What is there behind teachers’ reactions? A qualitative study on attitudes with some Brazilian teachers of English

Abstract

This paper is about teachers’ attitudes. We understand ‘attitudes’ as an evaluative reaction, based on opinions and beliefs one might have. Our objective is to share some data of a qualitative research we conducted with some high school teachers of English, in Brazil. Therefore, we used two instruments of data collection: a questionnaire and an interview. It is an interdisciplinary study, developed under the light of applied linguistics, because upon problematizing social issues related with language, we resorted to social psychology, discourse analysis and critical pedagogy to understand the data. This research is justified because there is still the need to investigate teachers’ attitudes, since there has been a great amount of researches on attitudes based mostly on learners, what points to a gap that still needs to be filled. The analysis pointed to some attitudes, such as toward the Self, the language, the methodology, the approach, the logistic factors and to the learners.