ABSTRACT
After the earthquake of 2010 that affected the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, Brazil started progressively to receive an increasing inflow of immigrants from the Caribbean country. This research focus is on a group of Haitian students that arrived in Brazil, in 2011, through a cooperation agreement that had as one of its main aims to allow those affected by the earthquake to finish their undergraduate courses in Brazilian universities. The author of this paper was involved in the insertion of these students in one of the higher education institutions teaching them Portuguese as an additional language and, later on, in 2014, made a proposal of a specific course in this field for this group, based on the theoretical framework of academic literacies, taking into consideration that these students would be graduating soon and would have to write their thesis. The main aim of this article is to analyse the development of this specific course with a focus on the metapragmatics regulating the stances taken by the participants in their oral and written interactions. The research was conduced taking into consideration a reflexive ethnographic approach with the register of the development of activities in a research diary, as well with the audio register of the interactions in the classroom and in individual meetings and the organization of an archive of written tasks. The data analysis points out to issues related to the dynamics of power in the production of knowledge, the processes of building a reflexive knowledge about the literacy practices in higher education and the ways academic writing conventions would be challenged. In the final section, it is discussed the specificities of academic literacy practices in a transnational situation like this one, briefly looking at the potential impacts of these practices for the subjects writing these texts and, broadly, for the production of knowledge in the/from the Global South.
Keywords:
academic literacies; portuguese as an additional language; haitian immigration (Brazil)
