Carta da editora

Abstract

This issue of RBLA brings to our readers a collection of diverse articles, which should appeal to a broad readership. The first article, by Brito and Guilherme, analyses the learning memorials of pre-service foreign language teachers in order to understand how these teachers make sense of their learning processes and to problematize the possible impacts on their future professional lives. The second article, by Baptista, also deals with pre-service foreign language teachers but focuses on their reflections on the use of new technologies in the teaching and learning of languages. To go on with the theme of technology, the next set of articles centers around virtual space. The article by Gallardo considers the representations of national identity put forward on Facebook by two students (English Majors), using a Critical Discourse Analysis approach. Medeiros discusses how multimodality influences the choices, navigation and writing of undergraduate students in a virtual learning environment. Jesus also uses a critical discursive perspective based on gender and sexuality studies to analyze a text published in a famous Brazilian magazine. His objective is to understand how the text construes the notions of masculinity and femininity. His findings suggest that a predominantly binary view of sexual identity can be found in the text. On a different note, Labella-Sánchez uses a genre-based needs analysis to inform the production of teaching materials in Spanish. Her results revealed an appropriate set of textual genres to be used with real estate professionals learning Spanish and the communicative situations in which they appear. The two final articles in this issue deal with the study of Portuguese. The first, by Angelo and Menegassi, focuses on Portuguese as a mother tongue and studies the preparation of reading comprehension questions by a Portuguese teacher in a remedial context before and after the intervention of the researchers. The other article, by Franks and Barbosa, focuses on the study of the acoustic characteristics of some Brazilian Portuguese vowels in stressed syllables in order to distinguish native speakers from non-native speakers.