Português Língua de Herança: realidades e desafios (contexto de ensino universitário)

Abstract

Portuguese Heritage Language: intuitively, when we think of this term, we define it as referring to a language that is inherited, that comes from family ties; the Portuguese spoken by parents, grandparents, or close relatives, from a country that you know or do not know, that you have heard about, that you have visited. Heritage Language is a concept that shows the relationship of speakers with a language whose status is difficult to designate, and which gravitates between mother tongue, language of origin, immigrant language, minority language, community language, or home language (Valdés, 1995, cited. Ortiz Alvarez. 2000:156). Almeida and Flores (2017:291) define the speaker of Portuguese Língua de Herança as the speaker of Portuguese descent who is a second or third generation emigrant and was born in the host country or emigrated at an early age, having contact with the Língua de Herança mainly in the family context. The teaching of Portuguese as a heritage language within the domain of language teaching has many points in common with the teaching of Portuguese as a foreign language and Portuguese as a second language. In this study, we intend to elucidate some of the following questions: What is it about Heritage Languages that makes them different from Portuguese as a Foreign Language and Portuguese as a Second Language? What distinguishes a heritage speaker from, for example, a native speaker or foreign learner? How can we organize the teaching of PLH in heterogeneous classes in a university context?

DOI: https://doi.org/10.56515/PLJ562476695