A formação do professor de inglês para fins específicos

Abstract

This dissertation deals with education of English Teachers for Specific Purposes, who act in this area in higher education courses and in professional and technological courses in Rio Grande do Sul. The main goal was to contribute to teachers’ continued education throughout the investigation of what their difficulties, challenges, conquests and fruitful experiences in this area of actuation are, and its specific objectives were: to investigate if Brazilian Federal Universities’ Language courses (Portuguese/English or only English) offer didactic subjects that enable teachers to teach English for Specific Purposes; to identify and to analyze the difficulties and challenges found by instrumental English Teachers; to identify curricular, didactic and pedagogical aspects needed to ESP teachers’ continued education; to build curricular, didactic and pedagogical guidelines for a Specialization Course (Lato Sensu) in Teaching English for Specific Purposes in order to enhance the teachers’ pedagogical knowledge to act with these subjects; and to contribute to the discussion and proposition of curricula to English for Specific Purposes (ESP) teachers’ formation. This is a qualitative research, which used documentary and bibliographic procedures, and an online questionnaire to collect data from the empirical research with fifty-seven teachers. To analyze these data, the elaboration of categories inspired by Bardin’s (1977) Content Analysis and the elaboration of graphs and tables were the most adequate systematic. The research confirmed the hypothesis of lack of teacher training courses for teaching English for specific purposes, and the results reinforce the importance of having specific training for teachers who work in this area, once only seventeen participants realized ESP theoretical and practical subjects. Through the curricular, didactic and pedagogical guidelines elaborated based on the obtained answers, new proposals of teacher formation can be thought, trying to mitigate the difficulties of these professionals.