Benefícios cognitivos do plurilinguismo para além do aprendizado de uma língua estrangeira.

Abstract

In Brazil, we observe that the majority of public schools of basic education do not have a diversity of foreign languages (LE) in their curricula, favoring mainly the teaching of English and, secondly, although very discreetly, the teaching of Spanish. Some researches point out, like those developed by Martins and Souza (2018), that based on Linguistic Policies developed by the government, social institutions and the media, Brazil is often seen as a monolingual country, although there are several other languages spoken in the country such as those of Italian and German communities, in addition to the many indigenous languages and the Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS). However, there are already researches that emphasize the importance of contact with several languages for the personal and professional training of students, such as the studies by Alas-Martins (2017). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), the guiding document for language teaching and learning, conceived in Europe, also points to the importance of multilingualism for the development of linguistic, pragmatic and social skills. In recent years, in addition to research, multilingual teaching and extension projects have been developed in some Brazilian universities, such as the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), the Federal University of Campina Grande (UFCG) and the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). Even so, we observe empirically that there is still some lack of knowledge on the part of the Brazilian teaching and educational community about the advantages of knowing languages / cultures in addition to learning a single foreign language (MORAIS FILHO, 2020). Therefore, we have as main objective in this work to find out what are the benefits of multilingualism for the cognitive structure of LE learners. For this, we carried out a bibliographic and documentary research of a qualitative nature in which we verified the presence of multilingualism in the curricular components of Language Courses at public universities in Paraíba. Furthermore, we seek to find out how multilingualism can facilitate the understanding of languages and the main cognitive differences between a monolingual mind and a multilingual mind. Our analysis is anchored in studies by researchers in the field of Language Didactics and Psycholinguistics, such as Souza (2019) and Bialystok (2012) and also in cognitive theorists, such as Vygotsky (2003) and Ausubel (2000). Among the identified results, we verified several cognitive advantages of a multilingual mind regarding attention, memory, logical reasoning, creativity and adaptability to frequent changes in addition to the development of a better conscious perception of the relationship between languages.