31.561, Review: Portuguese; Applied Linguistics; Linguistic Theories: Koch, Reimann (2019)

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Subject: 31.561, Review: Portuguese; Applied Linguistics; Linguistic Theories: Koch, Reimann (2019)

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Date: Fri, 07 Feb 2020 20:50:13
From: Enrico Torre [contact at enricotorre.com]
Subject: As Variedades do Português no Ensino de Português Língua Não Materna

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3118.html

EDITOR: Christian  Koch
EDITOR: Daniel  Reimann
TITLE: As Variedades do Português no Ensino de Português Língua Não Materna
SERIES TITLE: Romanistische Fremdsprachenforschung und Unterrichtsentwicklung
PUBLISHER: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Enrico Torre, Università degli Studi di Genova

SUMMARY

‘As Variedades do Português no Ensino do Português Língua Não Materna,’ edited
by Christian Koch and Daniel Reimann, is a collection of essays on the
teaching of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL, henceforth). The volume,
entirely written in Portuguese, situates itself in the context of the
increasing awareness of the importance of multilateral management of the
so-called ‘pluricentric languages,’ i.e., “languages as with several
interacting centers, each providing a national variety with at least some of
its own (codified) norms.” (Clyne 1992, p. 1; see Soares da Silva 2018 for a
recent overview of the pluricentrism of Portuguese). Following a short
introduction jointly contributed by the editors, the book is divided into four
parts.

In their brief prologue, Koch and Reimann concisely introduce the problem of
dealing with language variation in the teaching of pluricentric languages
generally and of Portuguese more specifically. The authors start from the
assumption, nowadays largely shared, that teaching a modern language means to
anticipate the actual encounter with such a language, using exposure to
authentic materials as well as promoting informal contacts with native
speakers. This implies that too strict an adherence to a standard norm would
never be a good practice to teach a pluricentric language. As a result,
finding ways to include variation in the classes of Portuguese becomes a
matter of necessity.

Part I is entitled ‘A polifonia do português’ and contains a single chapter
provided by Benjamin Meisnitzer, entitled ‘O português como língua
pluricêntrica: Un desafio para a didática do Português Língua Estrangeira.’
After mentioning the properties typical of pluricentric languages, the author
underlines that Portuguese falls within the category with at least two
standard varieties: the European norm (EP, henceforth) and the Brazilian norm
(BP, from now on), emphasizing the independence of BP from EP as a diaphasic,
diastratic, and diatopic system. With regard to African and Asian countries,
Meisnitzer points out that the situation is far less clearly defined, as the
spread of the use of Portuguese is a recent phenomenon and in most countries
most speakers speak it as a second language (Angola seems to be a
counter-example, though, see Heigemeijer 2016). However, it is important to
highlight that endogenous standards seem to be on the rise at least in the
case of Angola and Mozambique. Concerning teaching, the author observes that
the pluricentric status of Portuguese is still marginally considered as
variants are not systematically addressed; rather, teaching materials tend to
focus on either BP or EP, only.

Part II, ‘As variedades do português na formação universitaria em Portugal,’
is made up of three chapters. The first chapter, contributed by Isabel
Margarida Duarte, is entitled ‘Português língua pluricêntrica: Formação de
professores de PLE na Universidade do Porto.’ After defending the importance
of considering language variation in the teaching of PFL, Duarte presents the
measures which have been adopted, in this direction, within the M.A. course in
PFL of the University of Porto. First, she outlines the compulsory modules
which focus on the pluricentrism of the language that students need to attend
in the first year (Varieties of Portuguese, Topics in Literature of
Portuguese-speaking Countries, and Topics in Culture of Portuguese-speaking
Countries), and the research lines they normally pursue in their second-year
internship with regard to language variation (the language and culture of
students from Lusophone countries other than Portugal, the polycentrism of
Portuguese in non-European and non-Brazilian contexts, the status of
Portuguese in the context of teaching Portuguese abroad, and the discussion
and criticism of the concept itself of ‘Lusophone world’). Then, she provides
a few guidelines on how to include pluricentrism in the teaching of Portuguese
as a non-native language.

In the third chapter, entitled ‘Português língua estrangeira no ensino
superior: Dar voz às vozes dos estudantes,’ Dulce Melão evaluates the
situation of the teaching of Portuguese in secondary school. First of all, the
authoress introduces the theoretical framework of her study, namely the theory
of social representations (Castellotti & Moore 2002). Then, Melão presents her
empirical study in detail, clarifying its objectives at the onset: i) reflect
on the contribution of the theoretical framework of social representation to
the teaching of PFL; ii) identify, describe, and understand the students’
representations of PFL. Eighteen  secondary-school students were presented
with a questionnaire at the beginning of their course, and then again at the
end. The author obtained the following results: i) most students decided to
study Portuguese because of their need to communicate in everyday life and to
understand academic contents; ii) at the beginning, most students consider the
Portuguese language difficult or complex; iii) most students indicated grammar
as their main source of problems; iv) the vast majority of students consider
the use of language in everyday life as the greatest advantage of learning
Portuguese; v) at the end of the course, most students would describe
Portuguese as interesting and useful to find work; vi) their main source of
problems would still be grammar, along with writing; vii) the best advantage
of learning Portuguese would be an increased level of employability and the
understanding of Portuguese culture.

In the fourth chapter, ‘Usos que criam vozes: Divergência pragmática na
aprendizagem de Português Língua Não Materna,’ Anabela Fernandes and Joana
Cortez-Smyth briefly reflect on the inclusion of pragmatics in the teaching of
PFL. First of all, the authors describe pragmatic competence in a foreign
language in the domain of listening, reading, speaking and writing. Then, they
argue for the need to include pragmatics in the teaching of foreign languages,
due to the need to understand i) the variation of cultural norms in terms of
appropriateness; ii) regional and individual differences; iii) grammatical and
lexical complexities; iv) discursive subtleties; v) non-verbal behavior. Then,
the authors show that the inclusion of the pragmatic dimension of Portuguese
in the courses enables the development of the awareness of linguistic
plasticity, favoring autonomy and freedom in the creation of one’s own voice,
starting from the reception of different voices and varieties.

The third part of the book is entitled ‘As variantes do português no material
de ensino’ and comprises four chapters. The first chapter, contributed by
Thomas Johnen, is entitled ‘As variantes do Portuguêse en manuais de Português
Língua Estrangeira.’ The author provides an overview of the presence and
representation of the variants of Portuguese in PFL manuals, based on the
analysis of nine manuals published either in Portugal (eight) or Macao (one),
nine published in Brazil, and fifteen in non-Lusophone countries (namely,
twelve in Germany, two in the United States, and one in France). The author
observes that the manuals published in Brazil tend to focus on the variant
spoken in this country, mostly ignoring other variants. The volumes published
in Portugal show a similar tendency, privileging EP but some of them are
keener on treating other varieties. Then, the author reports that, in Germany,
different manuals are published for the two established norms of BP and EP,
although mentions of the other variant are not too rare in the same book. The
volumes published in France and the United States seem keener to include
materials from different varieties, but – importantly – the author notices
that (at least concerning Jouet-Pastré et al. 2013), examples are often
presented as peculiarities of a variant while they are also possible in the
other). As a general conclusion, Johnen observes a general lack of
metalinguistic reflection on the similarities and differences between
variants, and a virtually total lack of information on diastratic and
diaphasic variation.

In the second chapter, entitled ‘PE com PB e PB com PE? Abordando o
desenvolvimento de competências em duas variedades nos manuais Olá Portugal! e
Beleza!, Christian Koch compares two volumes, ‘Ola Portugal!’ and ‘Beleza!’.
The former is published in Portugal, whereas the latter is published in
Brazil. Both volumes aim to include both variants throughout the A1/A2 course,
offering a range of activities. Contrary to the general tendency to focus on a
single variant, restricting the treatment of the other one to a specific,
self-contained unit, these two books consistently approach both variants from
the beginning to the end. Based on his comparison between the two books, Koch
observes that the approach to BP in ‘Ola Portugal!’ is more anecdotic, whereas
‘Beleza!’ includes a more systematic treating of some grammatical aspects of
BP. As a result, the author argues that teaching and learning EP with BP
implies above all transmitting impressions of BP and practicing oral
comprehension, above all. On the other hand, teaching BP with EP implies the
study of grammatical structures of EP, given that these still serve as a model
for the prestigious registers of BP.   

The third chapter, contributed by Leonor Paula Santos, is entitled ‘Sugestões
práticas para a integração das variedades da língua portuguesa na aula de
PLE,’ and consists a series of proposals to integrate different varieties of
the language in the classroom. The authoress, starting from the case in point
of the teaching of PFL in the German state of Baden Württemberg, whose school
curriculum aims to develop the students’ intercultural competence. The
authoress emphasizes that including regional variation in the teaching of PFL
is not necessary a confusing factor for learners, as long as it is worked out
with awareness and organization. Then, Santos proposes a series of activities
which may be adapted to the scope of including variation in the classroom.

The fourth chapter, contributed by Teresa Bagão, is entitled ‘PE and PB – duas
variedades em dialogo: Contributos para a compreensão do oral em PLNM/PLE.’
This chapter presents a set of authentic materials that empower an integration
of the two established norms, EP and BP, in the context of teaching and
learning of oral understanding skills. After proving a brief outline of
linguistic variation in the Portuguese national school curriculum and the
official programs of Portuguese in Portugal as a native and non-native
language, the authoress concisely systematizes the difference between EP and
BP in terms of morphology and syntax, phonetics, and the lexicon. Finally,
keeping in mind all these distinct levels of language, she puts forward a
proposal for the adoption of a selection of publicly available authentic oral
materials downloaded from the web: contemporary songs, conversations from the
platforms Audio-Lingua and LingQ, and also the website ‘Say it in Portuguese’,
and the level of proficiency will be, globally, B1-B2. At the end of her
chapter, Bagão points out the necessity to organize a bank of oral documents,
of different origin, easily available.

The fourth and last part of the book is entitled ‘As variedades no ensino de
PLNM no mundo: Alemanha, Galícia e Timor-Leste.’ The first chapter is
contributed by Maria Teresa Nóbrega Duarte Soares. It is entitled ‘Ensino do
Português no estrangeiro: Alemanha – da língua maternal a língua de herança’
focuses on the concept of ‘heritage language,’ i.e. the language used within a
family, which is related to the origins of people who migrate abroad. It is a
language restricted to social groups that coexist with a dominant language.
The authoress addresses the phenomenon of linguistic xenophobia, which often
leads Portuguese families abroad to neglect their language in favor of that of
the host country, arguing that it is based on myths. Then, she introduces the
courses of Portuguese language and culture, highlighting the heterogeneity of
the students in these courses as a problem. The authoress suggests that
manuals considering this issue would help resolve the problem and improve the
quality of the teaching. At the end of the chapter, Duarte Soares criticizes
the recent introduction of a 100-euro yearly fee, which led to a decrease in
the number of students.

In the second chapter, entitled ‘“Hai moitas palabras en Galego que pensas que
son iguais no Portugués e isto non é así, pero como en Castelán son distintas
que ao Galego, pensas que sì”: Diagnóstico de competências e indentificação de
estratégias na comunicação oral do aluno galego-falante,’ Carla Sofía Amado
presents an empirical study aimed to envision teaching methods and learning
strategies to facilitate cohesion, coherence, and fluency in the oral usage of
language, as free as possible from phonetic and lexical interferences. The
author ran an experiment with a group of students of the University of
Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, a bilingual (Galician/Spanish) region in the
north west of Spain who were attending the second semester of the second year
of Portuguese. Amado reports that the proximity between Galician and
Portuguese cause the student to feel falsely fluent in Portuguese. However,
she points out two other factors which may contribute to this situation: the
inadequacy of the teaching methods, which mirror those used in the context of
PFL (thus failing to address the proximity of the source and the target
language), and the failure to explore the culture divergences between Galicia
and Portugal.

The third chapter, contributed by Karim Noemi Rühle Indart, is entitled ‘Uma
Abordagem Didática Plurilíngue para a Língua Portuguesa no Sistema de Educação
em Timor-Leste,’ and it overviews the education system in East Timor after the
country obtained independence from Indonesia (1999). In 2001, the country
joined the Community of Portuguese-speaking Countries, receiving help from
Portugal and Brazil to implement the language in education. The Portuguese
cooperation mostly acted in the area of education, and helped the Minister of
Education from the beginning, having a strong influence on its policies and
plans. On the other hand, the Brazilian cooperation arrived later and in a
more gradual fashion, engaging in projects of adult literacy and the education
of professors and students with resources of distance learning. The only
university in East Timor is the Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e, which
received the attention of the teaching programs of Portuguese from both
Cooperations.
 
EVALUATION

Overall, ‘As variedades do Português no ensino de Português língua não
materna’ represents a valuable collection of contributions to the study of
language variation in the context of foreign language teaching, focusing on a
language which, despite counting 280-million speakers, is still to some extent
underrepresented the field of sociolinguistics, at least in comparison with
other pluricentric languages such English, French, and Spanish.

As a whole, the book provides a significant amount of information on several
aspects of the (actually, very broad) field of the teaching of Portuguese as a
Foreign Language, including information on teaching practices and policies
both in Portugal and abroad as well as on teaching materials. One of the
strongest points of these contributions is the identification of blind spots
in the current language teaching practices and the suggestion of measures to
improve the situation. In so doing, not only does this slim volume cover a
sizeable range of topics but, perhaps even more importantly, it also provides
stimuli to advance the debate. As a consequence, the present reviewer deems it
safe to argue that it represents a fine contribution to the growing literature
on language teaching as well as on the challenges presented by language
pluricentrism. Each chapter can stand as a self-contained contribution but the
volume as a whole is, overall, coherent. For all the above-mentioned reasons,
this book represents a welcome addition to the ‘Romanistiche
Fremdsprachenforschung und Unterrichtsentwicklung’ Narr Francke Attempto
series.

The decision to include contributions introducing a plurality of methodologies
and/or theoretical perspectives provides the reader with a overview of the
‘landscape’ which can be observed in the four areas the book deals with,
namely the polyphony of Portuguese, the varieties of Portuguese in university
education in Portugal, the varieties of Portuguese in teaching materials, and
the varieties of Portuguese in PFL teaching abroad, illustrating the current
situation and collecting a number of proposals to find ‘the way forward.’
Although to a certain extent EP-centered (unavoidably), the volume does not
fail to make relevant comparisons between the two established norms of the
Portuguese language, and also, when possible, briefly characterizing the main
traits of the other varieties.

Meisnitzer’s chapter on the pluricentrism of Portuguese and its consequences
for the teaching of PFL is complete, rich in detail, and represents a good
overview of the situation of the language in terms of both its sociolinguistic
map and language policies. Likewise, the three chapters on PFL teaching in
Portuguese universities provide a clear, although necessarily brief, summary
of the situation, approached from three different perspectives. The four
chapters on teaching materials encompass a range of distinct types of
materials, which include manuals, which are compared adopting both an
in-breadth (Johnen) and a more in-depth approach (Koch), but also other
written and oral materials (Santos, Bagão). Finally, the three ending chapters
on linguistic varieties in the teaching of PFL abroad present case studies on
three situations which are extremely different from each other, in terms of
both the geopolitical and social setting and the specific focus of each study.
As such, this part is less coherent and more miscellaneous, but this is due to
the nature of the contributions; therefore, it does not detract from the value
of the book.

While my overall evaluation of the book is positive, I will now point out
three interconnected weaknesses of the volume. First of all, the chapters
presenting empirical studies are sometimes somewhat vague concerning the data
collection process and the methodology adopted: the database and the
collection process as well as the methods adopted are often presented only in
a brisk manner. Likewise, the analysis and the discussion of the results are
often only sketched. I do appreciate that this may be due to a two-fold
reason: the nature of the studies themselves, which are often only
preliminary, and length limitations. Still, I cannot help noticing that there
is, a certain disproportion between the introductory/background sections and
the analytical ones, as the balance is in general biased in favor of the
former, while the opposite would be more appropriate.

Apart from leading to a relative lack of detail in the analysis and discussion
of the results, this issue is also related to another less than ideal feature
of the book, namely a certain level of redundancy, which could have been
circumvented by making a more extensive use of internal cross-referencing,
which instead is virtually never used in the volume. For instance, the
peculiarities of different varieties are repeated almost verbatim in different
chapters. These repetitions do not add anything valuable to the volume and,
while they do not represent a serious flaw, they tend to slightly hamper the
narrative flow. At the same time, this reviewer considers that the book would
have benefited greatly from internal references among the distinct chapters,
which would have fostered the cohesion of the volume, also providing the
reader with a roadmap that could help them to fully appreciate the quality of
the work.

With relation to more formal issues, it is possible to notice a certain lack
of uniformity in the length and structure of the contributions, which, to some
extent, detract from the general elegance and cohesion of the volume. Indeed,
some chapters are relatively long and detailed whereas others are much shorter
and their contribution only consists of an outline of the topic. While the
latter generally still provide relevant information, they often run the risk
of leaving the reader with a sense of incompleteness, which may be a somewhat
frustrating experience. To be sure, despite these liabilities, the present
reviewer believes this book represents a valuable contribution to the study of
Portuguese as a pluricentric language and, in particular, to the search for
solutions to face the challenges posed by the inclusion of language variation
in PFL teaching.

In summary, the book provides a good snapshot of the polyphony of Portuguese,
the teaching of PFL in Portugal, and the treatment of PFL in the teaching
materials currently available. Moreover, it presents three case studies
dealing with the teaching of PFL abroad, which provide information on very
distinct contexts. The main limitation of the book is represented by the
presence of a substantial amount of repeated information which, in the case of
empirical studies, not rarely comes at the expense of a more detailed
description of data and methodology as well as a more in-depth analysis and
discussion of the results.   
 
REFERENCES

Castellotti, Véronique, & Moore, Danièle. 2002. Social representations of
language and teaching. Guide for the development of language education
policies in Europe from linguistic diversity to plurilingual education.
Strasbourg: Council of Europe.
 
Clyne, Michael. 1992. Pluricentric Languages – Introduction. In M. Clyne
(ed.), Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin &
New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 1-10.
 
Heigemeijer, Tjerk. 2016. O português em contacto em África. In E. Carrilho &
A.M. Martins (eds.), Manual de Linguística Portuguesa. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter. 43-67.
 
Jouet-Pastré, Clémence, Klobucka, Ana M., Sobral, Patricia I.S., Moreira,
Maria Luci de Biaji, & Hutchinson, Amélia P. 2013 [2007]. Ponto do Encontro:
Portuguese as a World Language. Boston: Pearson.
 
Soares da Silva, Augusto. 2018. O Português no Mundo e a Sua Estandardização:
Entre a Realidade de uma Língua Pluricêntrica e o Desejo de uma Língua
Internacional. In H. Barroso (ed.), O Português na Casa do Mundo, Hoje. Braga:
Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Enrico Torre holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lancaster University, UK and he
is currently a research fellow in English at the University of Genoa, Italy.
His research interests include English linguistics, Romance languages,
theories of language, and the history and philosophy of linguistics. He is
currently investigating the double-object constructions and the simultaneity
network in (the history of) English. At the same time, he is working on the
position and properties of subjects and objects in the pluricentrism of
Portuguese. Moreover, he is studying the structural heritage of usage-based
linguistics. In the recent past, he has analyzed the patterns of use of
Italian idioms.





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