(E)feito âncora: o uso do Instagram e seu impacto no desempenho e no engajamento cognitivo na aprendizagem de espanhol como L2

Abstract

Within the studies of Psycholinguistics Applied to Education (Maia, 2018), in this dissertation we adopt premises of Bilingualism (Grosjean, 2013; Megale, 2019), Cognitive Engagement (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; 1997; 1999; Egbert, 2003), Digital Information and Communication Technologies (TDIC) (Anjos; Silva, 2018) and their importance in learning L2 Spanish (Goettenauer, 2009), and the Theory of Meaningful Learning (Ausubel, 2003). Our objectives were to investigate the effect of the use of the social network Instagram on participants’ L2 oral production in terms of grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, fluency, global oral proficiency (POG) and cognitive engagement. Furthermore, we aimed to verify the perceptions of participants who were subjected to the use of social media regarding its use in the L2 learning process. To this end, we had a total of 42 participants learning Spanish as an L2 at IFRN - Centro Histórico Campus. The methodology consisted of applying a pedagogical intervention, using the social media Instagram, with an experimental group (EG), comparing it to an active control group (GCA), which performed the same tasks in the classroom without using the social media. Following a quantitative-qualitative approach (Dornyei, 2007), we collected oral production metrics from the application of pre- and post-tests and measured the levels of cognitive engagement during the experiment. In addition, we analyzed the perceptions of the EG about the use of Instagram through the creation of word clouds. Our results point to a statistically significant improvement in grammatical accuracy, pronunciation and overall oral proficiency only for students who used the social media over the four weeks. Regarding perceptions, the positive occurrences of the EG were more numerous than the negative ones. Finally, we highlight the role of Psycholinguistics Applied to Education in understanding how L2 learning processes are established in bilingual individuals in a school context in order to propose significant pedagogical practices.