Abstract 4D

Sunday, July 9 2:25pm

Social changes and linguistic changes in Brazilian higher education

Raquel Freitag rkofreitag@academico.ufs.b
Universidade Federal de Sergipe, São Cristóvão, Brazil

The expansion of higher education in Brazil over the last few decades has resulted not only in a significant increase in registrations but also in a diversification of regions and social origins among university students. Most notably, a new profile of undergraduates has attended higher education: young people from the lower class who studied in public schools, but only after the creation of new educational policies did they reach public universities. These changes lead to contact and conflicts in language. Since Brazilian Portuguese is assumed as a standard, faculty said new undergraduates are deficient in reading and writing skills, and they recognize that their difficulties affect their performance in classes and assessments.

“A língua da universidade” (The university language) is an integrated project in progress which aims to delineate these new linguistic patterns of Brazilian Portuguese that is being configured at the university as a result of the linguistic contact arising from the expansion policies of higher education. Sociolinguistic interviews with students from various social profiles were conducted systematically, and reading aloud tasks were recorded to create a sample that supports sociolinguistic analysis of phonological and grammatical features of Brazilian Portuguese.

Describing the linguistic profile of undergraduates is the first step to thinking of effective strategies to address the problem of difficulties in reading and writing, which interfere with performance in the course. The grammatical parameterization at phonological and morphosyntactic levels of the linguistic variety spoken and written by undergraduates has subsidized linguistic planning actions, such as courses on academic reading and writing, reading strategies, and grammatical review. At the same time, actions have been taken to make the faculty more aware of the linguistic differences, which must be recognized as such as a starting point for propositional actions concerning academic retention and evasion demands at the university.