Polêmicas no funcionamento do "Pré-PEC-G": análise de discursos dos sujeitos envolvidos no Programa de Estudantes-Convênio de Graduação

Abstract

The Exchange Programme for Undergraduate Students (PEC-G) is the longestrunning educational cooperation program in Brazil aimed at an international audience, through which undergraduate vacancies are offered to students from different countries of the global South. It is currently managed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MRE) and the Ministry of Education (MEC) in partnership with Brazilian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Candidates from nations where the Certificate of Proficiency in Brazilian Portuguese (Celpe-Bras), a requirement for admission to graduate, is not applied, may enroll in a Portuguese as an Additional Language (PLA) course at one of the recognized Brazilian HEIs, often known as a Pre-PEC-G course, before beginning Higher Education. This doctoral thesis seeks to make the voices of the Pre-PEC-G agents visible by analyzing the controversies at stake in the operation of the Program, whether they have been explicitly stated or not. These agents include: (1) Program managers in the MRE and MEC; (2) PLA coordinators and/or professors for Pre-PEC-G; (3) PLA student body for Pre-PEC-G. To do so, we combine Indisciplinary Applied Linguistics and French Discourse Analysis from a qualitative and interpretive standpoint. We built our research corpus from three sets of materials: (i) official documentation dealing with PEC-G, from its inception to the present day; (ii) academic papers on the program, as well as a letter addressed to the MEC and the MRE, written by professors and PLA course coordinators within the scope of the PrePEC-G; (iii) interviews with MRE, MEC and Pre-PEC-G and PEC-G students. Four contentious issues emerged during our analytical path: (1) “Pre-PEC-G student” x “PEC-G student”: same status?; (2) Pre-PEC-G: possible violations of human rights x successful initiative; (3) The diversity of PLA courses in Pre-PEC-G in HEIs: reason for “desperation or “enrichment”?; (4) “It is obvious that we do not have the means to deliberate on this.”: games of (dis)accountability. Such controversial aspects demonstrate that the discourses emerge from antagonistic discursive positions: on the one hand, MEC and MRE managers; on the other hand, PLA coordinators and professors, and Pre-PEC-G and PEC-G students. We concluded that, rather than being silenced, the polemics highlighted here – marked, among other things, by the functioning of discursive inter incomprehension (MAINGUENEAU, 2008) – must be made more visible, as a sine qua non condition for the strengthening of the PEC-G as a public policy for the internationalization of HEIs, cultural diplomacy and dialogue between Brazil and other countries in the Global South.