TU ERES RESPONSABLE POR AQUELLO QUE CAUTIVAS : UMA ANÁLISE DA MULTIMODALIDADE EM PRODUÇÕES DE ALUNOS DE 8ª SÉRIE EM ESPANHOL COMO LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA

Abstract

Foreign language teaching in public schools in Brazil needs deep changes for the learning-teaching process to be more effective. Usually, students leave school after studying the foreign language for four years without sufficient knowledge to communicate in the language. This indicates that something needs revising and updating. Communication Pedagogy can offer an important contribution for education today. The need for the outside world to enter the classroom, including the new technologies, is urgent. Through these technologies, textual patterns change, becoming smaller, and resorting to plenty of images. These new texts are not present in the vast majority of Brazilian public schools, which, in the case of foreign languages, prefer to use long texts, most of the time without images. Even when images are present they are used as illustrations only, not actively worked on. As a result of Communication Pedagogy, with an emphasis on Multimodality, we resort to a visual grammar perspective to explain the new textual patterns that circulate in our society. It is from this perspective that we designed a project asking groups of students from public schools in Pelotas, Southern Brazil, to produce multimodal texts. The students created booklets after reading Little Prince and watching the movie based on the book. These booklets were then analyzed in the light visual grammar, as proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen. Our initial hypothesis that students knew how to use multimodal structures in their productions, even if intuitively, was confirmed. Besides that, students also showed a high level of autonomy and motivation, consistent with their involvement in the tasks that were proposed