<b>Teacher´s and student´s roles in on-line forums of the portuguese language

Abstract

Results of a research on the collaborative construction of knowledge in on-line forums of the discipline Morphology of Portuguese are discussed. The specific issue on social-interactional roles by the teacher and students is taken into account within the interactions of forums, whilst the hypothesis of destabilizing of roles proper to each within educational situations is discussed. Starting from Applied Linguistics, the above is done within the interpretative perspective and in an interdisciplinary way through the theoretical bases on on-line forum (Montero,Watts, & Garcia-Carbonell, 2007; Cassany, 2012; Cunha, 2012), on forum as a social practice (Biondo, 2015), on on-line collaborative learning (Harasim, 2012) and others. Results reveal that teacher and students have different roles within the interactivities established by the forums, sometimes to maintain traditional established roles, sometimes to destabilize these roles. Although there is a constant displacement of power within the practice of knowledge construction mediated by the Internet, difficulties within the subjects´ agency are revealed especially to disrupt established social structures.