Culture, imaginaries and discourse communities: a study of teaching materials of Portuguese for foreigners

Abstract

This project proposes a study of the meanings attributed to the Brazilian culture in teaching materials of Portuguese as a foreign language. This work will be carried out from a theoretical perspective that considers the editorial configuration in its relation to cyberculture, the major source of the contents that compose these materials. Our hypothesis is that cyberculture organizes editorial, teaching and reading practices, among others. Based on the French discourse analysis, the idea is to consider learning a second language as a process stimulated by the production of meaning that is established through foreign students contact with teaching materials. This implies considering these materials as historical devices, which build and stabilize imaginaries about Brazil. We aim at observing the extent to which the notion of discourse community might contribute to investigate the ways these devices materialize aspects of the semantic heterogeneity that characterizes the constitutive plurality of a culture. Our corpus is composed by the textbooks Brasil Intercultural: língua e cultura brasileira para estrangeiros (Intercultural Brazil: language and Brazilian culture for foreigners) (Moreira; Barbosa; Castro, 2013) and the teaching units proposed by Portal de Ensino do Professor de Português Língua Estrangeira (Portuguese Foreign Language Teacher Education Portal) (IIILP, 2013). Therefore, our objective is to contribute with a reflection on the relation between linguistic and extra-linguistic material, stimulated by the media and the materials in which it is included, focusing on textualization practices and evidences of constitutive heterogeneity in devices that are considered traditionally representative of a "consensual" identity of language and country. (AU)