FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN ANALYSIS OF ITS OFFER IN BRAZILIAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract

This study focuses on the offer of a Foreign Language (FL) in national Higher Education, in view of the demands of the academic and professional spheres through the parameters of the globalized society and its influence on the internationalization process of universities. Therefore, a brief history of Higher Education Institutions in the country is presented, up to the configuration of recent institutional models, focusing on the New Law of Guidelines and Bases of the Brazilian Education (LDB) of 1996, which enabled the preparation of the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) and the reformulation of the curriculum at all levels of education. This way, following the need for mastery of a FL, especially the English Language (EL), considered as an academic lingua franca (JENKINS, 2013), a survey is carried out for the provision of FL in undergraduate courses based on opinions and decrees that they have guided their curricula over the last two decades, publicly available on the Ministry of Education and Sports (MEC) website. From the analysis of the files, mentions to the domain of FL were perceived, sometimes defined as EL and the Spanish language, and its offer is mainly related to the development of communicative competence and reading ability. Thus, it was observed that FL has the role of allowing access, participation and dissemination of academic research and extension activities globally, in addition to being related to the performance of the professional in training in view of current demands.