ABSTRACT
Recently, university programmes have been revised in the education of Brazilian students in the areas that deal with language and culture, emphasising both the development of critical citizenship and the learning about the Other and about social plurality—foreigners, the different, the peripheral, the immigrants and those who think differently. This revision is based on research outcomes that have indicated the need for broadening students’ and citizens’ worldviews, considering the homogeneous, supposedly universalist, Eurocentric and colonialist perspectives practiced in Brazilian education for so long. In this chapter, I discuss a proposal which aims to broaden perspectives in the education of undergraduate students in the areas of language and culture, cultural discourse and critical applied linguistics studying social, cultural and educational functions of language learning (foreign and mother tongue). This proposal, entitled interpretive expansion or expansion of perspectives (Monte Mór, 2007, 2017), occurs through reflective and critical activities based on theories that make it possible to review hegemonic cultural concepts. For discussing the work of such expansions, I have generated data from activities carried out with undergraduate students from the aforementioned areas, according to a thematic and theoretical selection regarding cultural issues.
