Márcia
When did you come to Australia?
I came to Australia before I started school. So I started school here in Prep, in this town and have been at school here ever since.
What language do you speak at home?
We speak Portuguese at home. My Mum and Dad speak English and they don’t need me to speak for them anymore. They don’t really need my help with English. When people speak to my Mum she understandings it unless they speak very fast then she can’t understand it.
What language do you speak the most of?
When I’m with friends, certain words just pop into our minds, so we can swap between English and Portuguese. We often mix up languages. When I am using WhatsApp to communicate with family, I use Portuguese.
And keeping our language is important, it is part of us being Brazilian. I’m not scared of forgetting that language, because obviously it is there, but we’ve had to teach ourselves how to read and write in Portuguese because we haven’t been educated in Brazil. So being allowed to speak in our language is important. We learnt to read Portuguese by reading the bible every single day for a year.
What helps you in class?
I think that doing some more work with words might help.
When you are listening to English do you translate?
It depends, at the beginning of this year I had some troubles with processing, but it does click, so not so much now. And even in writing – there was a word I was writing in Portuguese and my teacher kept correcting it like a spelling mistake. And I kept thinking that’s right – then I realized I was writing it in Portuguese not in English.
What do you think you will do after school?
I can’t see myself going back to Brazil to live, but I can see me spending some time there. My family want me to get the same grades as the Australian students. I hope I’ll go to university when I’m finished.
*These profiles are constructed from real interviews, but are not direct transcriptions.