Proposta de ensino de vocabulário baseado nas fábulas de esopo: uma Abordagem de Corpora

Abstract

The present work brings, as a primordial point, discussions about the teaching of vocabulary in the English language. The object of study is the vocabulary of Aesop's Fables. The general objective of this work is to describe the lexical profile of the texts of the fables. The specific objectives are: to compile a corpus of Aesop's fables, the CorFABE; select ten fables that stand out in each of the tracks listed by VocabProfile. The theoretical foundation resorted to the theoretical and methodological principles of Corpus Linguistics (BERBER SARDINHA, 2000, 2009; SILVA, 2011) and Lexicology (BIDERMAN, 1998; NATION 2003). The methodological route required the compilation of a corpus composed of 283 fables, with 38,163 tokens and 4,148 types. Text processing was performed using two computational tools, WordSmith Tools and VocabProfile. The lexical profile indicated indicated 10 fables with more than 90% of K1 vocabulary, another 10 fables that can add up to 16.87% of K2 vocabulary, 10 fables that can guarantee contact with up to 5% of academic words and, finally, 10 fables with up to 20% low frequency vocabulary. The results show that fables can effectively contribute to the development of didactic material for English language classes.