Meaning-making trajectories about Portuguese and English in experiences of student migration in Brazil

Trayectorias de producción de significado en portugués e inglés en experiencias de migración estudiantil en Brasil

Abstract

This article discusses practices of recovery, projection, evaluation and recontextualization of meanings about language uses in Portuguese and English along trajectories of mobility among international students in Brazil. Considering that contemporary globalization processes diversify academic internationalization and, consequently, the policies regarding foreign language teaching, this proposal focuses on multilingual experiences of two students from the international academic program called PEC-G, at a university in Midwestern Brazil, with data drawn from interviews carried out during a multi-sited ethnography between 2019 and 2022. The results show migrant students’ trajectories in Brazilian higher education as highly anchored in the need to learn Portuguese during their undergraduate years, articulated with language policies linked to the need of English use as a gateway to postgraduate studies. Such practices encapsulate the learning of foreign languages on reified notions of language, nation, and culture. At the same time, students also recontextualize those meanings by metapragmatic recalibrations, leading to new migratory routes and building spaces of belonging to complex and fragmented linguistic communities. Therefore, this article shows the need to understand academic internationalization through the political-ideological crossings that guide institutional demands on migrant students, but also points to possibilities of negotiating complex linguistic-educational practices from a Global South perspective.