We aim at presenting two courses of Portuguese as an additional language for academic purposes at a higher education institution in Brazil as well as discussing the implications of a questionnaire done with foreign graduate students attending the courses in regards to their language practices. Our research shows the importance of considering the interplay between genres and languages, the emergence of new academic genres in communicating science to lay audiences, and the need for welcoming multiple languages in internationalization initiatives.
In this presentation, we aim at discussing the proposal of an academic reading and writing course of Portuguese as an additional language for foreign graduate students at a public university in Brazil. This course is part of the ever-increasing internationalization plans of Brazilian institutions, which has been promoting the teaching of Portuguese as an additional language for academic purposes. The theoretical framework guiding the course design comes from the New Literacy Studies (Street, 1984), which examined views about writing as a cognitive and individual process and advocates for a sociocultural approach of literate practices. This approach challenges the supposed neutrality of reading and writing practices and points to the several meanings that can be attributed to them. In the wake of these studies, there have been debates about teaching writing in the academic setting, which lead to the development of the academic literacies model. It highlights social aspects of reading and writing practices, issues of power, authority, and knowledge, and students’ identities and meaning-making practices. Grounded on the possibility of using this model for designing writing courses (Lillis, 2003), we propose to analyze how its principles took shape in the planning and execution of the course. We intend to examine issues such as teaching materials and assessment practices, based on data from needs analysis surveys and interviews with students. Our initial results suggest the need to cover science popularization genres as students wish to have their research reach a broader audience and the need to address issues related to their experiences of translanguaging in the academic setting. References: Street, B. V. (1984). Literacy in theory and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lillis, T. (2003). Student writing as academic literacies: drawing on Bakhtin to move from critique to design. Language and Education, 17(3), 192–207.
