BILINGUAL EDUCATION AND TRANSLANGUAGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION
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, we began conceptualizing
translanguage and tracing its relations with areas of important connections, such as the
Decolonial studies and Education. To this end, we 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 the author's Visiting Scholar
Program (Doutorado Sanduiche PSDE/CAPE), through a critical-collaborative
methodology (NININ and MAGALHÃES, 2017), and 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.