Language ideologies on English as a Lingua Franca in Brazil: conflicting positions expressed by undergraduate students

Abstract

Abstract Drawing on the concept of ideology proposed by Voloshinov (1929 [1999], Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem: Problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. Trad. Michel Lahud; Yara Frateschi Vieira 9 ed. São Paulo: Editora Hucitec.) and on the notion of language ideology (Woolard 1998, Introduction. In Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard & Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.), Language ideologies practice and theory, 3–47. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Kroskrity 2004, Language ideologies. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology, 496–517. Blackwell Publishing), this paper addresses language ideologies expressed by participants of an Academic Writing course taught to undergraduate students majoring in English and Portuguese in a public university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The data from which participants’ language ideologies are interpreted come from two literacy events that integrate a wider set of literacy practices (Street 2000, Literacy events and literacy practices. In Marilyn Martin-Jones & Kathryn E. Jones (eds.), Multilingual literacies: Comparative perspectives on research and practice, 17–29. Amsterdam: John Benjamin’s, Street 2009, Ethnography of writing and reading. In David R. Olson & Nancy Torrance (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of literacy, 329–345. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) in which participants engaged in Moodle, the virtual learning environment of the course. Concerning students’ positions, the analysis depicts how they entextualize ELF scholars’ language ideologies to either (re/de)construct their own standard native-based language ideology about English or to reinforce this same ideology. The paper also examines the stance adopted by the professor in her responses to students’ writings in terms of both her ideological alignment with theories that challenge the role of the native speaker as English expands worldwide and her resistance to naïve and romantic views of this expansion.