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Building Cultural Connections through K-12 Engagement
 Toward the end of Fall 2015 semester, the Department of Portuguese welcomed nearly 20 students from Martha's Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS) to the campus. They were accompanied by two of MVRHS faculty members, who teach Portuguese language and Brazilian history, Ms. Elaine Weintraub and Ms. Jane McGroarty Sampaio. The students were enrolled in the Portuguese for Heritage Learners language class at MVRHS and had the opportunity to engage with Portuguese-language heritage learners at UMass Dartmouth. They first met with current Portuguese majors and minors who are also heritage learners and discussed the value of pursuing a Portuguese degree, as well as how they are using their language skills both inside and outside the classroom. They also shared views on opportunities to build their language skills and cultural competence through internships and study abroad opportunities in Brazil and Portugal.
 As the main point of the day's program, MVRHS students attended the Portuguese for Heritage Learners (POR 104) class taught by Gina Reis. In addition to witnessing a typical college class, students engaged in small group activities, which included UMass Dartmouth students conducting short interviews that subsequently provided the basis for a writing assignment. Commenting on the experience, Reis said, "In this short visit, our students learned about the Brazilian community in Martha's Vineyard, as well as a bit about their and their families' lives in Brazil. The encounter provided a unique opportunity for our Portuguese heritage language learners, most of whom are from Portugal and Cape Verde, to compare and contrast experiences. Best of all, the conversations were held in Portuguese and the students' vivid exchanges underscored the linguistic diversity of the Portuguese-speaking world."
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Honoring Achievement in Portuguese, Commemorating 25 de Abril
On April 25, faculty, students and guests of the department gathered at the annual induction ceremony of Alpha Delta, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth chapter of Phi Lambda Beta, the national Portuguese Honor Society. Phi Lambda Beta was founded in the 1960s at Vanderbilt University and has chapters in colleges and universities throughout the United States, such as Georgetown, University of Florida, University of Georgia, Rutgers, and University of California Berkeley, among many others. The primary purposes of this honor society are to stimulate greater interest in the advanced study of the Portuguese language and Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures and literatures, to reward outstanding academic achievement in the field, and to recognize individuals who have demonstrated their support for the growth and development of Portuguese Studies in the United States.
Because the day also marked the forty-second anniversary of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution, which ended the long-lasting dictatorship and put Portugal on the path to democracy and European integration, the central event of the program was a presentation by our guest of honor, Daniel da Silva (Columbia University), on "Dissident Folk: Performing
Grândola, Vila Morena." The lecture discussed the reemergence of José Afonso's revered anthem of the 1974 Revolution in the context of recent protests in Portugal provoked by the Euro Zone economic crisis and austerity measures. It urged a reconsideration of
Grândola not as historic anthem but as a folkloric
cante alentejano (traditional style of choral singing from Alentejo, recently recognized by UNESCO as a form of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity), shedding light on how folkloric and expressive culture may emerge as collective practice of resistance and dissidence.
The Alpha Delta chapter of the National Portuguese Honor Society welcomed fourteen new members during this year's ceremony. The largest group of inductees was composed of undergraduate and graduate students nominated on the basis of high scholarship and advanced level of achievement in Luso-Afro-Brazilian studies: Fausta Boscacci, Matthew Gomes, Miriam Kelly, Inês Lima, Américo Motta, Serena Rivera, Diana Simões, Cristiane Soares, and Janice Vinci. They were joined by five new members who have demonstrated through scholarship, teaching, service to the academic profession, public service, and/or professional activity that they are earnestly interested in the promotion of Portuguese language, Lusophone cultures, and related collaborations across academic, social and cultural boundaries. They include: Daniel da Silva, our guest speaker and PhD candidate at Columbia University; Professor Maryellen Brisbois (UMass Dartmouth College of Nursing); Professor Ricardo Rosa (UMass Dartmouth School of Education); MaryLou Freitas (Taunton High School); and last but not least, His Excellency Pedro Carneiro, Consul of Portugal in New Bedford. Welcome and congratulations to all!
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New Frontiers in Student-Faculty Research Collaboration
Professor Gláucia Silva has worn many hats in her very busy academic career: chair of the Department of Portuguese and director of the Office of Faculty Development at UMass Dartmouth; professor and supervisor of Portuguese language programs at Ohio State University and UMass Dartmouth; and a leading scholar in Portuguese applied linguistics, whose recent research has focused in particular on teaching and learning Portuguese, both as a foreign language and as a heritage language. It is in this latter capacity that Silva has collaborated on several research projects with doctoral candidates working under her supervision in the PhD program in Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory.
In one ongoing project, Silva's co-investigators have been Viviane Gontijo (PhD 2013, now Portuguese Language Coordinator at Harvard University) and Cristiane Soares, PhD candidate at UMass Dartmouth and director of the Portuguese program at Tufts University. They have researched the use of grammatical gender among traditional, heritage, and Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese. Following data collection and analysis, their first presentation to the academic community was a paper at the annual meeting of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) in 2015: "Uma problema complicado: Grammatical gender among Spanish speakers, heritage learners and L2 learners of Portuguese." (No, the title does not contain a typo. The tongue-in-cheek expression "uma problema complicado" illustrates the kind of grammatical gender error common among Portuguese language learners: "problema" is a masculine noun, which calls for the masculine indefinite article "um," but because it ends in "a" the noun looks like it should be feminine.) The next step? Another joint presentation at the upcoming 2016 AATSP conference: "Outra problema complicado: grammatical gender in semi-spontaneous production of learners of Portuguese."
Professors Silva and Soares have also collaborated on another project, concerned with the depth of processing, awareness and fossilization among Portuguese language learners, which analyzes transcriptions made by learners of Portuguese as a foreign language. Their investigation aims to uncover whether transcribing statements made by native speakers of Portuguese helps participants with structures that had been problematic for them, and whether transcriptions facilitate deeper levels of processing and levels of awareness. Silva and Soares have submitted a proposal to present their results at the next global conference of the International Association of Applied Linguistics, which will meet in Rio de Janeiro in July 2017, and are currently waiting to hear from the program selection committee whether their paper has been accepted. Fingers crossed!
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