Gastronomia para alimentar falantes interculturais – uma experiência de aprendizagem a distância durante a pandemia

Abstract

This work draws on an experience put into practice at the 34th Portuguese Language Summer Course, the first distance learning Summer course due to the Covid-19 pandemic, organized by the University of Macau. This project revisits concepts like “intercultural speaker”, “culture”, “intercultural communicative competence” developed by different authors (Byram 1997, 2008; Deardorff 2009; 2012; Fantini 2009, amongst others) and presents an intercultural proposal for the teaching and learning of Portuguese Languaculture(s) based on cooking recipes from the diverse Portuguese speaking world. These recipes were recorded on video and dishes were prepared by Portuguese speakers with different cultural backgrounds. Since gastronomy is a cultural aspect common to all communities and of interest to our students, who were mostly Chinese, based on the aforementioned videos and recipes, we developed various tasks that contributed to the development of participants’ intercultural communicative competence. This experiment attempts to demonstrate that gastronomy can not only contribute to develop intercultural speakers, but also to raise learners’ awareness that our culture can be viewed as “foreign” by the languacultures communities. The project will be further developed in 2021, at the 35th distance learning Summer Course.