Abstract
The teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language has faced many challenges since its establishment as part of the field of Portuguese as a Foreign Language, mainly for presenting specificities unknown to the teachers and researchers in the field (GROSSO, 2010; DEUSDARÁ; ARANTES; BRENNER, 2018). Among these challenges are the methods employed to analyze the oral performance of the Host Language speakers. With this in mind, this report aims at discussing the evaluation of the oral performance of adult immigrants, beginner students of Brazilian Portuguese as a Host Language, based on two descriptive scales of the measure of Outcome Achievement, a multifaceted measure that looks, mainly, at pragmatic aspects of language use in tasks whose main focus is the communicative outcome of the performance. Even though the proposal of criteria that compose the measure of Outcome Achievement is based on the interpretation of raters, which might bring incongruences to the evaluations, the measure presents an alternative to evaluating oral performance in contrast with other more traditional measures. In conclusion, the employment of the Outcome Achievement measure to analyze oral performance in tasks to teach Portuguese as a Host Language brings aspects that are inherent to this context of teaching, taking into account the immediate objectives of language use of the immigrant population.
Highlights
The teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language has increased in importance in the latest years and it became an urgent matter for research to embark on investigating the processes taking place in these classrooms
It is of common knowledge that the teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language can be inserted alongside other specific contexts of teaching under the umbrella field of Portuguese as a Foreign Language, the Host context brings its specificities to the discussion of how to teach and evaluate language learning, which has not been addressed by the broader area yet (JENSEN, 2002; LOPES, 2009; DEUSDARÁ; ARANTES; BRENNER, 2018)
The tradition in the field of language learning, concerning the evaluation of language development has been strongly connected to standardized tests that look mainly at structural elements of language which might not be the most appropriate approach to the Host Language context – though some important changes have happened in the recent years (LONG, 2015), with the advance of proficiency tests and scales that are more function oriented instead of grammar-based
Summary
The teaching of Portuguese as a Host Language has increased in importance in the latest years and it became an urgent matter for research to embark on investigating the processes taking place in these classrooms. Among the specificities brought by the teaching of Portuguese as a Host language is a necessity for specialized teachers, for personalized teaching materials (SILVEIRA; XHAFAJ, 2020), and for adequate techniques and methods for analyzing the language development of the speakers in this context. These aspects have to be coherent with the students’ context of learning and, primarily, with their learning objectives. Research in the field has lacked a careful consideration of how to prepare and evaluate language performance considering these populations’ immediate communication needs
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