Genre-Based Teaching Materials in EFL Teacher Education in Brazil: Raising Awareness and Fostering Autonomy

This chapter describes how teaching materials (TMs) designed on a programme for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher education in the southeast of Brazil have contributed to helping student-teachers (STs) to foster autonomy in language teaching, learning, and learning to teach. A key idea supporting these materials is raising awareness, focusing on the choices teachers must make throughout their professional practice, and the importance of making such informed decisions. The programme where the TMs in focus are used is a five-year-long undergraduate programme in language and literature, offering teaching credentials in Portuguese (L1 and FL/L2), Brazilian, Portuguese, English, and American literature, and English or Spanish as a foreign language. The materials are used to prepare these prospective teachers to identify and reflect on their choices in language teaching and learning on a 60-h-long course, which guides them to prepare an EFL teaching unit. This curriculum design activity is the heart of the teaching materials and serves as a framework to reveal STs’ beliefs and (pre)conceptions about language teaching (and learning). Choosing what to teach, to whom, and under what circumstances is guided by group presentations, discussion, and reading of theoretical texts. This chapter brings illustrations of the TMs, describes their implementation, and presents STs’ considerations about their experience on the course, which reveal awareness and reflection about being in the process of becoming teachers: still learners, but already preparing to endeavour to become professionals. Evidence from these STs’ in-service pedagogical practices has confirmed their attitude of inquiry (Larsen-Freeman, 1983), that is, their natural curiosity to continue learning from their contexts and their students, and their courage to experiment and face the new situations they come across. In other words, STs seem to be prepared for lifelong learning.