Language Classes and Incommunication in The Technological Higher Education: Online learning in an uncertain context

Abstract

In a short period of time and without any notification, the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, has obliged teachers worldwide to reinvent and rebuild their practices. In this uncertain context, the online teaching and learning platforms (many of these adapted to this finality) have emerged as the only alternative to maintain the classes in this panorama where schools and universities were closed, where the interaction between students and teachers is exclusively made by a device connected to the internet. In this aspect, the language classes had to be planned again due to reorganize the listening and speaking tasks. Nevertheless, this scenario is a fertile ground for incommunication, defined by Wolton (2006) as failures in the communication process. Thus, this paper aims at investigating the English and Communication and Expression classes given at a public technological college located in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo. Therefore, it will be a case study based on the works of Menezes (2005), Wolton (2006, 2011), Künsch (2007), Yin (2015), Carneiro et al. (2020) and Santos (2020). As results, it was verified that a significant incommunication occurs in terms of the internet connection followed by other factors.