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The aim of the present paper is to highlight some aspects of bilingualism in a German minority language community located in the South of Brazil. Based on ethnographic research methods, the study describes language use in face-to-face interactions between bilingual students and their teacher in a monolingual primary school, focusing on Portuguese-German code-switching from a socio-functional perspective. The results suggest that code-switching should not be associated with language deficit, but with the bilingual discourse since the phenomenon could be seen both as a relevant conversational strategy as well as a significant learning resource among bilingual children.
This paper discusses the assessment of German language learners in classes for beginners in a context gathering monolingual Portuguese speakers and bilingual speakers of Portuguese and Hunsrückisch, a German dialect derived from the contact of an immigration language and Portuguese. One of the challanges faced by the teachers of these heterogeneous classes is to assess learners’ classroom achievement once dialect speakers’ needs are considerably different from novice learners’. It is suggested that teachers make a compromise between the course objectives and the learners’ different proficiencies and needs to assess their language progress, incorporating and valuing students’ multicultural and experiential backgrounds.