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- Changing teachers’ attitudes towards ICT-based language learning tasks: the ETALAGE Comenius project (the Portuguese case)Publication . Lopes, AntónioMany foreign and second language teachers are reluctant about shifting from traditional language instruction to TBLT. Another challenge has been the use of ICT in the classroom, a problem addressed in previous Comenius projects. The ETALAGE aimed to build on the achievements of such projects and to address these challenges, by collecting, re-designing, adapting and disseminating samples of good practice of ICT-based language learning tasks (A1-B2 CEF levels) in primary and secondary education. Partners produced in-service teacher training courses adjusted to local needs. Independent experts in language teaching monitored the quality of the products at a national level. This paper explains the project setup and its implementation in Portugal, describing a) the specific challenges and constraints that the local reality poses to an international project like this and; b) the perceptions of the Portuguese trainees in pre- and post-course surveys concerning the use of ICT in TBLT.
- “Should we all be on Marx’s side?” Contributions of post-marxist discourse theory to the historiography of communismPublication . Lopes, AntónioDrawing on post-marxist discourse theory inspired by the writings of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, this article puts the case for a literature on communism situated at the crossroads of critical theory, cultural studies and historiography. Specific illustration is provided by the author's own research on British communism and the Spanish Civil War. However, the scope of the article is much broader and it is intended as a contribution to the theoretical discussion of future possibilities for communist history-writing. The article concludes that discourse should be regarded neither as a flat surface of tightly knit signifiers nor as an impenetrable monolith of meaning systems. Rather, it should be seen as an inherently dynamic phenomenon, with its own condensations and dispersions along the historical continuum. In this lies its significance for historians of communism.
- Reinventing America on the battlefields of Spain or following the party line: conflicting perceptions of the Spanish Civil War in the present and in the pastPublication . Lopes, AntónioIsolationism and neutrality are two of the recurrent themes in the study of the history of the U.S. foreign policy in the interwar years. The trauma of the Great War, which had swept away 130.000 U.S. lives and had cost $30 billion, had led public opinion to strongly oppose any involvement with European affairs. Besides, the urgent need for economic recovery during the dismal years of the Great Depression did not leave Roosevelt much room for manoeuvre to influence international events. His positions regarding the intentions of the Fascist states remained, at best, ambivalent. These facts notwithstanding, about 2800 U.S. citizens crossed the Atlantic and rushed in to help democratic Spain, which was on the verge of becoming one more hostage in the hands of the Fascism. They joined the other British, Irish and Canadian volunteers and formed the XV International Brigade. 900 Americans never returned home. This alone should challenge the commonly held assumption that the American people were indifferent to the rise of the Fascist threat in Europe. But it also begs other questions. Considering the prevailing isolationist mood, what really motivated them? With what discursive elements did these men construct their anti Fascist representations? How far did their understanding of the Spanish democracy correspond to their own American democratic ideal? In what way did their war experience across the Atlantic mould their perception of U.S. politics (both domestic and foreign)? How far did the Spanish Civil War constitute one first step towards the realization that the U.S. might actually be drawn into another international conflict of unpredictable consequences? Last but not the least, what ideological, political and cultural complicity existed between the men from the English-speaking battalions? In order to unearth some of the answers, I intend to examine their letters and see how these men recorded the historical events in which they took part. Their correspondence emerged from the desire to prove their commitment to a common cause and spoke of a common war experience, but each letter, in its uniqueness, ends up mirroring not only the social and political background of each individual fighter, but also his own particular perspective of the war, of world politics and of the Spanish people. We shall see how these letters differ and converge and how these particular accounts weave, as in an epistolary novel, a larger-than-life narrative of outrage and solidarity, despair and hope.
- The last fight let us face: communist discourse in britain and the spanish civil warPublication . Lopes, AntónioI sought to analyse the ways in which, within the context of the tensions and antagonisms that characterised British democracy in the interwar period, Communist discourse evolved from 1920 onwards and how it succeeded, thanks to the People’s Front line, in overcoming some of the resistance it had met in its earlier stages. After years of insistence on the centrality of the working class in the revolutionary process, by the mid-thirties the discourse of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) began seeking to expand the number of possible articulations so as to construct a new political identity—the ‘people’—encompassing groups or classes that had hitherto been excluded from the political equations of the Communist leadership. Since its inception, the party attempted to retain its strictly proletarian character. But now the new hegemonic tasks that the People’s Front entailed were incompatible with the notion of one single natural class agent or of one single class identity. The party had to learn how to reach out to more subject positions (the intellectuals, the petty bourgeoisie, etc.) and had to do so by means of establishing an equivalential chain (usually under the guise of ‘all democratic forces’) whose cohesion was believed to be guaranteed by the existence of an antagonistic frontier separating the ‘democratic’ camp from the ‘Fascist’ one. In the course of the construction of such a broad identity, Spain soon became one of the nodal points that permitted the consolidation of this equivalential chain. In this study I also tried to demonstrate that discourse is to be regarded neither as a flat surface of tightly knit signifiers nor as an impenetrable monolith of meaning systems. It is, above all, an inherently dynamic phenomenon, with its own condensations and dispersions along the historical continuum. Yet this does not mean that discourse is wholly inconstant. Actually, although it can grow to accommodate further signifiers and to cover a larger variety of practices by different subject positions in the context of a hegemonic project, it neither loses its internal stability nor dissolves into nothingness. It has its own mechanisms of self regulation and compensation, and therefore keeps tending towards equilibrium. I tried to show how signifiers were passed down the chain of command, all the way from Comintern officials in Moscow to the International Brigaders on the front, and how they were negotiated at the level of the different practices, demands and interests—which varied from one subject position to the next—without substantial entropic losses. But this did not operate in one direction only. I also sought to demonstrate how discursive practices at the local branches of the CPGB and on the Spanish battlefields had a determining effect on the definition of the discursive strategies of the party’s hegemonic project. Despite significant differences in context and variations in the constitution of the identity of each individual involved, communist discourse retained a remarkable degree of consistency, which also accounts for the vitality and cohesion of the party in this difficult period in the history of Europe. This is not to say that it was devoid of contradictions or lacunae (think of, for example, the party’s positions towards parliamentarism, the Labour Party, the issues of nationhood and the problem of war). Although it is usually defined as a relational totality that establishes the parameters of each meaningful action (both linguistic and non linguistic), discourse is in fact characterised by a structural incompleteness which derives, on the one hand, from the dislocations the social is continuously being subjected to and, on the other, from the very impossibility of encompassing the infinite play of differences. The discourse of the CPGB sought to suture those lacks by investing, from the outset, in a closed symbolic order, but the minute it started to make concessions in order to dilate its political space, older systems of meanings had to be discarded (the theory of Social Fascism, for example), that closure (the dictatorship of the proletariat) deferred sine die, and a new set of signifiers adopted—which also led to a whole series of new practices. The People’s Front represented such a challenge and the war in Spain constituted the ground where that challenge would be met.
- "Os outros Saxões": imagens da Alemanha na literatura popular eduardianaPublication . Lopes, António; Furtado, FilipeSe se quiser determinar os contornos do relacionamento (por vezes fricativo) da Grã-Bretanha com o continente, impõe-se ao estudioso da sua cultura, como uma das tarefas mais prementes, procurar deslindar as raízes de tal desconfiança insular no seio da história contemporânea. A nação alemã tem sido, de todas as potências continentais, não só aquele interlocutor com o qual esse relacionamento se tem revelado o mais polémico, mas também a que mais marcou a experiência e o imaginário do povo britânico desde o início do século. As rêveries de Guilherme II e de Adolf Hitler constituiram, indubitavelmente, a mais dura prova à política externa de Londres e o mais terrível pesadelo para a consciência colectiva. Não deixa, pois, de ser pertinente analisar de que modo a Grã-Bretanha aprendeu a lidar com a constante ameaça alemã ao seu espaço fisico e social. É nesse contexto que ganha sentido um olhar sobre a literatura popular eduardiana enquanto instrumento ideológico privilegiado para a diwlgação e consolidação das representações do poder (e do não-poder) junto das massas. Na realidade, vários foram os escritores, mormente os de ficção, que procuraram alertar o leitor quanto ao perigo para a supremacia britânica advindo da constante pressão política, militar e económica exercida pelo crescente imperio alemão. Isso tornou-se particularmente visível em subgéneros que, de uma forma mais ou menos explícita, espelhavam as tensões políticas do momento: o spy thriller, cuja acção tinha lugar nos bastidores da política internacional e à margem dos grandes centros de decisão (aqui representado pelo texto seminal de Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands [1903] e, ainda, por The Thirty-nine Steps [1915] de John Buchan); a invasion novel, onde o próprio territorio nacional era tornado vítima da voragem alienígena (The Invasion of England [1906] de William Le Queux e The War in the Air [1908] de H. G. Wells); e a occupation novel, onde se imaginavam cenários de uma vivência a meias com o inimigo opressor (e o caso da singular narrativa de Saki, When William Came [1913]). Também a adventure novel, apesar de a alimentar uma postura muito mais agressiva face ao “outro”, possui imanentes um quadro de valores e um conjunto de representações do alemão que não podem ser de todo relegados para segundo plano. Os dois textos de Anthony Hope - The Prisioner of Zenda e Rupert of Hentzau - são disso casos significativos. Uma vez que foram escritos um pouco antes das crises internacionais que grassaram ao longo da primeira década do século (em 1894 e 1898, respectivamente), apresentam em termos gerais a figura do alemão a uma luz algo mais favorável do que a dos textos produzidos posteriormente. A sua inclusão no corpus justifica-se porquanto lhes está subjacente um desejo de identificação, senão mesmo de fusão, com o povo alemão que não mais se manifestaria na literatura popular ulterior. As narrativas de Hope encontram-se informadas, ainda que subliminarmente, da busca de uma ancestralidade comum a ambos os povos, de uma consanguinidade que os tornaria, inconscientemente embora, cúmplices na conquista do poder na Europa e no mundo.
- Linking content and language-integrated learning (CLIL) and task-based language teaching (TBLT) in an effective way: a methodological proposalPublication . Lopes, AntónioCLIL and TBLT are approaches that have increasingly captured the attention of both teachers and researchers, and many of the latter have already discussed the ways in which they can be brought together. One of the challenges encountered in the implementation of CLIL has been the discrepancy between the level required to carry out the work for content learning and the students' actual level. One of the solutions may lie in resorting to TBLT, where language is regarded as action and the learner seen as a social actor engaged in real-life-like activities. However, in CLIL, the task being proposed to the students has to be appropriate to their level and their ability to internalise conceptual knowledge. In order to bridge some of the methodological gaps between CLIL and TBLT, a framework for designing content-oriented tasks, based on the one advanced for the project PETALL, has been developed to help teachers plan their CLIL activities. After a theoretical introduction to the principles of Task-based Learning and its integration with CLIL, a template designed to systematise the task is provided and discussed.
- Designing technology-mediated tasks for language teaching: A methodological frameworkPublication . Lopes, António; Ruiz-Cecilia, RaulPETALL (Pan-European Task-based Activities for Language Learning) is a European-funded project aiming at the promotion of foreign languages learning through ICT-based tasks. For that purpose, the project consortium has offered teacher training courses and has produced samples of best practices in which technologies play a major role. These tasks have been trialled and evaluated in the neighbouring countries in a network of collaborative partnerships in teaching and research, which allowed the designers of the tasks to receive constructive feedback from peers and end-users (teachers and learners). This article first provides an overview of the project (namely its rationale, literature review, implementation and evaluation processes, and the dissemination and exploitation strategies), before explaining in greater detail the procedures employed by the consortium in the setting-up of a methodological framework to be used in the designing and trialling of ICT-based tasks. The different stages of the designing process are described, as well as the criteria for the validation of the proposed samples. The template used by the designers is explained and an analysis of the set of tasks is also provided. In the end, some closing remarks based on the outcomes of the project are given.
- Texting, Textisms and Teaching PortuguesePublication . Gomez-Camacho, Alejandro; Lopes, António Manuel BernardoThis study examines the perception of digital Portuguese spelling and its relationship to the teaching of Portuguese as L1 and L2. 85 undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of education and communication participated in the study through a 35-item questionnaire, validated in both theoretical and the empirical terms. The qualitative analysis of the results showed a high rejection of the use of textisms at the graphic and phonological levels, which are regarded as being associated with standard Portuguese spelling mistakes. However, the multimodal elements of digital Portuguese were accepted as resources for the teaching of the language.
- Implementação do Processo de Bolonha a Nível Nacional, por áreas de Conhecimento, das Tecnologias da SaúdePublication . Lopes, AntónioRelatório final da Implementação do Processo de Bolonha a Nível Nacional, da área de Conhecimento das Tecnologias da Saúde