Teaching Portuguese as a Foreign Language as Cultural Diplomacy: Brazilian Culture Tasks

Abstract

We discuss in this paper the concept of Portuguese as a Foreign Language (PFL) teacher as a cultural diplomat and discuss the theoretical and methodological aspects of teaching practice of the foreign language teacher. It is pointed out the concepts of approach, methods and techniques as well. Furthermore, we describe a task to work Brazilian culture in PFL class. This task is in accordance with the theories discussed here. Thus, the objective of this text is twofold: first, to defend the idea of the foreign language teacher as a cultural diplomat; second, present the task example to illustrate the assumptions we follow. After the introduction, we discussed the conception of PFL teacher as a cultural diplomat, in (1); we present the theories of teacher-researcher, action research and active methodologies, as well as the notions of approach, method and techniques, in (2); we describe a task is used in our course syllabus, called ‘Brazilian themes’, and some suggestions for developing it, in (3). In our final remarks, in addition to returning to central ideas, we point out the importance of support, from private and public initiatives, to PFL teacher.

Keywords

• portuguese as a foreign language
• cultural diplomacy
• brazilian culture