The Foreign Language in Higher Education: An Analysis of Its Offer in Brazilian Universities

Abstract

This study focuses on offering Foreign Language (FL) disciplines in national Higher Education given the demands of the academic and professional spheres through the parameters of the globalized society and its influence on the university internationalization process. Therefore, a brief history of higher education institutions in the country is presented, up to the configuration of recent institutional models, focusing on a new law of 1996, LDB (Guidelines and Bases of the Brazilian Education), which enabled the preparation of the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) and the reformulation of the curricula at all levels of education. This way, following the need for mastery of a FL, especially the English Language, considered as an academic lingua franca, a survey was carried out for the provision of FL in undergraduate courses based on opinions and decrees that they have guided their curricula over the last two decades, publicly available on the Ministry of Education and Sports website. By analyzing the files, mentions to the domain of FL were perceived, sometimes defined as FL and the Spanish language. Its offer is mainly related to developing communicative competence and reading ability. Thus, we observed that the FL has the role of allowing access, participation, and dissemination of academic research and extension activities globally, in addition to being related to the performance of the professional in training given current demands.