Despite common belief that Brazil is a monolingual country, it is in fact a multilingual country with dozens of immigrant and indigenous languages spread in many communities where Portuguese is not the mother tongue. As pointed out by Leffa (2013), Brazilians must recognize and preserve this multilingualism fighting against the omission and discrimination towards linguistic minorities through the reflection on and elaboration of language policies that promote understanding and tolerance among cultures, languages and identities. Leffa (2013) also alerts to the danger of linguistic isolation in Brazil, the only country in Latin America whose national language is Portuguese and where Brazilians face many challenges to learn foreign languages, be them the language of their parents (heritage languages) of their neighbors (Spanish) or the international language (English). In a country with over 200 million people, this represents a huge challenge for language policies and education in Brazil.

Lagares (2013, p. 185) claims that the teaching of foreign languages in Brazil was sometimes treated as an extracurricular component being delegated to outsourced private language institutes that reinforced the belief foreign languages cannot be learned fluently in schools (p. 186). This belief is supported by authors (for example Tilio, 2014) who suggest that just as the public school does not form mathematicians or historians (to give but two examples), it does not have the responsibility to form fluent speakers of foreign languages either. Finardi, Prebianca and Momm (2013) and Finardi (2014) disagree with this view of the responsibility of Brazilian public schools based on the assumption that some knowledge of English is necessary to build a global citizenship and public education must guarantee the teaching of English with quality. Gimenez (2013) and Finardi (2014) go a step forward to suggest that the lack of responsibility of public schools to form fluent speakers of English increases the social gap of those who can afford to study English as a foreign language in private institutes and those who cannot.

Adapted from: FINARDI, K.; LEÃO, R.; PINHEIRO, L.

English in Brazil: insights from the analysis of language policies, internationalization programs and CLIL approach. Education and linguistics research. Vol. 2, nº. 1, 2016, p. 54-68.