Questão 2493798

- This text refers to questions 38 and 39.

Teaching Teenagers

Teenagers constitute by far the largest subpopulation of English language learners in the world, since the foreign language requirement of most secondary educational system has been met by introducing English as the first foreign language of choice. Whatever cultural differences that divide them, teenagers share the experience of transiting from childhood to adulthood via the phases of puberty and adolescence. Teenagers are fundamentally “heterochronous subjects” (Lemke 2003, 81), because they are both at the same time the children they were and the adult they will become. Challenged to (re)construct themselves and find their identity they resort to a wide range of expressive styles, music preferences, commitment to sports and social activities; all of which contribute to what is generally referred to as youth culture (Hebdige 1979; Diller et al. 2000; Blossfeld et al. 2006). The emotional turmoil of the teen years – coming to grips with insecurity and vulnerability and at the same time finding appropriate ways of expressing their new selves – is played out in secondary school. For these crucial years the classroom becomes a focal point where also the ambiguities and the turbulence of these phases can render learning quite difficult or even problematic.

LEGUTKE, K. M. Teaching teenagers. In: BURNS, A., RICHARDS, C. JACK.(Ed.) The Cambridge Guide to Pedagogy and Practice in Second Language Teaching. Cambridge; CUP, 2012, p 112.

Because the teenagers are “heterochronous subjects”, they: