TENSIONS AMONG PORTUGUESES IN METACOMMENTARIES FROM EAST ASIAN INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN BRAZIL

Abstract

ABSTRACT The aims of this paper are to analyse how East Asian international students narrate tensions in Portuguese language, or Portugueses, through metacommentary, and to foster reflections on the counter-hegemonic potential that language learning comprises, particularly when thinking of the internationalisation agenda implemented by a Brazilian public university. To pursue that, we depart from audio-recorded semi-structured interviews, later manually transcribed, with a Korean and a Japanese undergraduate student during their sojourn. We observed that these tensions in Portugueses arose as students’ communicative repertoires were put to the test, either by them or their interlocutors, in different spaces. Our discussion foregrounds how students, when engaging in various social practices on campus and off-campus, manoeuvre sociolinguistic scales in comments made by themselves or by their interlocutors about ways of speaking Portuguese. We considered that, overall, students resort to ecological factors when doing scales, whilst indexing dominant language ideologies. Moreover, it was also possible to conceive that metacommentary from their interlocutors, particularly from Brazilians, impact (negatively) on students’ perception about their language learning and linguistic practices. To tackle these tensions, we advocate for an internationalisation agenda that envisages language education not only to international students, but also to home students and staff in order to promote different degrees of language and social justice awareness.