The Discursive Gaps in the Productions of a Field Diary and a Portfolio: Loss of Sense in What Is Being Taught?

Abstract

In recent years, many studies about language (BARZOTTO & EUFRASIO (2009); FAIRCHILD (2013, 2014); REZENDE (2010)] have shown that a teaching practicum has to be thought as a reflexive pedagogical event, where students become researchers of their own teaching experience; such activity allows them the analysis and assess of their own experience and also the validation of knowledge, methodologies and teaching strategies. It is during this teaching practicum that teaching journals, as a database of the close observation of the practicum-student, should become an important reflexive instrument of classroom activity. However, the written products from Spanish teaching practicum-students in a public university in Central America show that, on many occasions, students do not know how to use such resource, since journals show little connection between the discourse of the official documents and the student’s written work. Such problem gives the idea that the meaning of concepts taught may not be found in the final work a student submits. For the purpose of this research, we selected a journal and a portfolio from a student in a Spanish teaching program. These two sources were considered successful final productions. Moreover, they allowed the researchers to start a discussion about how this student articulated and analyzed his own data. Coherence of the produced discourse and the specific knowledge from the program— in this case Spanish teaching— the meaning ( or not) and the usefulness such productions have for the practicum-student and for the practicum-supervisor, and the role of the teacher as the one in charge of the follow-up and monitoring of the practicum are discussed.