[Building language understanding for German proficiency exam in a Swabian migration context in Brazil]

Abstract

Our focus are practices in which teachers and students engage in a preparatory work of developing understandings for international German language proficiency tests. We aim to discuss how the concept of standard German language is developed by students and teachers who participate in these German Language classes in the 1st and 3rd years on this Basic Education. Data were noted by Dalla Vecchia in the 1st and 3rd year classes, in 2015, through an ethnography of language (Garcez; Schulz 2015), and are theoretically and methodologically situated within the scope of Applied Linguistics in articulation with epistemological constructs of Sociolinguistics and Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis. Our results show that not only is translanguage at the service of participation and thus results as elaboration of understandings and progress in tasks for understanding what constitutes an international German proficiency exam, but also that this way, the interactors make use of their linguistic and semiotic repertoire in order to better understand what is or not acceptable in such a proficiency test. They are practices in which tensions emerge, to which they bring to the classes their Swabian culture and also their economic capital that positions them in terms of recognizing the standard German language as an interesting skill to be added to their curriculum.

Keywords:
language ideologies; linguistic repertoire; German exam; Swabian migration in Brazil