Session Information
WERA SES 06 B, Cultural Hierarchies and Colonial Thinking in Education
Symposium
Contribution
Keywords: English; Internationalization; Higher Education; Identity English has been promoted as the language of internalization by most institutions all over the world. This has brought to the fore issues of cultural identity and domination related to language in general, and to English in particular, especially in Latin-American countries where English is not an official language and has its use restricted to specific academic activities. From a postcolonial perspective, English has entered these countries’ imaginary as a two-folded tool: on the one hand it is seen as a path to inclusion in global networks of knowledge and privilege; on the other hand it seems to haunt users with the ghost of “native-speakerness” and unattainable levels of proficiency, alongside the risk of losing one’s identity (connected to the use of one’s mother tongue) perceived as a consequence of using English as an educational medium. This paper describes and analyses a recently created English program for professors of different areas to develop their skills in English, offered by the Federal University of Parana, Brazil. The program consists of an initial 30-hour course called “English for Internationalization”, aiming at preparing professors for internationalization at home. The course started from a discussion with Brazilian professors, who have been teaching exclusively in Portuguese, on their experiences with academic English. Such descriptions were then used as the basis of a course program on English from the theoretical perspective of Bhabha’s cultural translation. In this paper I will present what the professors described as their experience with English, and the practices we developed to understand and overcome the myth of the native speaker that haunted most of them.
References
Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The Location of Culture. Oxon: Routledge
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