Abstract
ABSTRACT This essay explores the issue of oral production in English as a foreign language in Brazil. It reports the difficulty some students find to speak the language to matters of authority and legitimacy constituted in a particular history of language policies. Interest in the theme emerged because many Brazilian students who know English state they cannot speak the language and avoid pronouncing it and engaging in conversations. A discursive methodological framework forms the basis for the analysis of postings collected from discussion forums on different websites. First, I can´t speak English works as the reference statement that makes it possible to verify a discursive regularity in operation in Brazil. Second, a postcolonial theoretical framework supports the discussion on the conditions of possibility to speak English as a foreign language in a former Portuguese colony. The author argues that the ghost of the native, idealized speaker prevents students from recognizing the English they know as legitimate, and to speak it, and points out that dignity is a possible discourse to help deconstruct the colonial, silenced positioning that exists regarding the oral production in this foreign language.
Highlights
This essay discusses the conditions of possibility (FOUCAULT, 1997) of the emergence and stabilization of the statement I cant speak English
Within the postcolonial rationality taken in this study, such discursive findings enable the understanding of English as a foreign language (EFL) oral production as an effect of a social voice which comes to exist when there is a social place and a discursive position from where one can enunciate and be heard
The following posts were collected from different websites accessed after the results provided by the browser and its search tool under the Portuguese tags for I cant speak English. and its variation I freeze when I have to speak English.2, which are very commonly said by students in a course of Letters3 in the Southeast region in Brazil, as well as in other EFL classrooms in Brazil
Summary
This essay discusses the conditions of possibility (FOUCAULT, 1997) of the emergence and stabilization of the statement I cant speak English. Can we speak English?, the question in the title of this essay, materializes the proposed problematization of the historical conditions for EFL enunciation in Brazil. It aims to resonate and reterritorialize a critical positioning present in postcolonial works, such as Spivaks Can the subaltern speak? The regularity of the verb can with verbs like ‘speak’ and ‘think’ in the titles of these texts marks a moment of an intellectual territory where global, local, political, and historical conditions of humanity, scientificity, and dignity are part of the agenda These works remind us that to speak is a movement that depends on the existence of a voice and an ear for it (DERRIDA, 1988). The analysis makes visible the operation of a discourse of failure and fear, in which the EFL that is known is always represented as insufficient for communication
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