O PAPEL DOS OBJETOS DE APRENDIZAGEM NO ENSINO DE LÍNGUAS:UMA ANÁLISE EM CURSOS ON-LINE DE ESPANHOL COMO LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA

by TAVARES, ARICE CARDOSO

The use of interactive technologies mediated by computers and Internet is becoming more and more frequent in the teaching of foreign languages, demanding new skills from language teachers so that they can use these technologies more appropriately and evaluate the new methodologies that are introduced almost everyday. A technology that has received a lot of attention lately is the use of learning objects, seen as cultural artifacts capable of promoting language learning. The objective of this study is to describe, analyze, and evaluate the pedagogical content of these objects and detect their presence in courses that propose to teach Spanish on the Web. We start from the social-cultural perspective as advanced by Vygotsky and his followers, constructing an evaluation instrument to measure the educational value of these objects, highlighting the following aspects: (1) content quality; (2) usability; (3) reusability; (4) interactivity; and (5) scaffolding. The methodology used included a survey of Spanish courses offered on the WWW, three of which were selected for analysis. The results showed that the courses varied a lot in terms of the learning objects that they used: the best courses offer objects based on interactive activities, with good content distribution and clear objectives; the other course, poorly evaluated considering the instrument that was used, does not present these features. The conclusion is that the use of the learning objects perspective, with its well-defined criteria, seems to facilitate the preparation of instruments to evaluate courses mediated by the new technologies