Chapter 3 Bilingual Education in Brazil Luciana C. de Oliveira and Camila Höfling Abstract Brazil does not currently have an approved education policy for Portuguese-English bilingual programs, which is problematic in terms of consid- ering the discourse of bilingual education in the country today. We start the chapter with an overview of current laws and guidelines for bilingual programs for other languages, namely Brazilian sign language, border schools, and indigenous schools. We then review some education laws related to the teaching of foreign languages. We present information about typical bilingual education program models to show the affordances and focus of each model. The main section of the chapter includes a discussion of new guidelines for bilingual education in Brazil which are currently being reviewed. Based on current bilingual education practices that are additive and focus on multilingualism, we propose some principles of plurilingual pedagogies for bilingual education programs in Brazil, since an absence of policies leaves the country with little information about how to structure these programs. 1 Overview of Brazil Brazil is the largest Portuguese-speaking nation in the world. Within the context of predominantly Spanish-speaking Latin America, this provides a significant and intriguing linguistic profile for Brazil. The English language has had a strong presence in Brazil since the 1940s. In the school curriculum, the presence of French and English as foreign languages has been substantial, along with classical languages (Latin and Greek) since the early nineteenth century. The teaching of English in Brazil started with the decree of June 22, 1809, signed by D. João VI, a Portuguese Prince who ruled Brazil at the time, which stipulated the creation of a school of French and a school of English. Until then, only Greek and Latin had been taught as school subjects. At L. C. de Oliveira (B ) Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, USA e-mail: deoliveiral@vcu.edu C. Höfling Universidade Federal de São Carlos (Federal University of São Carlos), São Carlos, Brazil e-mail: camilahofling@ufscar.br © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 K. Raza et al. (eds.), Policy Development in TESOL and Multilingualism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3603-5_3 25