Cancelled: Religious issues in teaching foreign land heritage languages

The extent to which spirituality can be or should be integrated into language learning curricula is a contentious issue (Souza, 2016).

Research on teachers’ beliefs in Applied Linguistics in Brazil, for instance, has focused mainly on pedagogical issues (Gimenez 1994; Barcelos, 2004; Silva, 2007). This has been the case despite spirituality being seen as an important cross-curricular theme, for example, to construct peace culture in schools (Soares, Rech, 2015). The research being reported contributes to these discussions by exploring the inclusion of religious issues in the teaching of foreign and heritage languages. More specifically, this presentation focuses on the first phase of a study which analyses policy documents that guide the teacher education of English language teachers in Brazil and of Portuguese as a Heritage Language teachers in a European country.

The thematic analysis conducted identifies whether and how religion is mentioned and represented in the educational policy documents. These representations are discussed with a view of understanding the context in which teachers develop their perspectives about the integration of religious issues in language curricula and teacher training programmes.

Dr Ana Souza is a Lecturer in ELT at the Federal University of Goiás (UFG), Brazil and a Visiting Academic at Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her publications include: Portuguese as a Heritage Language – a pluricentric perspective (2021), Português como Língua de Herança – uma disciplina que se estabelece (2020), O Ensino de Português do Brasil: uma herança, um acolhimento (2020), Línguas, Identidades e Migração: Brasileiros na Europa (2019), O POLH na Europa: Português como Língua de Herança  (2017), Português como Língua de Herança em Londres: recortes em casa, na igreja e na escola (2016).