Language policies and their unintended consequences: The “English without Borders” Program and its repercussions in Language Teaching Undergraduate Courses

Abstract

In the context of globalization, the goal of improving Brazilian science competitiveness has set into motion several actions towards the development of researchers’ and scholars’ foreign language proficiency. The efforts focused on higher education engender transformations at other educational levels, due to their interrelationships. As a result, unintended consequences may emerge from short and medium-term goals to meet specific demands. The Federal Government Program “English without Borders” (EwB), created in 2012, is an example of a language policy attached to a competitiveness development project of the country in the international scenario with the potential to impact English language teacher education at university level and the teaching of English at the Basic Education level. Like other governmental Programs which have been implemented and researched by the universities themselves (e.g. Pibid, Parfor), EwB has also been the object of investigation. In this article, we present an overview of such studies, through lexico-semantic analyses of oral presentations’ abstracts from three conferences of national relevance and reach in the area of language studies: V Congress of the Brazilian Association of University English Language Teachers (ABRAPUI), V Latin American Congress of Language Teacher Education (CLAFPL) and XI Brazilian Congress of Applied Linguistics (CBLA). The analyses aim at highlighting aspects of EwB development and how these relate to the initial education of English language teachers at university level.

Keywords: English without Borders, Language Policies, Internationalization.