Challenges faced by Brazilian university professors about teaching process of orality in Portuguese teacher training

Abstract

Teacher training programs in Brazil have been changing over the years due to accomplishments in Education Sciences and also because of official policies that enforce and outline teaching practices and curricula for undergraduate programs. However, there are still several difficulties faced by professors. For those involved in Portuguese teaching programs, this reality is no different, since working systematically with some topics may be challenging. Including didactic topics of orality as part of the curriculum is one of them. In spite of the fact that the development of orality skills is essential to the process of linguistic education of students in the school, the reflection on the teaching process of orality in teacher training programs seems not to be that obvious. Considering such scenario, this study aims to identify the challenges to be overcome by teacher trainers in order to effectively carry out the debate on teaching and learning of oral texts. For this purpose, professors from two Higher Education Institutions located in the Brazilian northeastern region were interviewed. The data show that the main difficulties are related to the emphasis on specific contents (oral conception, speech-writing relation, speech characteristics, etc.) to the detriment of pedagogical contents such as aspects of didactic transposition, teaching strategies, planning and evaluation. The greatest challenge seems to be to scrutinize the theory-practice relationship.