Teachers' Discourse on English Language Teaching: Faces of Resistance and Neo-colonialism

Abstract

This work analyzes discursive representations within Tocantinian teachers’ enunciations regarding themselves and the exercise of their teaching role, as well as English teaching-learning and its insertion in school. Considering our incursion through French Discourse Analysis we employ conceptions of forgetting, subjecting, ideological and discursive formations, according to Michel Pêcheux. In addition, we use analytical-methodological procedures by Eni Orlandi. Our investigation indicates that prestige and social status, often assigned to English language (EL), offer significant space to the ideas of struggle and suffering, whereas the sense of accomplishment, self-fulfillment and financial gains tend to be silenced. Teachers find the reasons for EL teaching through a presumed intellectual superiority, a linguistic utilitarianism and the economic system, while averting this same teaching from a propaedeutic function. Furthermore, a “unifying” discourse, which is a component of Brazilian imaginary, projects teachers as constant sufferers and strugglers. There is also a strong tendency, by teachers, towards reproducing learners’ discourse about EL as a beautiful and difficult language. This image contrasts with an undervalued and underestimated position that teachers believe is assigned to EL in the school curriculum.