The speeches of public-school English teachers on the official documents

enunciative discourse analysis of a (in)tense dialogue

Abstract

The present article presents a survey of the studies in the English Language teaching and learning field that addressed the issue of official documents in relation to the practice of the English teachers in public schools, bringing their speeches out. In order to analyze how the speeches of the official documents are being appropriated by English teachers, according to research in the field, this work is theoretically based on the perspective of the subject’s social and discursive formation, based on the Bakhtinian theory related to the appropriation of discourses. As the analysis of teachers’ statements indicates, the documents do not have direct adherence to the concrete context of teaching practice, they are understood by teachers as alien to their reality and inefficient in the conjunction in which they work. The official speeches are taken by the teachers as an authoritative word, which refers to a high sphere, far from the sphere of familiar contact (BAKHTIN, 2010). As observed, the asymmetry between the speeches of official documents and the speeches of teachers related to their practice tends to continue due to the distance from the teachers and the instances of planning and organization of classes, the choice of material and personalized content for their students.