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Plurilingualism and Critical Literacies in the Teaching of English in Higher Education



Author(s)

Cláudia Hilsdorf Rocha

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DOI:10.17265/1539-8072/2014.11.001

University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil

This work aims at discussing the concept of critical and plurilingual English teaching within the context of the Interdisciplinary Higher Education Program recently implemented at the University of Campinas, Brazil. This program aims at widening possibilities for public students to have access to Higher Education. The teaching of English as a foreign language is part of the curriculum and one of the challenges faced was to design a language course that meant to be meaningful to students and able to develop the necessary knowledge and literacies for active citizenship as well. A discursive approach to language was adopted and, this way, Bakhtinian theories, re-contextualized to the educational field, support the claim for the development of critical literacy in the process. Along with the concept of multiliteracies, linked to the notion of speech genres, the idea of a plurilingual, plurivocal, and pluristylistic language teaching is theoretically discussed and briefly illustrated. The results show that such an approach successfully led to meaningful and critical practices in the language classroom in Higher Education.

plurilingualism, speech genres, multiliteracies, English language teaching, Higher Education