English for everybody and everywhere: conexões e convergências

Abstract

The smartphones have become a vital part of human life, their great expansion and modernization make people connect in cyberspace from the moment they wake up until the time they go to sleep. Taking this into account, the educational processes can create strategies so that this everyday use of smartphones can be converted, at least in parts, into Learning activities. This dissertation, called English for Everybody and Everywhere: Connections and Convergences, linked to the research line Language: Linguistic, Cultural and Teaching Practices in the Master of Art from the State University of the West of Paraná (UNIOESTE), proposes the use of four smartphone applications, Let's Learn English, Duolingo, LyTrans English, and WhatsApp, in the process of English Language Learning, aiming to approach learning to the reality of 21st century students, in order to provide a more creative, interactive and dynamic environment in the classroom, in a process of convergence that establishes connections between students, teachers, cyberspace and their knowledge. This study is an action research with a qualitative approach, in which the researcher assumed the role of teacher, developing practical activities in the applications for smartphone, mentioned above, with a group of high school students from a public school in the city of Cascavel - PR. At the end of the activities with the applications in the school, the research used as data generation, besides the reflections on the practice, an interview with the regent teacher of the selected class, who participated as a listener of all the classes, a diagnostic questionnaire with the students involved and a journal, containing all the observations and impressions of the practice developed with the students. With the research, we sought to verify the possibility of smartphones being used as another way to access information that through integration and interactivity should become an additional knowledge in the students' lives. In the activities developed in the classroom with the selected group, we based ourselves on all the theoretical contribution described in the initial part of the text, and we based on concepts and theories of renowned authors in the area, such as: the Learning of Assmann (1999) and Dal Molin (2003); the importance of planning activities based on the advances of cyberspace and cyberculture, as Lévy points out (1999) and the influences of the culture of convergence in this scenario, according to Jenkins (2009); the characteristics of a rhizomatic teaching that creates maps and escape from from the tree models and decals, based on the theory of Deleuze and Guattari (1995); the new relations with knowledge that emerge from the age of cyberspace, with a collective intelligence and a teacher who passes from the only holder of the knowledge to animator and supervisor of this intelligence, in a process of flipped learning, based on the studies of Lévy (1998b), Moran (2015), Prensky (2001) and others; the advantages that mobile learning can bring both within the classroom and beyond the school environment, following UNESCO (2014), Motter (2013), Souza (2012) among other authors who collaborated for the present study.