In the passage ‘how its distinct communities have come toget...

Read text 4 and answer questions 23 and 24.

TEXT 4

The sense of individuality and nationalism that has been borne from the diversity of ethnicities and traditions in Brazil is extremely strong; people take great pride in the uniqueness of their culture. The idea of ‘Brazilianism,’ which examines Brazil’s powerful history and how its distinct communities have come together to form a cohesive and unified nation, is now being offered at the university level as a subject of study. Cultivated partially by decades of unfavourable sentiment directed at different times towards the Portuguese, Spanish, British and Americans, the Brazilian identity is also defined to a certain extent by its anti-imperialist views.

The English language specifically has long been denied special consideration in Brazilian politics, policy and education due in part to the association between the language and the notion of cultural imperialism; generations of Brazilians have prospered without knowledge of the language and many in the country associate English with the United States and its role in the military regime from the 1960s to the 1980s. Due to this and the diversity of Brazilian history and the Brazilian people, it has been important not to refer to English as a second language - of which many exist in the form of indigenous languages – but as one of many foreign languages. Examples of the democratisation of language is exemplified by the fact that seven foreign languages are offered to middle schoolers in Sao Paulo as well as the historical role of Spanish and French as the foreign languages of choice. Our research has shown that the popular sentiment towards English is slowly changing, especially with the new generation of citizens that has no experience with the former dictatorship and an awareness of the increasingly globalised knowledge economy, of which Brazil is an important part.

https://ei.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/latin-america-research/English%20in%20Brazil.pdf

Access on August 18th, 2018