Oral proficiency in Brazilian Portuguese: scenario, assessment and instruction contexts and issues

• Autor(a) principal: Smirnova Henriques, Anna
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Barros, Thaiza, Madureira, Sandra
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista da ABRALIN (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://revista.abralin.org/index.php/abralin/article/view/1755
• topic: Português como Língua Estrangeira; A avaliação da proficiência em Português Brasileiro; Pronúncia; Treinamento fonético; Testes de proficiência em línguas; Portuguese as a Foreign Language; Brazilian Portuguese Proficiency Assessment Test; Pronunciation; Phonetic training; Language proficiency tests

The large migrations, which took place in the past and have continued up to the present time, characterize Brazil as a multilingual country, which demands investment on formal instruction in Portuguese as a Foreign Language. In this context, questions related to formulating educational politics, preparing experts to teach Portuguese as a Foreign Language, elaborating and applying linguistic proficiency tests and contributing to make easier the access of foreigners to formal instruction in the Portuguese language are important to consider. In the present article, we address issues related to Portuguese as a Foreign Language and aspects of the Oral Part evaluation of the Portuguese Language exam applied in the Brazilian context, Celpe-Bras. Furthermore, we describe some of the difficulties related to perception and production of Brazilian Portuguese sounds by native speakers of other languages. Our objective is to point out the contributions that a phonetically-based perspective, which considers the straight link established between the perception of sound distinctions and the formation of new categories in L2, may bring to the development and assessment of the oral proficiency in Portuguese as a Foreign Language in face to the impact a strong foreign accent may have on intelligibility, comprehensibility and attitudinal assessment of the speaker. In regard to the oral proficiency assessment, we defend the necessity of formulating phonetically-based criteria which guide the evaluators to consider what a pronunciation with characteristics that impair interaction is.