GEORGIA ON MY MIND AND THE LANGUAGES WITHIN MY BODY. Translanguaging and Decoloniality in the Context of Higher Education: A Case Study in the University of Georgia.
Translanguage, Decoloniality, Higher Education, Multi/Bilingual. Education.
This dissertation, inserted in the area of Applied Linguistics, namely Indisciplinary (MOITA LOPES, 2006), aims to analyze the discursive functionality of translanguage in the context of university students who were also studying Portuguese as a foreign language in the Portuguese Flagship Program at the University of Georgia (UGA/USA). To build the theoretical basis of this research, I began conceptualizing translanguage and tracing its relations with areas of important connections, such as the Decolonial studies and Education. To this end, I put in dialogue the thoughts of García (2011), Canagarajah (2013), Mignolo (2018), Walsh (2018), Quijano (2007), among others. The corpus of the research was collected during my Visiting Scholar Program (Doutorado Sanduiche PSDE/CAPE), through a critical-collaborative methodology (NININ and MAGALHÃES, 2017), having, also, an ethnographic character (LUCENA E CARDOSO, 2018). It focused on the observation of 13 classes, which ranged from 3 to 10 students per session, during the months of October/2021 to March/2022. Data analysis indicates that translanguage is a relevant pedagogical resource, playing an important role in complex and interdependent areas of the students’ life, namely: social, academic, linguistic and personal areas.