INTERCULTURAL EDUCATION OF PORTUGUESE SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHERS FOR THE GUINEA MULTICULTURAL CONTEXT.
Portuguese language education in African contexts. Teacher education.
Intercultural Approach. Portuguese language. Guinea Bissau.
Guinea-Bissau is a small and young nation on the southern African coast, multiple and
large in its ethnic groups and Portuguese as its official language. The country presents
the context of multilingualism and the Portuguese language that serves as an official
communicational current, as a rule, it is not constituted as the mother tongue of Guinean
speakers. Portuguese as a Second Language, however, is taught at school, thus being the
language of schooling and institution, however, little used in relation to other local
languages. The teaching of LP in the Guinean multilingual and multicultural context is
predominantly based on the grammatical approach. The main objective of this thesis is
to contribute to the training of Portuguese language teachers in Guinea-Bissau,
proposing and encouraging the adoption of a new idea of LP training and teaching,
based on the Guinean linguistic and cultural reality in an observation corpus of ten
teachers in their classes and regular education environments in the country, in the
context of secondary and higher education, in a synchronic cut of the present in each of
them. As a theoretical contribution, for discussion we will transit in the areas of Applied
Linguistics, Studies on Multiculturalism, Linguistic Education, Teacher Training and
Interculturality, for this, among other authors, we consider Mendes (2004; 2008; 2012;
2014; 2016, 2022), Matos (2014); Serrani (2005), Moura (2015), Porcher (2004),
Gonçalves (2010), Candau (2008; 2016), Silva and Cabrera (2013). In order to answer
the research questions and achieve the objectives, a qualitative applied research of an
ethnographic nature was adopted as a methodological procedure. The corpus obtained in
the investigation was constituted from the investigation of (10) teachers participating in
the research, in three high schools and a University, in Guinea-Bissau, using
instruments and research procedures typical of ethnography, such as the conducting
interviews, observing the classroom and analyzing educational documents. The results
showed the need for (re)construction of pedagogical actions guided by an intercultural
and critical posture, which dialogue with the Guinean context and the social practices of
language use, aiming at the promotion of intercultural dialogue in our complex society
and particularly, in the contexts currently visited in Guinea-Bissau.