Users accounts on the Acervo Celpe-Bras contributions to the Portuguese language promotion

Abstract

The Certificate of Proficiency in Portuguese language for Foreigners, Celpe-Bras, is the brazilian Portuguese proficiency test developed by the Brazilian Ministry of Education, applied since 1998. In 2014, the Acervo Celpe-Bras, an online platform that contains all the documents, tests, manuals and other data regarding the exam, was publicly released by the Avalia research group, from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The Acervo’s availability was extremely relevant for the democratization of access to the data regarding the exam. In order to investigate the impact of the public provision of those materials to PAL (Portuguese as an Additional Language) teaching and learning and to the preparation of candidates, as well as to map users profile, a questionnaire was posted online to invite volunteer participation during the period of 2018 exam’s registration and application. This article presents quantitative and qualitative data, which indicate the impact of the public release of the materials on teaching practices, to researcher’s works and on examinee and PAL students’ preparation.