“Papagaio Colorido”? “Bola Saltitante”? “Construtor de Pontes”?: How do Language Teachers describe their role in Multilingual and Multicultural Contexts?

Abstract

In the postmodern era, societies tend to be multilingual and multicultural. This diversity has driven an intense political and educational effort to implement a plurilingual and intercultural education, namely in the European context, which has been reflected in the growing interest of Language Didactics in concepts such as intercomprehension, interculturality and plurilingualism. In this context, a challenge is posed to the school, and especially to language teachers: to train responsible, critical citizens, able to assume the role of intercultural mediators, fostering the development of plurilingual and intercultural communication competence.

One of the questions that can be asked in the face of this challenge is: how do language teachers see their role as promoters of plurilingual and intercultural education?

In this paper, we analyse the representations of a group of Portuguese language teachers (mother tongue and foreign languages) concerning the profile and role of the language teacher in a context of education for linguistic and cultural diversity. We propose to compare the data concerning teachers of Portuguese as Mother Tongue with the data concerning teachers of Foreign Languages in order to identify divergences and/or convergences, as well as factors that may underlie them, with the purpose of problematizing potential possibilities and/or constraints concerning the implementation of an integrated didactics of languages.