In such a project, and the practical steps she proposes, could be easily adapted and adopted by others working with English teacher education in different institutions with similar contexts. Collaborative work is also the focus of Gabrielli Zanini Barlow in Chapter Three, where she suggests an action plan for a five-year programme to establish and sustain an English language teaching community of practice in Paran. She explores the notions, structure and principles behind the implementation of the proposed programme and also discusses resistance to change in existing teaching environments. She proposes ways of overcoming such resistance with activities based on the notions of experiential learning and dialogue among community members. Chapter Four is the last in the string written by Hornby Scholars studying at the University College Plymouth of St Mark and St John Marjon. Following on in the steps of Oliveira and Barlow, I also decided to take my Masters in Teacher Education and study at Marjon under the supervision of Professor Tony Wright. An inquisitive reader would probably be able to detect his all-encompassing influence on these three papers, detectable in some common themes and shared bibliography. My paper is not based on my dissertation, as are the others in this publication. It is actually based on my assignment for the Approaches to Teaching and Learning module and the reason for this is that its topic is more closely related to the issues relevant to Brazilian practitioners than the topic I chose for my final thesis. In this chapter, I counted on the invaluable contribution of a colleague in Rio, Bruno Cesar Barros, who provided an extremely interesting description and analysis of his teaching context. In this chapter I defend the idea of seeing classrooms as complex environments intertwined with the broader social-historical contexts in which they exist. A short version of this chapter was first published in the IATEFL Voices, 212. If Chapter Four is the last one on a string of papers written by Marjon students, it is also the first in a series of papers written by Hornby Scholars coming from Rio Grande do Sul, also homeland to the authors of the final two chapters. In Chapter Five, Marcus Ferreira da Silva brings back the theme of mentoring and collaborative learning explored by Oliveira, in Chapter Two, and Barlow, in Chapter Three. His paper is based on his dissertation and examines the challenges faced by EFL teachers while integrating the use of Interactive Whiteboard technology IWB into their teaching practice. He provides a personal account of how he overcame the fear of teaching with technology and proposes a mentoring programme in order to develop teachers pedagogical and technical knowledge when using IWBs in English language teaching in public and private schools in Rio Grande do Sul. Chapter Six is certainly the most technical paper in this publication and the only one focusing on linguistics. Simone Sarmento discusses therein the historical background, scope and methodological issues concerning Corpus Linguistics as well as its implications for research and the production of English language educational materials. Her data is based on the framework of English for Specific Purposes ESP with aviation students, but certainly the uses she proposes for Corpus Linguistics and concordancers are widely applicable in other teaching contexts. When I finished my Hornby Scholarship in 2009, the expected course of action would be to go back to Rio Grande do Sul and back into teaching English as a foreign language. However, life sometimes takes another turn and I remained in the UK thanks to a scholarship granted by the Open University to continue my studies at doctoral level. However, I have never felt truly comfortable about it, even having the personal support of colleagues in the British Council and the tacit understanding of the Hornby Trust. I always felt that I had the moral and ethical obligation to give something back to the Brazilian ELT community. This publication is also a way of doing just this. When I had the idea of producing this collection of papers what guided me was the desire to share with other English language teachers in Brazil some of the things I have learnt and became empowered to do thanks to the Hornby Scholarship awarded me. Furthermore, thanks to the generous contributions of my fellow Hornby Scholars, this publication also became a way of putting into practice the ideas of collegiality, collaborative learning and the creation of a teaching community of practice which are recurrent themes in the chapters that follow.
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