THE RACE PLACE IN THE ENGLISH CLASSROOM

Abstract

When we think of the traditional teaching of foreign language, we observe in the social practices a concern with the code. In the free courses, the focus is on so-called four skills and grammar and/or vice-versa; in public and private schools that depends on the prescriptions that start in the Ministry of Education. In Language Courses, students would be trained to teach Spanish, English, Portuguese and literature. Are seen methods, textual genres, learning theories, language concepts, teaching materials, TICs etc. However, when we leave the training spaces and pass our tasks in different and complex classrooms, we are faced with students and sexualized bodies, racialized, with different genders choices  etc.; and even then, there is a building that in language classroom is no place for race, gender, sexuality etc. Starting from Butler's proposal (1997) - which is based on the concepts of Austin's performative speech acts (1962/1990) and Derrida (1972/1988) that we do things with language - we understand that the language classrooms are also places to question and challenge race relations. Thus, in this article, we intend to reflection about the stand of race in English classrooms.