GENRE PEDAGOGY IN THE TEACHING/LEARNING OF ENGLISH AS AN ADDITIONAL LANGUAGE: NEGOTIATING ANXIETY RELATED TO WRITTEN PRODUCTION
Teaching Cycle; Genre Pedagogy; Sydney School; Description; Anxiety.
This work, which is characterized as action research (TRIPP, 2005), aims to investigate the effect of the implementation of the Teaching Cycle developed by Rose and Martin (2012) and Rose (2015) in the teaching/ learning of the written comprehension and production students of English as an Additional Language (EAL) in a private school in Natal, RN, as part of a bilingual program. This research gauges the effects of the use of the Teaching Cycle (ROSE; MARTIN, 2012; ROSE, 2015) specifically related to the anxiety of students in performing activities of written production, and also in specific categories – generic, discursive and grammatical. The research is based on a theoretical framework that includes Krashen’s affective filter concept (1981, 1982), the premises of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004, 2014) and of followers of the Sydney School, the Theory of Genre and Register (TGR) (MARTIN; ROSE, 2008; 2012) originating from SFL, and on Genre Pedagogy developed from the concepts of TGR (MARTIN; ROSE, 2008; 2012), as well as on works implemented internationally from the perspective of TGR and the Sydney School. It is also based on the explicit teaching of Bernstein (1975). In accordance with the methods of action research, faced with the problem – anxiety in written production in the context of EAL – we elaborated a systematic pedagogical intervention based on the Teaching Cycle (ROSE, 2015) of a written production – description – of the painting Christina’s world (Andrew Wyeth, 1948). We appplied a pre and post program with SLWAI (CHENG, 2004) and CLWAI (REZAEI; JAFARI, 2014) questionnaires to measure the anxiety of the students before and after the pedagogical intervention. We analyzed the writing having been evaluated using the generic, discursive, and grammatical categories of the Teaching Cycle (ROSE, 2015). Data generated by the two instruments, applied to the 19 students who participated in the month-long pedagogical intervention, were correlated. Results indicate changes in the scores of the written production based on the instrument of evaluation, and changes, although not statistically significant, on the level of anxiety. Future work may include a longer study and the use of other genres and text types.