Desenvolvimento das habilidades orais e escritas em língua estrangeira por professores de inglês em formação nas modalidades presencial e à distância

Abstract

Based on the Theory of Information Processing, this longitudinal study compared the development of oral and written skills of students in ESL Teaching Certificate Programs in two different learning environments – distance learning and on-site learning. The quali-quantitative analysis of the students’ oral and written skills during four semesters aimed at determining if the prospective teachers, from the two different learning environments, developed oral and written skills at similar levels, and which learning environment proved more effective for developing one or another type of language skill. The participants were students from the first semester of two ESL Teaching Certificate Programs at the Federal University of Ceará - five students in the distance program and seven in the on-site program. The following three instruments were used to collect data from the participants during four semesters: a) a socio-economic questionnaire, which surveyed their educational, economic and social environment, as well as their language learning background; b) two complete TOEFL iBT tests, applied in the first and in the fourth semesters, as pre- and post-tests; and c) written and oral tasks in each of the four semesters, analyzed for: fluency (number of words divided by time), lexical and syntactic accuracy (wrong words divided by produced words and number of correct sentences divided by number of independent sentences, respectively), and lexical and syntactic complexity (number of different words divided by number of words produced and number of individual sentences divided by number of analysis units, respectively). Data were analyzed using ANOVA tests to investigate three variables: Group, Time and the Interaction between Group and Time. Results indicate that both groups developed listening, reading and writing skills at similar levels in a period of four-semesters. However, the on-site group developed oral production skills at a higher level than the distance learning group. As for fluency, accuracy and complexity, it was observed that the variable Time influenced the participants from the two groups in three parameters – fluency, sentence accuracy and sentence complexity. The variable Group had an effect on the same parameters, but with a significant difference for the on-site group. The interaction between Group and Time did not show any significance level that could account for the superiority of one learning environment over another in any of the three analyzed parameters. In the written tasks, the variable Time demonstrated significant development of all the participants in all the analyzed parameters. The variable Group had a significant positive effect on lexical and sentence accuracy for the on-site group. The interaction between Group and Time did not show any significant difference between the groups that could indicate that one learning environment is more effective than the other in the long run. Overall, the results of this research demystify the impossibility of learning a second language in a distance learning environment, since they indicate that both groups increased levels of language development.