Busuu como potencial espaço de ensino de inglês como língua estrangeira através de aplicativos

Abstract

Applications can be good alternatives for those who want to learn foreign languages. Busuu, is an application that offers twelve languages with free and paid activities. Because it contains an expressive number of users and offers free activities, Busuu is the universe of analysis of this study while the corpus is composed of free and paid activities available in the English language course. With this study it was possible to explore the application regarding research in the area of teaching and learning English language as well as to develop a more comprehensive and critical view of language, such as teaching and learning English in this virtual space and in what way the interaction is established between users. The research was conducted taking into account the resumption of the main methods of teaching languages throughout history, from method to post method, with the aim of understanding how language teaching happened over time. Afterwards, we mobilized the Theory of Activity, which underlies our work. Finally, we talk about computer-mediated language learning (CALL), an area that investigates the impact of computers on language teaching and learning. The main purpose of the study was to identify, describe and analyze how Busuu proposes to teach English to its users, taking into account its contents and the methodology adopted to teach the language to the users. For this, a detailed description of the application as well as the corpus was performed. Subsequently, for the purposes of analysis, three categories were established. The results indicate that Busuu adopts a functional view of language, not prioritizing only its form. In addition, it uses the lexical approach predominantly during the teaching and learning process of English language and some characteristics of the communicative approach. Regarding the interaction between users, this is limited to correction of exercises, that is, there is no closer relationship between the members of the application. Finally, it was found that oral ability has potential to be developed in Busuu, however, it is not. As a suggestion for improvement, we propose interaction activities as in the Teletandem project (TELLES, 2006).