Computers in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language: Access to the Diversity of Textual Genres and Language Skills

In the area of language teaching both language skills and textual genres can be worked with simultaneously (thus responding to the Brazilian Curricular Parameters and to the trends in contemporary education, which emphasize contextualized teaching) by means of computers. Computers can make the teaching process dynamic and rich, since they enable the access to the foreign language through virtual environments, which creates a larger number of learning contexts, with all their specific vocabulary and linguistic features in real communication. This study focuses on possible applications of this kind of approach. The computer online is a resource of diverse textual genres and can be an important tool in the language classroom as well as an access to authentic material produced in contextualized practice close to real-life communication. On the other hand, all these materials must be appropriately used without ever worshipping the technology as if it were a miraculous solution. After all, the professional pedagogic skills of the teacher should never be forgotten or taken for granted. In this study, a series of interviews with teachers was carried out – both with Brazilian teachers of the public sector (basic education) and language institutes (private English courses) as well as teacher trainers (university professors), in order to verify if the teachers were prepared to work with informatics in teaching practices, and check the professionals’ views on the subject. The ideas of Maingueneau and Marcuschi about textual genres are a theoretical base in this work, besides the concept of cognitive economy. The text and its typology are focused here as the basic material for teaching English, through digital technologies and hypermedia. The study is also based on Sharma and Barrett’s notion of blended learning as a balanced combination of technological resources and traditional practices in the classroom. Thus, this is an attempt to investigate the relevance of information and communication technologies in the education and professional practice of English teachers in Brazil in the context of the 21 century.