Brazilian LPs are analyzed to suggest that top-down decisions seem to prevail, leaving little room for bottom-up policies, agency of local stakeholders and other languages besides English. The paper concludes with the suggestion of using approaches such as CLIL, COIL and IC in the context of internationalization of higher education.
Globalization and internationalization are intertwined phenomena (Knight, 2003) which increased the mobility of people, goods and information promoting discussions around global and local values/languages. The changes caused by these phenomena also affected the field of language policies (LPs) that exist in a complex scenario of social, political, economic, educational and cultural factors (Spolsky, 2004) where language practices, ideologies and efforts to influence practices coexist. Given the centrality of language to education (especially the language to be used as the medium of instruction) there has been various debates around LPs in the (relatively recent) process of internationalization of Brazilian higher education. Recent changes in Brazilian legislation (such as the ones in the National Guidelines for Education – LDB, in Portuguese) have favored English as the mandatory foreign language to be used in various levels of instruction thus strengthening the Anglicization of education (De Wit, 2011; Knight, 2011). Brazilian government-funded programs such as the Science without Borders (SwB), Languages without Borders (LwB) and CAPES PrInt have changed the linguistic landscape of higher education in Brazil, working as propellers of LPs and internationalization plans, which favor English as the academic lingua franca (Jenkins, 2013). A preliminary analysis of government documents from the aforementioned programs and institutional LPs shows that top-down decisions seem to be prevalent in Brazil, with the federal government and funding agencies such as CAPES influencing the decisions at the institutional level (Guimarães, Finardi & Casotti, 2019), leaving little room for bottom-up policies, agency of local stakeholders and other languages (indigenous, heritage, African-Brazilian and sign languages, for instance). So as to guarantee the inclusion of other languages in the context of internationalization of higher education in Brazil, Finardi (2019) suggests the use of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) and Intercomprehension (IC) approaches.
