Educação bilingüe e ensino de língua estrangeira: estudo de caso

Abstract

The teaching of the English language has been through many stages along the years, many methods and approaches have been created, some were abandoned, others remained with new features. But it was only through recognizing the communicative function of language, represented by the beginning of the Communicative Approach, that old and new teaching techniques became meaningful for the foreign language learners. Today it is one of the most used approaches to teaching foreign language in Recife. Another approach is being used in many schools in our town, namely, the Systemic Approach. It is comprised of Stephen Krashen´s Second Language Theory and the Content-Based Instruction (CBI) approach from the bilingual education. This paper will compare the traditional approach, language through language, represented by the Communicative Approach; and the alternative one, language through content, represented by the Systemic Approach in order to investigate the learners proficiency level upon which each approach aims to achieve; and to show that the latter approach goes further when it offers its learners the opportunity to get away from the limits of the target language structure and beyond the limited number of functions, to explore the language in use in real concrete mathematical problems or in science class experiments