The missing page: contributions to a history of language teaching in Brazil

Abstract

Language teaching is a professional practice and a theoretical area. This area is also known as Acquisition and Language Teaching (ALT) or simply Language Teaching, and includes the process of educating agents that contribute to these processes. These processes have always existed in the educational history of the country, but the literature is scarce and there is very little supply of this specialty as a discipline in the curricula of Letras Courses in the area of Language Studies. In this article, I return to writing about the history of characters, costumes and storyline of language teaching in Brazil not to signal periods but to point to the emergence in the area of points of consciousness, as I turn to a discussion of the lack of a historical sense of the field of language teaching (foreign languages in general and Portuguese as a FL in particular) to form a mature and thriving scientific discipline of FL history in undergraduate curricula of Letras courses and in postgraduate programs in Appolied Linguistics in the country.