Paradigms formais e funcionais para o ensino (em inglês)

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Ana Clara B. R. Cotrim
Teaching English is a hard work, because the teacher needs to guide the students to a proficient ability in speaking and understanding a language. In most of the times, there are two perspectives which help during the learning and teaching: the formal and functional paradigms. These two points of views work with different parts of a language and direct the professional to follow one of them. However, when the teacher unity these both ones, the results are better and the acquisition is achieved quickly. Besides that, the capacities that a speaker has become the verbal interaction possible and, when it is explored, the ability to use a certain language as second language or língua franca is higher.
It’s difficult to talk about language in formal or functional perspective. The formal paradigm is usually worried with the structure and how a language is organized. The functional, on the other hand, prefers to analyze the use of a language and how the speakers can establish a communicative interaction. In the book The Functional Grammar (1997), Simon Dik brings a different way to understand the functional paradigm. 
According to the author, the formal and functional paradigm cannot be separated. When speakers produce a sentence, they have to know how to organize to make it understandable using formal structures. Further, they cannot just insert all the elements in the right place and do not use in an appropriate context. Therefore, it is necessary to know the possibilities of use, triggering the functional paradigm and uniting these both perspectives. 
Also, Simon Dik (1997) mention five capacities that are extremely important to talk about language work (linguistic capacity, epistemic capacity, logical capacity, perceptual capacity and social capacity). Triggering these capacities, speakers can make a conversation faster and dynamic, because they will be able to deal with language deriving expressions, expressing themselves better, interpreting complex structures, knowing what to say and how to say in order to achieve goals, etc. 
Therefore, it is fundamentally important to unite the formal and functional paradigm in order to stimulate these five capacities of speakers that are learning English not as first language. 
For to happen, the teachers must use techniques that make students learn how to use the structure of English. As the authors bring in The Grammar Book, in the chapter one, it is necessary to teach three dimensions of a language: the form, the meaning and the use, because “grammatical structures not only have a morphosynthatic form, they are also used to express meaning (semantic) in context-appropriate (pragmatic) (FREEMAN, MURCIA, 1999). Form can be seen as the grammar structure, meaning is the sense of a grammar structure and use is the colocation of meaning and structure in a context. So, if there is a change in one of these three dimensions, all of them will be changed as well. 
During daily conversation, most of the native speakers, for example, change completely the meaning of a word but conserve the structure. If a learner do not know how to deal with these changes, he probably will face problems to communicate and will not achieve his goal as speaker. However, if he knows how to use a language, but make big mistakes according the structure, he will probably be misunderstood and will also do not communicate well. 
“If a student can recite a rule but cannot apply it, we will have failed in our ‘grammaring’ efforts.” (FREEMAN, MURCIA, 1999). This means that the student has to be critical about what he is learning mainly when it is conceptualization of some grammar term. The parts of speech can assume different functions according to the context, because of this, the student needs to know how to identify it and not only memorize it. For example, the nouns can be identified in three different ways and none of them can be considered best, it just depend on the manner of analyze. 
Besides that, the native speakers use some skills during a dialogue to achieve certain goals. These are structure skills but keep a use meaning. The voice of a phrase, for instance, can be applied in these categories. The form of the verb will change and the subject can be deleted because the speaker wants to focus on the action. This task can be learned in grammar classes, but because it involves structure of a sentence, however, the speaker needs to know how to apply it during a conversation, triggering the use.
With what has been told, it can be considered that formal and functional paradigms are related and can be separated, because when it talks about use, the structure has to be triggered to make a speaker develop a communicative interaction. According to this, learning a language has to unite these both perspectives as well in order to make a student able to use a structure in a certain context. Besides that, the five capacities are involved in this process because they can help the speaker developing the communication as long as he knows how the form, the meaning and the use of a language. 
REFERENCES:
DIK, S. The Theory of Functional Grammar. 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997, p. 1-18. 
CELCE-MURCIA, Marianne ; LARSEN-FREEMAN, Diane. Introduction. In:__________. The Grammar Book. EUA: Heile&Heile Publishers, 1999, p. 1-12.
CELCE-MURCIA, Marianne ; LARSEN-FREEMAN, Diane.Grammatical Metalanguage.In : __________.The Grammar Book. 2. EUA: Heile&Heile Publishers, 1999, p. 13-27.