PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING AN ONLINE COURSE AS A TEACHING PRACTICUM ACTIVITY IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

Although there has been considerable growth in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in distance education in Brazil in the last decade, the education of foreign language teachers in this context seems to remain scarce. We report the experience of an English language teaching practicum in a 'Letras' course in which student-teachers were responsible for all stages of design and implementation of an extracurricular course offered on the Moodle platform. Guided by a reflective and collaborative approach, the professional preparation process included the writing of an academic article on the experience. The papers written by the five student teachers who did their practicum by means of this mode in 2013 were analyzed. The purpose was to verify the appropriation of literature as well as practical considerations in building knowledge about distance learning. The contact with the literature seems to have served to strengthen adherence to the supervisor's proposal and the lived experience pointed to aspects that could be improved in future offers of the same course. The results suggest that opportunities such as those reported could contribute to the construction of theoretical and practical knowledge about distance learning.