This article analyzes the discourse of university teachers of literature in English in order to identify how they characterize their discourse about literature and teaching, based on computational tools. To this end, in order to guide the data analysis, the study resorts to the notions of language and discourse, from a dialogic and systemic-functional perspective, as well as the view of discourse analysis as a multidisciplinary activity (BAKHTIN, 1979 [1930]; 2006 [1979]; CHOULIARAKI and FAIRCLOUGH, 2001; FAIRCLOUGH, 2001; HALLIDAY, 1994). The data for the present research were generated by means of semi-structured interviews with ten university teachers of public and private institutions from different districts in the city of Rio de Janeiro. These interviews are qualitatively analyzed with the support of corpus-linguistic tools (BERBER SARDINHA, 2004; OLIVEIRA, 2009; TOGNINI-BONELLI, 2001; VIANA, 2008). Based on concordance lines generated for the keywords found by means of the software WordSmith Tools (SCOTT, 1999) for each interview, it was possible to notice that five dimensions seem to characterize the participants' discourse: ontological, methodological, institutional, cognitive and socio-historical. Among the implications of this study to scientific knowledge is the real need to investigate issues related to the literature classroom, following a tradition which is commonly implemented by language teachers (cf. RAJAGOPALAN, 2001; JORDÃO, 2004; PAIVA, 2005; GIEVE E MILLER, 2006; MICCOLI, 2007).
university teachers of literature in English; discourses; computational tools
