Dr Ana Souza

“This state-of-the-field collection provides a wealth of information about Portuguese in various European settings, including insightful descriptions of educational settings and pedagogical practices. Teachers interested in the situation of Portuguese as a Heritage Language will surely gain interesting and valuable knowledge regarding what is going on in Europe.”  Andrew Lynch, University of Miami, USA

​​​​​​​“This volume, edited by Ana Souza and Sílvia Melo-Pfeifer, makes a significant new contribution to the study of provision for Heritage Language (…) education. It does so by focusing on the teaching and learning of Portuguese as a Heritage Language (…) in different countries in Europe and by providing an account of developments relating to the teaching and learning of European and Brazilian varieties of Portuguese. As we read across the chapters, we see that the issues and processes identified through the research and practice presented here resonate with issues and processes that are also investigated in other fields of socio and applied linguistics. In fact, some chapters make explicit references to these fields. These fields include research into the multi-layered nature of language policy processes, sociolinguistic studies of multilingualism in migration contexts, the sociolinguistics of globalization and the study of language ideologies, particularly those pertaining to the nexus of language-nation-identity. They also include applied linguistics research into language learning in the context of reduced input, into motivations for language learning, into initial teacher education and the continuing professional development of language teachers.” -  Mariyn Martin-Jones, University of Birmingham, England

A preface, six articles and two book reviews.

Esta obra, intitulada O POLH na Europa, reúne artigos apresentados no II Simpósio Europeu sobre o Ensino de Português como Língua de Herança (II-SEPOLH), realizado na Alemanha em 2015. O interesse comum dos artigos aqui apresentados é o Português como Língua de Herança, nas suas múltiplas abordagens. Na primeira seção, as discussões são tecidas segundo um ponto de vista mais teórico, refletindo sobre a colocação e a definição de alguns parâmetros funcionais ao ensino do POLH, tais como formação docente, alfabetização e letramento, além da reflexão sobre materiais didáticos específicos, entre outros. As iniciativas em prol da manutenção do Português como Língua de Herança são o foco da segunda seção, que dá uma ampla amostra de projetos criados para preservar heranças linguísticas e demarcar espaços mais adequados e democráticos para os herdeiros da língua portuguesa que vivem na diáspora. Podemos afirmar que o presente trabalho é uma preciosa contribuição para o avanço da discussão sobre o POLH, pois possibilita aos pesquisadores, aos professores e aos pais a reflexão sobre práticas mais recentes ao redor do mundo e sobre a necessidade de formação nesse âmbito para a elaboração funcional de materiais didáticos específicos. Além disso, enriquece, de maneira rigorosa, o panorama bibliográfico dessa que já definimos como “disciplina” com dignidade acadêmica.

Portuguese has been taught both as a foreign language (FL) and as a heritage language (HL) in Europe. The FL context has been more widely explored with a number of research studies and teaching materials published, the main research context being Higher Education. The HL context is a more recent one – about 60 years for the children of migrants originally from Portugal and about 30 years for the children of Brazilian migrants. Research studies have focused on primary and secondary education, and on formal and non-formal teaching contexts. Consequently, the publications on Portuguese as a HL are scarce, especially considering the work based on the experiences of Portuguese and Brazilian migrants in European countries.

This edited book gives visibility to this work as well as contributes to an increase in collaborative studies among Brazilian and European researchers, challenging the still recurrent research practices of considering both varieties of Portuguese separately. This volume compiles chapters from academics and educators working with Portuguese as a HL (Brazilian and European varieties) in six European countries. The reasons for the selection of these countries are explained in the first section below. In the second section, we set out the principles underpinning the organisation of the volume, and then we outline each of the six chapters in turn. In general terms, issues related to the pluricentric nature of Portuguese are addressed in the first chapter. The five individual chapters that follow then present in detail the specificities of the communities within the Brazilian and Portuguese diasporas across Europe. The volume then ends with a brief Afterword.

In the first chapter, we reflect (as editors) on the concept of “Portuguese as a Heritage Language”. We argue that Portuguese needs to be seen as a pluricentric language, which is being taught in the diaspora to learners with different varieties in their family repertoire. We focus on three issues: what a pluricentric language is, the impact of pluricentrism on Portuguese as a Heritage Language, how Portuguese can be taught and learned as a Pluricentric Heritage Language. We draw on discussions of Lusophony and its language planning and policies. Our account is grounded in Bakhtin’s (1993) understanding of the interplay between centripetal and centrifugal forces in the use of language. We argue that adopting a pluricentric perspective on the teaching of Portuguese as a Heritage Language can help in better equipping children of diverse migrant backgrounds to act and interact in an ever increasingly globalized world.  We conclude with a call for a rethink in relation to four aspects of language teaching: the exploration of diverse intralinguistic features, the development of teaching materials that explore social and cultural diversity, curricular progression around pluricentric content and teacher education that prepares teachers to work in plurilingual and pluricultural contexts.

Ana Souza and Olga Barradas discuss the teaching of Portuguese in England in the second chapter and call for the cultivation of Communities of Practice (LAVE; WENGER, 1991). As Souza and Barradas explain, the Council of Europe and European Commission’s focus on plurilingualism had a significant impact on language teaching (ENEVER, 2011). In England, the entitlement to learning languages has become available to pupils as young as 7 years old (DfES, 2002). More recently, English primary schools have been given the freedom to teach any language they wish, including heritage languages (LONG; BOLTON, 2016). This chapter contributes to discussions on language-in-education policies by focussing on how teachers of Portuguese are prepared to work in a migration context. First, the account of the development of Portuguese teaching in the UK includes a description of European and Brazilian schools. Then, the concept of Communities of Practice (LAVE; WENGER, 1991) is discussed, along with its links to teacher education are discussed. After that, two studies of teachers’ experiences of teacher education, one of the stages in language-in-education planning, are reported (KAPLAN; BALDAUF, 1997). The first study involved making video narratives with teachers of European Portuguese. The second study involved focus group work with teachers of Brazilian Portuguese. The findings emerging from both projects indicate that the teachers of European Portuguese share many of the challenges experienced by the Brazilian teachers. Souza and Barradas propose that partnerships should be developed between policymakers and practitioners with a responsibility for both language varieties to promote the cultivation of Communities of Practice (LAVE; WENGER, 1991).

This chapter highlights the literature on language and religion in relation to language and identity studies in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics. With this purpose, the multidisciplinarity (engagement with different disciplines) and the interdisciplinarity (application of methods and approaches of different disciplines) involved in researching religion as a dimension of identity and the link between language and religion in language and identity studies are covered. These issues are introduced with a discussion of the development of the Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR) as a subfield of sociolinguistics in the 21st century. One fundamental issue in the studies of language and religion is that both aspects play an important role as identity markers. An overview of identity and its relationship to language, to religion, and to language and religion is presented in the following section.  Issues of language and religious identities are then re-visited with an examination of ongoing debates in applied linguistics in relation to faith literacies, language planning and policy, and faith and English language teaching. A number of denominations, a variety of contexts and a diversity of ethnic groups were used to illustrate the relevance of language, religion and identity in different parts of the world although the chapter has in the main focused on studies involving Christian and Muslim participants and/ or contexts.

Despite this mass communication paradigm, media have played a limited role in ‘top-down’ language plans (i.e. plans made by governments and which are imposed on a group), as they are usually beyond the influence of language planners (Cormack, 2013). Instead, new media – the Internet and SNSs, in particular - allow their users to develop their own activities, and thus, be involved in ‘bottom-up’ initiatives (Cormack, 2013). In fact, new media has been reported to generate new forms of social gatherings, including religious ones (Sanchotene, 2011). It is now possible to “attend” religious services online, take part in praying sessions via the Internet, watch previously recorded religious programmes on websites and interact with fellow religious members via SNSs.

This situation has led some researchers (e.g. Sanchotene, 2011) to believe that the Internet may lead to a new relationship with religion - one in which the face-to-face contact is replaced by the computer screen. Other researchers (e.g. Lundby, 2011) see the Internet as an online space which interacts with and influences offline spaces. Souza’s (2014) study of Kardecists (i.e. Christians who also believe in reincarnation and spirit mediumship) in London illustrates this. The use of the Internet by the teachers who deliver the faith lessons to the Kardecist children allow for their connection with offline spaces as well as for their development of virtual transnational networks. More specifically, the Kardecist teachers in England decided to adopt English as the language of interaction in their lessons. With this purpose in mind, they developed online links with an organization in Brazil to access their lesson plans in Portuguese. These plans are translated into English by the Brazilian teachers in the UK, who then post the plans online to be accessed by other Kardecist Brazilian migrants in other countries. The teachers in the UK also meet face-to-face to discuss these plans and their lessons. In other words, the online networks support the language ideologies of the Brazilian leaders in relation to the transmission of their religious beliefs offline.