ABSTRACT
Historically, bilingual programs in Brazil have not figured in national educational policies. However, in 2020, the Brazilian National Council of Education issued the first draft of the National Curriculum Guidelines for Plurilingual Education, which may be interpreted as a gesture of language policy that aims to fill this gap. In this article, we read the Guidelines from a discursive perspective, based on two analytical categories: the production of equivocity and the effect of (in)determination in processes of designation. Part of the discursive process underlying the textuality of the Guidelines is to evoke a memory of silenced languages in the Brazilian territory, in the process of institutionalization of Portuguese as the national language, as well as the confrontation with this memory and image of a monolingual country. Taking into account this imaginary and the political gesture of the document in an attempt to cover very different situations of bilingual education (Portuguese + another language), we postulate that equivocity runs through the textuality of the document, regarding the signifier “bilingual education” or “plurilingual education”, thus producing an effect of (in)determination in the linguistic materiality. We conclude that the equivocity indicates the contradiction in proposing the homogenisation of distinct situations of bilingual education and sustains the effect of confrontation between linguistic indeterminacy (the proposed Guidelines are intended to encompass education in any and all languages spoken in the national territory, besides the prestigious foreign languages) and discursive determination, which sets the focus of bilingual education on prestigious foreign languages.
Keywords:
plurilingual education; discourse; language policy; equivocity; designation