The discourse of the linguistic diversity in academic texts

Concepts of language and identity underlying academic texts on acquisition and language teaching are discussed to investigate how the texts deal with language teaching within the different language contexts in Brazil. When texts as taken as an object of academic study, it remains to understand how language and identity are interconnected within the construction of language policies when a multilingual situation in Brazil is held to be the parameter. Analysis is foregrounded on current critical perspectives for language studying by Hall (2006) and Iglesias (2009) on identity concepts and by Bourdieu (2008) on language and discourse, through its problematization as an object of domination and symbolic capital. Results reveal a shift in some scholarly productions when they shun hegemonic conceptions about language and its teaching and instead establish a new discourse based on the linguistic diversity in Brazil. The new discourse, however, has not yet been incorporated to policies and pedagogical practices within Brazilian educational context, albeit present in many productions analyzed.