Describing and interpreting worldviews: critical language awareness and cultural literacy in the context of teaching Portuguese as a foreign language

Abstract

Learning a foreign language involves more than merely developing skills related to the knowledge and use of grammatical structures for specific communicative purposes. It is a process that also integrates the recognition of discursive configurations, often ideological, that may be revealed in texts, particularly in specific cultural and social contexts of production and dissemination. Within a globalised world and in various communication contexts, often with an intercultural dimension, hegemonic discourses are produced and disseminated around beliefs, identities, events and geographies, which in some way sustain and naturalise unequal power relations and areas of tension and conflict. This work aligns with theoretical perspectives that recognise the importance of discursive and critical shifts in language teaching and intercultural communication, as well as with approaches that understand language as a social practice, namely Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis. It is argued that teaching and learning contexts for Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PLE) benefit from training critical awareness of language through its different modes of realisation, and from teaching cultural literacy. In particular, when framed by these approaches and equipped with strategies that facilitate the acquisition and application of socially committed textual analysis tools, PLE teaching methodologies enable students to question and evaluate texts in Portuguese in relation to their everyday and professional practices. They also facilitate the mastery of different modes of meaning and an understanding of how they work, making this explicit. To begin with, this article describes and explains a learning sequence for critical discourse analysis of authentic multimodal texts in Portuguese, involving classroom tasks and independent work. The sequence was implemented in the context of the Discourse and Multimodality course unit, part of the Applied Portuguese Language course taught at the School of Education and Social Sciences of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria to Chinese students in the 2023/2024 academic year. In this context, the portfolio resource is highlighted as an element of individual application and assessment of knowledge, and the results of the application of the proposals are discussed, with reference to works describing and interpreting elements of connotation and interdiscursive configurations in texts selected by the students and included in their portfolios. As a result, the textual analysis work carried out by the students reveals that exposure to authentic texts, which allows them to describe and interpret verbal and visual choices, and the types of relationships that different modes establish between themselves, enables them to develop a critical and socially committed cultural awareness. There was evidence of students identifying and questioning the interrelationship between language, culture, economics, ideology and power, as well as the materiality of representation, both verbal and visual, and, very importantly, the social and communicative specificities of the texts.