Full Title: Education for plurilingualism: the possibilities with the pluralistic approaches (16 LUSITANISTENTAG)

Date: 15-Sep-2025 - 19-Sep-2025
Location: University of Munich LMU, Germany
Contact Person: Simone Raquel Berniero
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://www.romanistik.uni-muenchen.de/lusitanistentag25_pt/simposios/didactica/educacao/index.html

Linguistic Field(s): Applied Linguistics; General Linguistics; Sociolinguistics

Call for Papers:

The Portuguese language (historical language, with its complex diversity) is spoken by around 260 million people (3.7% of the world's population), being the fourth most spoken mother tongue in the world. (Instituto Camões, 2022) In Brazil, a country with an estimated population of 206 million (IBGE 2023), Portuguese is “the mother tongue of almost all of the inhabitants of this country” (Bagno, 2014). Because although it is the official national language, it is not necessarily the mother tongue of all Brazilians, but of a large part of the country's population. Different and complementary Brazilian political-social factors such as Brazil's past and recent economic growth, its reception policy for foreigners, such as the latest Migration Amnesty Law, law no. 1,664/2009, which authorizes the regularization of foreigners who lived illegally in the country (to cite some examples) has made Brazil famously recognized as a welcoming country for immigrants/refugees. To illustrate in numbers according to (Pereira, 2017, p. 110): “In 2010, the number of immigrants reached 70 thousand, [...] asylum requests reached, in 2015, almost 29 thousand, according to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (ACNUR) (2010).”
With these social movements, naturally, the Brazilian linguistic scenario is dynamically redesigned. Thus, having the school domain as one of the social locus of transformation(action). Therefore, Portuguese is the medium of instruction language for curricular components for students who have not yet learned it and/or are in the process of learning/acquiring the language. This event highlights the need to think about the place of languages ​​in schools and the development of plurilingual skills (of teachers and students, immigrants/refugees or not) in which a plurilingual approach to language teaching implies “pensar o ensino e a aprendizagem de forma sinergética e integrada, promovendo zonas de transferência entre diferentes conhecimentos linguísticos, declarativos e processuais já adquiridos pelos aprendentes.” Melo-Pfeifer (2020, p.22) We thus highlight the notorious and emerging need to understand the processes of teachers' pedagogical actions, and the didactic-pedagogical relationships that shape the perception and attitudes of the teaching group, students in relation to linguistic diversity in Brazilian schools.
And, based on understanding this context, work to promote teacher’s training to equip them, through work with pluralistic approaches (Candelier, 2007) for work in favor of plurilingual education “pautada na sensibilização perante as suas línguas e as do outro, mas sem deixar de investir nas diferentes habilidades que podem ser desenvolvidas a partir de uma língua” (Horst, Krug, 2020, p. 1278). Thinking, this way, about the set of individuals involved in this network that associates the school domain, focusing on teachers and students as a whole (immigrants/refugees or not). Because, “a cultura linguística brasileira, pode-se dizer, é ainda fortemente monolíngue e elitizada” (Broch, 2014, p.16) and we need, through the repertoire of knowledge produced by linguistics, to provide opportunities and support the promotion of practices favorable to a plurilingual education, so that our country does not repeat, in a school environment, mistakes from the past, with immigration languages ​​from other historical moments that arrived in Brazil.
Furthermore, we highlight deaf individuals, who also do not have Portuguese (an oral language) as their mother tongue, but rather a signed language (LIBRAS, by way of example), in the case of Brazil. In addition to communications proposals focused on the reality of Brazil, experiences from other Portuguese-speaking countries are especially welcome, also considering Portuguese in multilingual contexts and phenomena that emerge from these contacts, such as: borrowing, code-mixing, code-switching , code-blending, translanguaging and teaching perspectives from plural approaches, therefore, according to Andrade; Lourenço and Sá (2010, p. 70) “a universalização do acesso à educação, os movimentos migratórios recentes e a rede global de comunicação, entre outros fatores, trouxeram para o interior das escolas uma grande multiplicidade de línguas e culturas, (CNE, 2008), com os quais a educação escolar deverá saber lidar quotidianamente, de forma a garantir a equidade e o desenvolvimento pleno das potencialidades de que cada criança é portadora (UNICEF, 1989; UNESCO, 2001).”

Proposals must be sent to Cristiane Horst and Simone Raquel Bernieri by March 15, 2025:

Cristiane Horst: [email protected]

Simone Raquel Bernieri: [email protected]