“Gente” and “a gente” in the speech of the English 3D tutor: analysis in the Systemic-Functional perspective

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the linguistic resources used by the tutor of the English Online 3-D Course to construct meanings through lexical choices in interaction with students, focusing on the use of the noun “gente” and the pronoun “a gente” , for ideational and interpersonal meanings. It is a qualitative-quantitative research, a case study (Motta-Roth; Hendges, 2010), which is based on the transcription of the initial 10 minutes and 7 seconds of an English as additional language class implemented virtually in 2022. After that, we proceed to classify the sentences selected based on corpus selection criteria and, finally, we analyzed and discussed the data based on the lexico-grammatical systems of Systemic-Functional Grammar (Halliday; Matthiessen, 2004). For this analysis, we used the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions with the intention of investigating how language is constituted as an experience and in what ways the interaction between tutor and students occurs in the virtual class. The results indicate that there is a predominance of mental processes in the tutor's speeches, which are focused on the cognitive development of class participants from a collaboration/help perspective. Furthermore, the sentences are predominantly declarative clause propositions, corroborating the exchange of information between the tutor and the students.