage (Crystal, 2012). However, the massive dissemination of this language has drawn the attention of scholars and researchers in Applied Linguistics to the social, political, cultural, and, above all, educational implications of this reality, since the expansion of English is not limited to the language itself, but also involves the promotion of discourses that attribute superiority to the English language and Anglo-American culture (Pennycook, 1994), resulting in forms of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992). In this context, teaching materials can operate as instruments for sustaining this imperialism. Considering this, we formulated the research question: How does linguistic imperialism manifest itself in English language teaching materials? From this, we established the general objective: To understand how linguistic imperialism manifests itself in English language teaching materials. To achieve this, we defined the following specific objectives: To investigate how the English language is represented in English language teaching materials; To examine representations of English speakers in these materials. This is a qualitative study of an interpretivist and critical nature, developed through a documentary analysis of English language teaching materials. For its theoretical and methodological framework, the study draws on Critical Applied Linguistics to discuss English teaching and its historical relations with colonialism and imperialism, and employs Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with a focus on the ideational metafunction, to identify how lexico-grammatical choices (processes, participants, and circumstances) construct meanings about the English language and its speakers. The selected corpus consists of the books English File (4th edition), from Oxford University Press, and English Vibes for Brazilian Learners (FTD, 2020) and instructional videos published on YouTube, some produced by a Brazilian teacher and others by an American teacher. The definition of this corpus was based on data obtained through a questionnaire applied to teachers from the 10th Regional Education Office of Paraíba State Department of Education. The materials were selected based on the frequency with which they were mentioned by the teachers and the analytical potential they present for the analysis proposed in this research. The results indicate that, in foreign-produced materials, linguistic imperialism manifests itself explicitly through the cultural centrality of the United States and the United Kingdom, the representation of the native speaker as the legitimate model, and the association between English, prestige, and mobility. In nationally produced materials, this process operates in a more subtle way: although there is greater visibility of Brazilian identities, fostered by the guidelines of the National Textbook and Teaching Materials Program (PNLD), the local context is often mediated by external references, keeping the non-native speaker in a symbolically peripheral position and reproducing hierarchies typical of linguistic imperialism, albeit permeated by considerable tensions.This study is expected to contribute to critical reflection on the production and use of English language teaching materials and, consequently, foster pedagogical practices that are more sensitive to linguistic and cultural diversity and to the legitimation of different voices and varieties.