Intercultural competence development by learners of Portuguese as an additional language: a multicase study in a preparatory course for PEC-G candidates, offered by CEFET-MG
interculturality; intercultural communicative competence; PLA; Pré-PEC-G; CEFET-MG
During the last decades, globalization has influenced the flow of foreigners who are looking for opportunities to study and / or work in the international labor market. This worldwide scenario has provided the meeting of people from several countries and cultures. Regarding Brazil, in recent years, educational institutions are receiving more and more foreign students who choose to study here, facilitated by some governmental initiatives, such as the Student-Undergraduate Agreement Program (PEC-G) (BRAZIL, 2013). Given this panorama, new contexts of communication have been made feasible and, therefore, new questions about foreign language teaching and learning have been discussed. One of them is this new approach to teaching based on interculturality: the intercultural approach (MENDES, 2011). Such an approach brings with it a new vision of language - as language-culture. In this sense, students who come to study the Portuguese language-culture in Brazil end up participating in daily communicative situations with other Brazilian Portuguese speaking subjects. These events, by providing multicultural and intercultural interactions, have produced experiences of the third spaces (KRAMSCH, 1993), that is, an intermediary space in which renegotiations occur between the language-culture itself and the target language of the foreign student, which is also called intercultural competence (BYRAM, 1997). Since this process is evidenced in a context of immersion, this research seeks to analyze the development of intercultural competence of the students taking the preparatory course for the Celpe-Bras exam, offered by CEFET-MG for candidates for PEC-G. The data will be generated through the application of a questionnaire and the conduct of monthly interviews. These data analysis will be based on the four 'perceptions' of native culture and foreign culture proposed by Kramsch (1993) and the ‘intercultural communicative competence model’ proposed by Byram (1997). It is hoped that this research results can contribute to the discussion concerning interculturality and teaching practices of Portuguese as an additional language - PLA, in the Brazilian context.