Desenvolvimento da competência colocacional na produção escrita dos assistentes de professores de inglês em universidades brasileiras

Abstract

The research described here is the product of a work that concatenates three major areas within the studies in Linguistics: Phraseology, Communicative Competence and Interlanguage. Given the fact that phraseological units are lexical items of difficult acquisition in a second language context, we adopted the collocations as an object of study to be highly productive and recurrent in oral and written production of native speakers. We intended to find out how the learners of Portuguese as an additional language use collocations in written texts and how this use betrays what we decided to call collocational competence. We chose to work with American subjects belonging to the FLTA program, linked to the Fulbright Commission, who promoted the English language in Brazil for a nine-month period in 2015. The subjects who were interested in participating in this study were grouped according to the level of proficiency and were asked to write texts in Portuguese, whose theme questionnaire was about their impressions of the Brazilian culture. Once written, the texts were analyzed and the collocations categorized according to the existing equivalence between target / mother language and according to their morphosyntactic structures. After we crossed the data, we found out that the B1 / B2 language system proficiency level is still dependent on the mother tongue, with "Total Equity" collocations presented in all types of morphosyntactic structures. The analysis of the C1 / C2 proficiency level group showed that they know and use a larger number of types of structures, while producing guided collocations in a direct relationship with the mother tongue. In addition, we conducted an analysis of collocational errors, whose results point to the fact that the linguistic transfer does not constitute the main factor to the process of fossilization. Besides, we also realized that the most advanced levels make more collocational errors as they were still testing hypotheses on language acquisition. We concluded by launching perspectives of continuity and possible contributions that this work offers to areas such as Applied Linguistics.