摘要
As foreign language teachers, we always wondered about the silence of our students during the lessons. However, after we started the project ＂Conversation Table in Portuguese＂ （CTP）, we realized that the students assumed a more active role during the interactions, probably due to the less hierarchical situation they were in. The CTP provided the students the opportunity to express themselves in a foreign language without the interdiction they felt inside the classroom. Within this new context, the lack of confidence they might have been facing when communicating in a foreign language started to disappear, giving place to a motivation to express what they felt in this ＂new＂ language. Therefore, the target language started to become a new locus, a new way that made them not feel scared, but free and curious to say things that they would not say in similar situations when communicating in their mother tongue. In other words, the foreign language can be the place where everything seems to be possible as we do not have the control or interdiction imposed by the social values presented in our society and manifested in our mother tongue. In this study, we analyze some discursive situations taken from a session of CTP in which the students show their new identities in the foreign language. The results show that acquiring another language is much more than acquiring new linguistic aspects of communication, but also giving birth to new identities that make us become new subjects.
