Língua materna na aula de Português como língua estrangeira em Goa, Índia [Mother tongue language in the Portuguese foreign language classroom in Goa, India]

Abstract

The inclusion of Mother Tongue language (MTL) in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has its share of pedagogical benefits. India's National Education Policy (2020) focuses on the power of Indian multilingualism and encourages mother tongue inclusion in education. Noam Chomsky postulates humans are innately programmed to acquire language, learning one or more if exposed to it. In First language (L1) acquisition, individuals develop language proficiency in 'naturalistic' settings and adopt another besides the native one in SLA. Learners in India are culturally bilingual, if not multilingual, learning several languages from the same language family and adopting them in different contexts, by the time they learn English at school. In the Foreign Language (FL) classroom scenario, this multilingual ambience has to rely on English language instructions. So, although C.J. Dodson's bilingual method of foreign language teaching requires the teacher to be bilingual in both the native and the target language, at times, meeting this requirement in sourcing suitably qualified teachers is not feasible. A study of students registered to the A1 level of Certificate of Proficiency in Portuguese as a Foreign Language at Goa University, indicated all had an Indic language as their mother tongue, having acquired English at school. Moreover, the majority of the students were first-time learners of any Romance language, inadvertently slowing down the L2 acquisition process due to specific Portuguese language characteristics. In certain instances, using English as a language of instruction proved not to be as effective, necessitating the inclusion of the learners' mother tongue. From a didactic perspective, teaching pronunciation adhered to a multisensory approach. To secure articulation with no or minimum accent, the researcher used the Indian alphabet in the Devanagari script to enable students to identify Portuguese phonemes in the articulation of their mother tongue. Acknowledging the presence of a considerable number of Portuguese loan words in learners' native tongue in various semantic fields also hastened the acquisition of the Portuguese lexical inventory in the learners. MTL inclusion is an underutilized yet significant didactic tool in the SLA process. The L1 acquired can have a positive influence on the process of FL acquisition, by offering sufficient comprehensible input, facilitating the decoding of teaching communication.