Desafios na escrita em português como segunda língua: um estudo com discentes Wai Wai

Abstract

Among the many demands of the university environment, academic writing is perhaps the most challenging one, even for those whose mother tongue is Portuguese. This study seeks to understand the degree of complexity that this requirement poses for indigenous students of the Wai Wai ethnic group, whose first language is not Portuguese. The main objective is to describe the primary syntactic difficulties these students face in their written production in Portuguese, as well as to identify the causes of such challenges. The research is grounded in Applied Linguistics (AL), with emphasis on the Error Analysis framework proposed by Corder (1967), in order to investigate the students’ interlanguage. A total of thirty-nine essays written by Wai Wai students from the Federal University of Western Pará (Ufopa), located in northern Brazil, were analyzed. The results revealed that, among the observed difficulties, syntactic issues were particularly prominent, such as the omission of articles, prepositions, and infinitive verb forms, in addition to distinctive uses of verb conjugations and grammatical gender. The analysis showed that these difficulties stemmed from four types of errors: interlingual, intralingual, ambiguous, and induced. This research contributes to raising awareness of the barriers faced by indigenous students in higher education and to fostering reflection on language policies aimed at teaching Portuguese as a second language.