In this paper we aim to present the main goals of our on-going project Trovoada de Ideias (2016 – 2020) , an action-oriented research on linguistic and social inclusion in Portuguese higher education institutions of African international students fluent in non-European varieties of Portuguese, developed at ISCTE-IUL since 2016 (Pinto & Matias 2018). These international students have chosen Portugal because the language of learning is the same of their basic and secondary education back in their countries of origin. However, despite being fluent speakers of Portuguese, they soon experience difficulties of (mis)comprehension both with Portuguese professors and fellow students. On the one hand, this is due to their few previous contact with oral Portuguese standard from Portugal. On the other, they report also significant differences between the country of previous schooling and country of tertiary education, in terms of previous work on academic language skills. In addition, they report situations of language discrimination because fluent in a stigmatized African variety of the language. To overcome these difficulties, our project implemented a course unit on Academic Portuguese, where standard norms are discussed in terms of linguistic description, while providing space for critical language awareness at different scales (Alim, 2005). For the present discussion, we bring data from biographic interviews with students attending the Academic Portuguese course unit, where participants reflected on their trajectories as Portuguese language learners through their educational experiences in the country of their origin and in higher education in Portugal. Finally, we propose to deconstruct ideologies positioning racialized speaking subjects “as deviant and inferior from the perspective of white listening subjects” (Rosa & Flores 2017: 628), that need to be framed in historical processes of linguistic and citizen stigmatisation, as observed in studies on descendants of African immigrants in Portugal (Matias & Martins, 2019).

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Language discrimination,Academic Portuguese,Higher Education Mobility,International African Students,Inclusion Strategies