O papel do bilinguismo no processo de difusão das línguas

O presente estudo propõe-se estudar as representações de alunos bilingues e não bilingues acerca do papel do bilinguismo no processo de difusão das línguas. Para dar resposta a este objetivo, desenhámos um projeto de intervenção que compreendeu a utilização de duas técnicas de recolha de dados: a entrevista e o inquérito por questionário, que implementámos a alunos do distrito de Aveiro. Os resultados obtidos permitiram concluir que, de forma geral, os alunos consideram que os falantes são os principais responsáveis pela difusão das línguas, contribuindo para o aumento de utilizadores da mesma e, portanto, para a sua expansão.

As dificuldades de leitura e escrita em crianças surdas profundas: Um estudo de caso com quatro crianças

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada ao Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada para obtenção de grau de Mestre na especialidade de Psicologia Educacional.

Reflexiones onomasiológicas en torno al papel de la administración en los programas de Español como lengua extranjera

Es un planteo de base teórica sobre la incorporación efectiva de la conciencia intercultural en los programas de Español como lengua extranjera (ELE) y de la influencia de las personas encargadas de administrar y facilitar su adecuada inclusión. La competencia en una lengua extranjera supone tanto capacidades lingüísticas, como el conocimiento y apropiación del conjunto de valores, creencias y normas culturales que conforman la identidad individual y colectiva de una comunidad académica.This is a theoreticalIy-based proposal conceming the effective incorporation of intercultural awareness in Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) programs and the influence of administering facilitating its adequate inclusion. Proficiency in a foreign language involves not only linguistic skills but also a knowledge and appropriation of the cultural values, beliefs and norms integrated in the individual and collective identity of an academic community.

Elementos para la construcción de una política pública de bilingüismo en el Valle del Cauca: un análisis descriptivo a partir del censo ampliado de 2005

Los índices de competitividad reflejan un pobre desempeño del departamento del Valle del Cauca, especialmente en lo referente al capital humano. Una política pública de bilingüismo permite acumular capital humano a través de la educación en inglés, acceder a nuevos mercados y mejor información, lo que hace posible el desarrollo de otros factores necesarios para la competitividad de una región. En este documento se hace un primer diagnóstico del bilingüismo en el Valle del Cauca, con miras a brindar argumentos para la creación de una eficaz política pública de bilingüismo. Los datos procesados provienen del Censo ampliado de 2005, y los resultados obtenidos a partir de él no son alentadores, pues muestran la necesidad de convertir el bilingüismo en un tema de prioridad en la agenda pública.

Reduced vowel production in American English among Spanish-English bilinguals

Prominent views in second language acquisition suggest that the age of L2 learning is inversely correlated with native-like pronunciation (Scovel, 1988; Birdsong, 1999). The relationship has been defined in terms of the Critical Period Hypothesis, whereby various aspects of neural cognition simultaneously occur near the onset of puberty, thus inhibiting L2 phonological acquisition. The current study tests this claim of a chronological decline in pronunciation aptitude through the examination of a key trait of American English – reduced vowels, or “schwas.” Groups of monolingual, early bilingual, and late bilingual participants were directly compared across a variety of environments phonologically conditioned for vowel reduction. Results indicate that late bilinguals have greater degrees of difficulty in producing schwas, as expected. Results further suggest that the degree of differentiation between schwa is larger than previously identified and that these subtle differences may likely be a contributive factor to the perception of a foreign accent in bilingual speakers.

Preposition Stranding in Heritage Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

Influential bodies of work in language acquisition studies single out heritage bilingualism as a discrete acquisition process within the bilingualism continuum. In regards to the acquisition of WH-/QU- interrogatives containing prepositional phrases (PP), the present study examined whether heritage speakers (HS) of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) produce preposition stranding (P-stranding) constructions in their heritage language, in contrast to monolingual and adult speakers of BP, where prepositions are pied-piped to form the interrogative. Participants were HS of BP born in the USA and in Brazil, monolinguals, and late bilingual adults. The experiment consisted of an elicited production task and a grammaticality judgment task, both carried out in BP and then in English. Results showed that HS born in the USA use P-stranding in QU- interrogatives productively and systematically, in contrast to the other three groups. Moreover, no evidence of protracted acquisition was found in this group. No signs of attrition were detected among bilinguals.

Language policy and critical discourse studies:towards an integrated approach

This chapter offers a framework for combining critical language policy with critical discourse studies (CDS) to analyse language policy as a process in the context of minority language policy in Wales. I propose a discursive approach to language policy, which starts from the premise that language policy is constituted, enacted, interpreted and (re)contextualised in and through language. This approach extends the critical language policy framework provided by Shohamy (Language policy: hidden agendas and new approaches. Routledge, London, 2006) and integrates perspectives from the context-sensitive discourse-historical approach in CDS. It incorporates discourse as an essential lens through which policy mechanisms, ideologies and practices are constituted and de facto language policy materialises. This chapter argues that conceptualising and analysing language policy as a discursive phenomenon enables a better understanding of the multi-layered nature of language policy that shapes the management and experience of corporate bilingualism in Wales.

Book review: Laurel Kamada, Hybrid Identities and Adolescent Girls: Being Half in Japan. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2010

Arguably, the catalyst for the best research studies using social analysis of discourse is personal ‘lived’ experience. This is certainly the case for Kamada, who, as a white American woman with a Japanese spouse, had to deal first hand with the racialization of her son. Like many other mixed-ethnic parents, she experienced the shock and disap-pointment of finding her child being racialized as ‘Chinese’ in America through peer group taunts, and constituted as gaijin (a foreigner) in his own homeland of Japan. As a member of an e-list of the (Japan) Bilingualism Special Interest Group (BSIG), Kamada learnt that other parents from the English-speaking foreign community in Japan had similar disturbing stories to tell of their mixed-ethnic children who, upon entering the Japanese school system, were mocked, bullied and marginalized by their peers. She men-tions a pervasive Japanese proverb which warns of diversity or difference getting squashed: ‘The nail that sticks up gets hammered down’. This imperative to conform to Japanese behavioural and discursive norms prompted Kamada’s quest to investigate the impact of ‘otherization’ on the identities of children of mixed parentage. In this fascinat-ing book, she shows that this pressure to conform is balanced by a corresponding cele-bration of ‘hybrid’ or mixed identities. The children in her study are also able to negotiate their identities positively as they come to terms with contradictory discursive notions of ‘Japaneseness’, ‘whiteness’ and ‘halfness/doubleness’.The discursive construction of identity has become a central concern amongst researchers across a wide range of academic disciplines within the humanities and the social sciences, and most existing work either concentrates on a specific identity cate-gory, such as gender, sexuality or national identity, or else offers a broader discussion of how identity is theorized. Kamada’s book is refreshing because it crosses the usual boundaries and offers divergent insights on identity in a number of ways. First, using the term ‘ethno-gendering’, she examines the ways in which six mixed-ethnic girls living in Japan accomplish and manage the relationship between their gender and ethnic ‘differ-ences’ from age 12 to 15. She analyses in close detail how their actions or displays within certain situated interactions might come into conflict with how they are seen or constituted by others. Second, Kamada’s study builds on contemporary writing on the benefits of hybridity where identities are fluid, flexible and indeterminate, and which contest the usual monolithic distinctions of gender, ethnicity, class, etc. Here, Kamada carves out an original space for her findings. While scholars have often investigated changing identities and language practices of young people who have been geographi-cally displaced and are newcomers to the local language, Kamada’s participants were all born and brought up in Japan, were fluent in Japanese and were relatively proficient in English. Third, the author refuses to conceptualize or theorize identity from a single given viewpoint in preference to others, but in postmodernist spirit draws upon multiple perspectives and frameworks of discourse analysis in order to create different forms of knowledge and understandings of her subject. Drawing on this ‘multi-perspectival’ approach, Kamada examines grammatical, lexical, rhetorical and interactional features from six extensive conversations, to show how her participants position their diverse identities in relation to their friends, to the researcher and to the outside world. Kamada’s study is driven by three clear aims. The first is to find out ‘whether there are any tensions and dilemmas in the ways adolescent girls of Japanese and “white” mixed parentage in Japan identify themselves in terms of ethnicity’. In Chapter 4, she shows how the girls indeed felt that they stood out as different and consequently experienced isolation, marginalization and bullying at school – although they were able to make better sense of this as they grew older, repositioning the bullies as pitiable. The second aim is to ask how, if at all, her participants celebrate their ethnicity, and furthermore, what kind of symbolic, linguistic and social capital they were able to claim for themselves on the basis of their hybrid identities. In Chapter 5, Kamada shows how the girls over time were able to constitute themselves as insiders while constituting ‘the Japanese’ as outsiders, and their network of mixed-ethnic friends was a key means to achieve this. In Chapter 6, the author develops this potential celebration of the girls’ mixed ethnicity by investigating the privileges they perceived it afforded them – for example, having the advantage of pos-sessing English proficiency and intercultural ‘savvy’ in a globalized world. Kamada’s third aim is to ask how her participants positioned themselves and performed their hybrid identities on the basis of their constituted appearance: that is, how the girls saw them-selves based on how they looked to others. In Chapter 7, the author shows that, while there are competing discourses at work, the girls are able to take up empowering positions within a discourse of ‘foreigner attractiveness’ or ‘a white-Western female beauty’ discourse, which provides them with a certain cachet among their Japanese peers. Throughout the book, Kamada adopts a highly self-reflexive perspective of her own position as author. For example, she interrogates the fact that she may have changed the lived reality of her six participants during the course of her research study. As the six girls, who were ‘best friends’, lived in different parts of the Morita region of Japan, she had to be proactive in organizing six separate ‘get-togethers’ through the course of her three-year study. She acknowledges that she did not collect ‘naturally occurring data’ but rather co-constructed opportunities for the girls to meet and talk on a regular basis. At these meetings, she encouraged the girls to discuss matters of identity, prompted by open-ended interview questions, by stimulus materials such as photos, articles and pic-tures, and by individual tasks such as drawing self-portraits. By giving her participants a platform in this way, Kamada not only elicited some very rich spoken data but also ‘helped in some way to shape the attitudes and self-images of the girls positively, in ways that might not have developed had these get-togethers not occurred’ (p. 221). While the data she gathers are indeed rich, it may well be asked whether there is a mismatch between the girls’ frank and engaging accounts of personal experience, and the social constructionist academic register in which these are later re-articulated. When Kamada writes, ‘Rina related how within the more narrow range of discourses that she had to draw on in her past, she was disempowered and marginalized’ (p. 118), we know that Rina’s actual words were very different. Would she really recognize, understand and agree with the reported speech of the researcher? This small omission of self-reflexivity apart – an omission which is true of most lin-guistic ethnography conducted today – Kamada has written a unique, engaging and thought-provoking book which offers a model to future discourse analysts investigating hybrid identities. The idea that speakers can draw upon competing discourses or reper-toires to constitute their identities in contrasting, creative and positive ways provides linguistic researchers with a clear orientation by which to analyse the contradictions of identity construction as they occur across time in different discursive contexts

ATITUDES COM REFERÊNCIA ÀS LÍNGUAS CASTELHANO E GUARANI

Abstract: This paper reports part of a research made in a school in the city of Presidente Franco (Alto Paraguay), with seven teachers who use two languages daily – Spanish and Guarani. The goal of the work was analyzing interaction situations in which the speakers - focus of the study - use different linguistic codes, taking turns with them during speaking events. In order to develop the analyses, questions were made to check the speakers attitudes regarding the use of their languages. The theory that has based the study comes from contributions of Grosjean (1982), Erikson (1989), Pereira (1999), André (1995), among others. Results have shown that these teachers use their languages in different contexts and diglossic situations which are inherent to the community they live. It was also noticed that in spite of Guarani language is part of their linguistic common use, situations of its use usually depend on the context and the subject´s hegemonic view toward his own language. Keywords: bilingualism, linguistic attitudes, Spanish/Guarani.

QUANDO OS IMIGRANTES FALAM: VOZES DIASPÓRICAS EM HOW THE GARCÍA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS, DE JULIA ALVAREZ

This article aims at discussing the fictional representation of Caribbean immigrants in the novel How The García Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez. This discussion will be especially based on the impact of immigration on Alvarez’s diasporic subjects and the development of their hyphenated identity in the U.S. For this, the paper will also consider the language issue for the construction of the immigrant identity insofar as bilingualism is a key factor in the negotiation the García girls must effect between their Caribbean and their American halves in order to understand where they stand.

Linguistic behavior of Italian descendants in Cascavel/PR

The maintenance and preservation of a linguistic variety are linked to historical issues, which consequently outline the beliefs and attitudes of a community. Depending on the community in which the speaker is inserted, his way of communicating can be stigmatized or prestigious. Thus, in addition to historical factors, the cognoscenti, affective and emotional components, which are connected to the way of thinking, feeling and evaluate are crucial for maintenance or not of a linguistic variety. Therefore consider the immigration process of Italian and migration of the descendants of this ethnic group until reach Cascavel city is important to understand how historical factors influence the beliefs and attitudes of the Italian community from southern region in this city. In addition, Frosi, Faggion Dal and Horn (2010) binding on the language attitudes also to social factors age and gender. Thus, in order to demonstrate the behavior of some descendants of Italians in Cascavel city before the language of their ancestors, 18 informants were selected, Italian descendants of southern colonization and that live in this town for more than 30 years or that were born in the city, which were distributed in the following dimensions: through generational and sexual. From this, individual interviews were conducted through the application of a semi-guided questionnaire and the data allowed checking the linguistic and cultural behavior of the Italian descent community from southern region, that is, those who came from Rio Grande do Sul and/or Santa Catarina states. We found that bilingualism levels vary depending on social factors such as gender and age, as well as historical factors. Language is a form of expression of a culture, however, an ethnic community does not presuppose the existence of a speech community.

AMBIVALENCE OF TERMS AND CONCEPTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR THE HYBRID LANGUAGE IN CONTEXT OF BOUNDARY

Faced with the perceived paradox between the scenario as sociolinguistically complex boundary and the pedagogical and educational policies that prioritize linguistic and cultural homogeneity, the objective of this article is to focus on the ambivalence of the concepts of language, culture, bilingualism and identity as concepts that guide different views toward writing hybrid "brasiguaio" students. The student, often taking as their mother tongue the Portuguese – as part of their family also uses the language of inheritance, for example, German and/or Italian - whose schooling in Paraguay focused on Spanish and Guarani languages, presents a hybrid language often stigmatized at Brazilian school, which usually leads low-esteem and school failure. The concepts presented open space to deviate attention from the idealized conception of the subject bilingual and consider that due to the characteristic muldimensional of bilingualism, the subject presents bilingual discourse practices in a constant process of mutation, and therefore also their cultural identities, which can facilitate identification with school success and distance to consider from prejudice.

Representação e Educação Linguística de Professores de Línguas: Revisitando Algumas Concepções Teóricas

Resumo: Neste texto trato da ideia de representação, discutindo como essa se traslada para a da representação linguística e em que esse movimento contribui para a compreensão do objeto língua como um território de saber atravessado por uma perene reformulação e ressignificação de sentidos. Para tanto, revisito o próprio conceito de representação (Far, 2011; Jodelet, 2000, 2001; Moscovici, 1976, 1978, 2009; Sá, 1996; Zarate, 2010) e passo a problematizar o seu deslocamento para o de representação linguística (Arnoux e Del Valle, 2010; Boyer, 1996, 2003; Calvet,1998; Houdebine-Gravaud,2002; Petitjean, 2009), articulando  conceitos como o de imaginário (Pesavento,1995;) e atitudes linguísticas (Dominique Lafontaine,1997; Fasold, 1984; Saville-Troike,1989). Interessa-me, ao longo deste texto, levantar algumas questões de natureza teórica e conceitual com o fim de promover um debate em torno da dimensão simbólica e, mais notadamente, de como essa pode ser relevante para a redefinição das práticas dos sujeitos, no caso de professores de línguas, situando-as no âmbito da educação linguística de professores.Palavras-chaves: Representação; educação linguística; língua

Reflexões sobre o Estatuto das Línguas nos Contextos Bi-multilíngues de Educação para Surdos no Brasil

RESUMO: A educação de surdos hoje no Brasil vive um período de transição,  de conflitos e contradições: por um lado o discurso da diferença cada vez mais presente na fala de educadores e em parte da legislação educacional em vigor; por outro lado a “diferença” surda continua sendo representada nas práticas escolares em geral sob a ótica da normalização que insiste em invisibilizar as especificidades linguísticas e culturais dessa minoria, apesar dos avanços alcançados pelo decreto 5626. Com esse cenário em mente objetivamos refletir sobre as pressões normativas guiadas por ideologias monolíngues (BLACKLEDGE, 2000) que tentam formatar um suposto uso ideal de português e de Libras. O capítulo está dividido em três partes: primeiro, apresentamos algumas considerações no âmbito da legislação acerca do estatuto de Libras no Brasil. Em seguida, tematizamos o processo de (in)visibilização das línguas de sinais com vistas a mostrar que a (re)construção do conceito de língua como algo fixo, também, em relação às línguas de sinais, pode ser usado para sedimentar desigualdades em relação ao surdo na escola. Por fim, refletimos, a partir de alguns dados de pesquisa, sobre as tensões existentes entre as línguas nos contextos bi-multilíngues que caracterizam a escolarização de surdos e as ideologias linguísticas que geram efeitos de hierarquização sobre os usos de Libras e de Português.

O Letramento Escolarizado e as Práticas Multiletradas em Contexto Superdiverso de Fronteira

Embora nos últimos anos tenham-se ampliado as pesquisas e publicações que rompem com a visão do Brasil como um país monolíngue, é fato inegável que, no contexto escolar, ainda persiste fortemente esse mito, mesmo em contextos de fronteira em que a ‘superdiversidade’ (VERTOVEC, 2007) salta aos olhos. A Linguística Aplicada, em sua vertente indisciplinar e transcultural (MOITA LOPES, 2006, 2013; CAVALCANTI, 2013; SIGNORINI, 2013, entre outros), no âmbito das novas epistemologias que propiciam a apreensão de fenômenos ou eventos compartilhados em que todos são participantes, abre espaço para a discussão e/ou a solução de problemas relacionados a práticas de linguagem situadas. É sob esse enfoque que, nesse artigo, problematizamos o letramento escolarizado frente às práticas “multiletradas” (SOUZA, 2011; ROJO, 2012), como forma de legitimação dos saberes locais e da superdiversidade, no contexto escolar da Tríplice Fronteira Brasil, Paraguai e Argentina. Para tanto, apresentamos exemplos provenientes de uma pesquisa etnográfica, focando em um evento na sala de aula de Língua Portuguesa em que professora e alunos/as trabalham colaborativamente na construção de uma peça teatral. Os resultados mostram como a negociação entre os saberes escolares institucionalizados e os saberes locais da vida vivida permitem que os alunos tornem-se protagonistas da própria história e mostram ainda como as práticas multiletradas fazem parte das suas práticas sociais.