The main difficulties of Russophone immigrants in writing in Brazilian Portuguese: analysis of essays produced during a preparatory course for the Celpe-Bras exam

• Autor(a) principal: Henriques, Anna Smirnova
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista Scripta
• Texto Completo: http://periodicos.pucminas.br/index.php/scripta/article/view/25815
• topic: Português como língua estrangeira.; Russófonos.; Celpe-Bras.; Migração.; Escrita.

More than half of the Russophone migrants arrive in Brazil without knowing Portuguese and acquire the Portuguese language on their own, without previous formal instruction experience. However, in 2018, Celpe-Bras, a Brazilian Portuguese proficiency exam, became mandatory for naturalization purposes, and the lack of formal education became an obstacle along this path. This work describes the main writing difficulties faced by Russophone migrants, as identified in the essays produced during a preparatory course for the Celpe-Bras exam. They include spelling difficulties, use of graphic accentuation, use of articles, gender agreement, use of verbs (conjugation, verb tenses, subjunctive mode) and word order in sentences. Despite these difficulties, Russophone migrants structure the text well and easily acquire an extensive vocabulary. Considering the acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese by Russophone migrants, our focus is on languages of the Indo-European linguistic group which have been scarcely considered in relation to each other in the field of L2 Language Acquisition: Russian, a slave language and Portuguese, a romance language. To stimulate the study of the migrants` difficulties in learning Brazilian Portuguese, the building of a Brazilian Portuguese as a Foreign Language Learner Corpus would be of great value.