The use of Instagram in the teaching and learning of Portuguese as a foreign language by Chinese students in the Un. of Aveiro

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to highlight the potential of the Instagram social network as a didactic resource for teaching and learning languages. To do so, it presents a pilot study titled #aveiroenossople (Aveiro is ours PLE) about the use of Instagram in complementary activities in the teaching of Portuguese for Chinese students of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL) of the University of Aveiro, whose products were advertised on the page Of the # AveiroeNosso-PLE project on the Wix platform. In order to study whether the Instagram social tool can contribute to the development of discursive skills of Chinese learners, both in the oral and written modalities, the study proposal was anchored in a conception of language as process and interaction, from which one understands the production and comprehension of text – oral or written – as social practice. In the methodological path, three stages were accomplished in the development of the work, namely: (i) planning, (ii) implementation, and (iii) evaluation. In general terms, the results point to contributions from the use of Instagram for the development of competences related to textual and multimodal production and comprehension, the cultural competences necessary and intrinsic to the learning of a foreign language, as well as for the formation of learning communities by means of the interactions between the participants.