Portuguese language in East Timor: writing and authorship

Abstract

Since 2002, Portuguese has become an official language and has been used in education in East Timor, together with Tetum. Nowadays, Portuguese has been reintroduced in this country by means of initiatives which most often involve changes in school curricula and teacher education. In our experience in the education of teachers and prospective basic education teachers, the greatest challenge posed by Portuguese is to learn how to write it. For this reason, the aim of the present work is to analyze the difficulties faced by senior students when writing their undergraduate thesis for completion of the Primary Education degree program at the National University of East Timor (UNTL). The utterances produced by 27 students were analyzed, using Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism as a reference. The concepts of chronotope and intonation were particularly used as categories of analysis. Our analysis has shown that most participants in this research consider the Portuguese language as the major obstacle to writing their undergraduate thesis. However, despite this difficulty, they appreciate the requirement of writing academic works in Portuguese. Moreover, their answers refer to the relationship between mastery of language and argumentative capacity and point to the fact that subjects find it difficult to feel like author-as-creator (in the sense of the term as coined by Bakhtin) of their written production in a non-native language.