O papel da competência em línguas adicionais na internacionalização de programas de pós-graduação do Brasil de acordo com os documentos de avaliação da capes

In Brazil, the Coordination for the Advancement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) is responsible for assessing the graduate programs in the country in terms of the education and research delivered, including their level of internationalization. Considering the internationalization process and competencies in additional languages as intertwined, this paper analyzes CAPES’sassessment documents regarding the role of additional languages in the internationalization of Brazilian graduate programs. The documents were coded using a pre-designed system with the assistance of NVivo, and the varying weights assigned to internationalization in the assessment process were documented. Differences were noted between the three broad disciplinary areas, Life Sciences, Humanities, and Exact, Technological, and Multidisciplinary Sciences, in both the weight assigned to internationalization and the frequency with which relevant codes appeared in the documents. The results show that activities specifically related to the teaching or learning of additional languages or additional language proficiency are not priorities for the disciplinary areas. Therefore, to receive high grades in CAPES’sassessment, graduate programs are expected to reach a high level of internationalization without, however, being evaluated by how much effort they are investing to improve the level of additional language proficiency of their faculty and students, which does not reflect the close connection existing between the internationalization process and competencies in additional languages.