Departing from the University of Macau, João Veloso defended today to Lusa a greater internationalization of the Portuguese Department, which could involve contact with countries that are not Portuguese-speaking but possess “cutting-edge research.”
João Veloso arrived in Macau in 2022 to direct the Department of Portuguese of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Macau (UM), a position he now leaves at the end of this academic year “for personal reasons.” Speaking to Lusa, the official considered that the future of the department must involve a firmer commitment to internationalization, even in regions outside the traditional circuit of Portuguese-speaking nations.
The department he directs currently counts around 20 international students, with the majority of the nearly 400 students originating from Macau and mainland China. It would be “very interesting” to bring in students from other geographies, such as Thailand, South Korea, or Vietnam, Veloso declared.
But he admits: “we know that studying in Macau is expensive, the students who come are normally students who are dependent on a scholarship and the number of scholarships is limited.” However, Veloso points to the other side of the world, where “students from countries that are not Portuguese-speaking want to study Portuguese linguistics or literature in Portuguese.”
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“Portuguese studies are a very important area of study within the international academy. If we go to Canada, the United States, France, or Germany, there are many people who are not native speakers of Portuguese and who are there doing teaching and cutting-edge research in the field of linguistics,” he said.
And Macau has been forgetting this vector, the official noted, observing that in the territory there persists “the idea that Portuguese is something that interests primarily native speakers of the language—Portuguese, Brazilians, Angolans, Mozambicans—[and] students from universities in China,” where “Portuguese has a very large projection.”
In the summer courses, however, “there have been advances,” with the presence of students from Australia and Asian countries, partly due to the promotion of the “course in circuits that are not the most habitual.” Still regarding internationalization, the official considers that the commitment to foreign languages on the part of the University of Macau remains “not very diversified.”
“There is a slightly closed vision of foreign language teaching in Macau,” he observed to Lusa, noting that UM has the potential to teach Asian languages.
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The Faculty of Arts and Humanities does not have specific departments for teaching languages like Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, or French, with the Department of Portuguese having, for example, two optional Spanish subjects.
Veloso interprets this choice as a concern that the higher education institution has “with quality and presence in the rankings,” which “implies directing many resources to specific areas.” The Department of Portuguese at UM currently has more than 30 teachers, including those who work part-time, and around 400 students.
The courses of this department reach, however, more than a thousand students across the entire UM, including students from the Faculty of Law and others who attend the language subjects offered transversally in all courses of the higher education institution.
