Padrões emergentes de dominância linguística em português e inglês: o impacto de práticas socioculturais de letramento (digital) na amplitude lexical de brasileiros falantes de língua inglesa como L2

Abstract

The diversity of technological devices, with Internet access, allows us to carry out activitiesthat, once limited to the physical world and predominantly in Portuguese, due to the clearBrazilian reality, can now be developed at a global level and marked by a strong insertion inlinguistic practices in the English language. In this scenario, we question whether literacysociocultural practices, impacted by the presence of technological cultural artifacts in oureveryday life, would be, in some instance, leading linguistic dominance patterns into a newconfiguration and, consequently, resulting in the improvement of English language proficiencyof Brazilians in contact with these technologies. Therefore, this work aims at evaluation theprevalence of the use of English in digital literacy contexts - of a sample of Brazilian users ofEnglish as L2, with an incomplete higher education level or above and, to a large extent,located in the Southeast - and the impact of these mediated practices in an explicit marker ofEnglish language learning of lexical amplitude measurement. The concept of languagedominance, as defined by Heredia (1997) in combination with the Principle of Complementarity(CP), Grosjean (1998, 2016), is used to operationalize the construct in terms of frequency andspecific domains of use, providing the basis for the creation of the Languages Uses SurveyQuestionnaire, a tool for profiling the participants. The proficiency, in turn, is implemented bymeans of a measure of vocabulary breadth in English, assessed by the Vocabulary Size Test(NATION and BEGLAR, 2007).The results point out the prevalence of English in practices ofuse related to music, games and audiovisual contents, such as films, series and other TVprograms. Portuguese, on the other hand, presents itself as the dominant language in activitiesof reading, information search, text production, message exchange and conversations.Statistical analyzes show that there is a positive and significant correlation between theinvolvement in digital literacy practices in English and the VST scores, and indicate thatrespondents with greater involvement in digital text recordings in Portuguese.