INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES: A CONTRIBUTION TO THE LEARNING OF PORTUGUESE AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT

In recent decades Portuguese society has deeply changed as a consequence of successive migrations. This fact has placed progressing challenges to school, particularly in what concerns both the cultural and the linguistic diversity of its students.

Baixa da Banheira Secondary School is attended by a large number of students from Mozambique, Cape Verde, Angola, Sao Tome, Guinea and, last years, besides these, others from Senegal, Russia, Romania, China and Moldova have signed up. As a result one has come to feel increasingly the need to create educational and teaching conditions capable of providing these students an appropriate learning of the Portuguese language. Although various strategies have been implemented within the PLNM, one still feels that this is not an easy task. Many of these students arrive, after the school year started. This situation makes their integration into the curricular project of classes harder.

Therefore it was important that the school possessed the necessary resources to meet these students’ particular needs, who demand a more individualized effort and further differentiation of work. The need to implement such a project becomes more pressing when there are students that as a consequence of their diagnostic evaluation are set at levels of advanced linguistic proficiency (B2, C1) and therefore are considered able to follow the national curriculum, benefiting from only one teaching unit of 90 minutes (when compared to other students). And if one thinks that this positioning does not take into account neither their needs nor the differences in curriculum between the country of origin and the host country, one will easily understand, especially in secondary education (in which the syllabus is mainly aimed at the reading and the studying of the works of national literary canon), that the weekly time set does not allow a real individual monitoring of these students.

In this sense, we believe that modern technologies, due to the diversity of tools involved, can play an important role in learning, by allowing the exploration of new models and equipments. Hence, in this project, we intend to create a learning space, as a complement to the work done in the context of the classroom, allowing students a direct relation to the contents offered through learning situations previously prepared. Therefore, we used a Moodle platform in order to create a system for distance learning, in the form of b-learning, which gives students both a greater autonomy in the resolution of the proposed tasks and the capacity of following a more individualized path of learning, with a flexible timetable and pace.

KEYWORDS: b-Learning, Internet, Portuguese as a foreign language (PLNM), learning.