ABSTRACT
This article reflects on the bilingual education for indigenous students in a multicultural context, presenting a proposal as a result of a bibliographical survey in search of foundations that could subsidize the elaboration of models of bilingual education for indigenous people in the southern and southeastern regions of Brazilian state of Pará. In this direction, we come to the proposition that the triad composed by Interculturality, Literature and Alternation can base the construction of teaching models in the conjuncture researched. We start from the theoretical perspectives of Applied Linguistics (A.L.), an area of studies that establishes an epistemological cut with theoretical linguistics in order to direct its theories, methodologies and analyzes by its own propositions. This cut is what has subsidized studies such as those that consider bilingual education in favor of subalternized communities. Aware that for each community it is necessary to think of a specific bilingual teaching model, considering the specificities of the people in question (their ethno-knowledge, their times, their projects of society, their culture, etc.), we feel the need to clarify we do not intend to present a formula, but elements that can inspire constructions around bilingual education in the contexts of indigenous students. We come to these three guiding elements (interculturality, lettering and alternation) by the premise that bilingual education should serve to enable the subjects of the field to circulate in the legitimized spaces and transform the structures of domination and power. This bilingual teaching should serve so that the original subjects do not depend on the Other to write their history and so they can fight for epistemic equity. In this way, this work reinforces the greater understanding that working with language requires an interdisciplinary exercise, thus enabling a broader reflection on such a complex element, constituent and constitutive of subjects.
Keywords:
bilingualism; indigenous people; applied linguistics