Questões de Inglês - Artigos | Articles para Concurso

For the question 2 to 10, fill in the blanks with the correct alternative.

Read the text and choose the option according to it:

To live the longest and healthiest life possible, get smarter. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) data show that past a certain threshold, health and wealth are just weakly correlated. However, overall health is closely tied to how many years people spend in school. Mexico, for instance, has a fifth the per capita gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States, but, for women, more than 50 percent of the latter’s schooling.

In line with the trend, Mexico’s female adult mortality rate is only narrowly higher. Vietnam and Yemen have roughly equivalent per capita GDP. Yet Vietnamese women average 6.3 more years in school and are half as likely to die between the ages of 15 and 60. “Economic growth is also significantly associated with child mortality reductions, but the magnitude of the association is much smaller than that of increased education,” comments EmmanuelaGakidou, IHME’s director of education and training. “One year of schooling gives you about 10 percent lower mortality rates, whereas with a 10 percent increase in GDP, your mortality rate would go down only by 1 to 2 percent.”

Discover, May 31, 2013. Adaptado.

Read the text and answer the questions.

What if there was a way to take the things you need without paying for them, and doing it in a way that supports your moral beliefs?

Welcome to the freegan movement.

Basically, the modus operandi is to buck the conventional economy and engage in minimal consumption of resources. This is done by living off of consumer waste – cast-off clothes, restaurant and supermarket trash, street finds – as the New York Times describes them, freegans are “scavengers of the developed world.”

The movement, which has been gaining strength since the mid-1990s, grew out of the antiglobalization and environmental movements. It is a way to boycott, an “economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider,” according to freegan.info, the online hub for all things freegan.

The word freegan is a mashup of the words “free” and “vegan.” Taking the ethos of veganism a step further, freegans go beyond advocating for animals and stand against the industrial economy in general, seeing at its core the abuse of humans, animals and the environment.

Of all the strategies practiced by freegans, the movement probably garners the most attention for the act of dumpster diving; rummaging through garbage in pursuit of usable items. Few places are off-limits – retailers, offices, restaurants, schools, supermarkets, and any other facility that throws out useful items is game.

Freegans, however, aren’t solely dependent on urban scavenging. There is a growing network of places where people can give away, take, share and trade items, like Freecycle and the free section of Craigslist. In addition, there are events like, "Really, Really, Free Markets" and “Freemeets.” In these meet-ups, rather than tossing perfectly good stuff into the waste stream, people can bring the thing they no longer want and share it instead.

Perhaps the best things in life are free, after all.

(Adapted text from: https://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/responsibleliving/stories/what-is-the-freegan-movement)

TEXT V- Text for questions 38, 39and 40.

Strategic behavior in digital reading in English

as a second/foreign language: a literature review

(Juliana do Amaral, Marília Camponogara Torres, Lêda Maria Braga Tomitch).

1. “[...] It is essential that teachers acknowledge the fact that reading hypertexts is a more cognitively
2. demanding process which requires skills such as navigating through hyperlinks and constructing meaning
3. from multiple sources. Besides, teachers need to develop students’ awareness when reading digital texts
4. by showing them that the strategies employed in this space might be borrowed from traditional forms of
5. reading, but, many times, should be selected from a pool of specific strategies that are unique to the digital
6. environment. In this way, fostering the students’ metacognition in reading in a second/foreign language
7. is essential to improve their competence as readers of both printed and digital texts.” (p. 143)

TEXT III- Text for questions 34 and 35.

(Available at: https://br.pinterest.com/pin/56506170312404719/ Accessed on March 29th, 2019).

TEXT II

Affordances and limitations of technology: Voices from EFL teachers and learners.

(Mohammad Amiryousefi)

Abstract

1. With the developments of new technologies appearing very quickly, the attention has been focused more on
2. technology than learning. English centers and institutes have mostly been busy accommodating new programs
3. and technologies and hence have not spent enough time to evaluate the CALL (Computer Assisted Language
4. Learning) programs and technologies employed to find their affordances and limitations. The present study
5. was an attempt to study the perceptions and evaluation of the Iranian EFL learners and teachers about CALL.
6. To this end, 240 students and teachers of two big institutes in Iran where CALL is used in their English
7. learning program participated in the study. The required data were collected through a mixed-method design.
8. The results of data analysis showed that CALL can enhance language learning and English listening, reading,
9. and writing skills. It can also increase students' motivation and interest in learning and their exposure to
10. language. However, it cannot improve speaking skill well. It also causes technology addiction, lacks good
11. standards and an interactive nature necessary for the development of communicative proficiency, and may
12. give the confidence to the teachers that everything is prepared by CALL courseware designers and hence they
13. may come unprepared. The present study argues that the mere focus on technological support is not adequate,
14. and a pedagogical understanding of language teachers’ and learners’ new roles and identities in CALL
15. environment should be developed.

Keywords:

Computer Assisted Language Learning; evaluation; perception; language learning;

language skills

(Source: Journal of English Language Teaching and Learning. Article 2, Volume 9, Issue 19, Winter and Spring 2017, page 1-24. Available at: https://elt.tabrizu.ac.ir/article_6252.html . Accessed on April 20^th, 2019)

Answer questions 30 to 33 according to TEXT II.

TEXT I

The teaching of English as a foreign language in the context of Brazilian regular schools: a retrospective and prospective view of policies and practices.

(Ricardo Luiz Teixeira de Almeida).

(…) A brief overview of the recent history of ELT in Brazilian regular schools

During the 1970s, the so-called audiolingual method, based on behaviorist and structuralist assumptions, was still considered the only scientific way of teaching a foreign language. Its emphasis on the oral skills and on the exhaustive repetition of structural exercises seemed to work well in the contexts of private language institutes. Those contexts were characterized by the gathering of small numbers of highly motivated students per class, a weekly time-table superior in the number of hours to the one adopted in regular schools, and plenty of audiovisual resources. Questionable in itself, both because of its results (which in time were revealed to be less efficient than believed, especially in terms of fluency) and its theoretical assumptions, the method ended up being adopted by regular schools due to its positive reputation at the time. The failure of the methodology in this context would soon become evident, generating extreme frustration both amongst teachers and students.

From the 1980s on, with the spread of ideas connected to the so-called communicative approach and the growth of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), the community of researchers and teachers interested in the context of regular schools started reviewing the assumptions and logic of English Language Teaching (ELT). Recognizing that each and every school discipline needs to justify its presence in the curriculum socially and educationally, this movement identified the skill of reading as the most relevant one for the students attending the majority of Brazilian regular schools. This understanding was achieved by considering not only the possibility of real use outside school, but also the role this approach could play in the achievement of other educational goals, such as the improvement of student's reading abilities in Portuguese as a mother tongue (MOITA LOPES, 1996)*. This movement reached its climax with the publication of the Brazilian National Curricular Parameters (PCN) for the teaching of foreign languages at basic education level by the end of the 1990s. The document recommended the focus on the teaching of reading within a view of language as discourse. However, it did not close the door on the teaching of any other skill, as long as the context made it possible and relevant.

It is important at this point to clarify a few things about the emergence of this educational policy. First of all, it was not formulated apart from the community of teachers and researchers and then imposed upon them. On the contrary, great names in Brazilian Applied Linguistics, such as Luiz Paulo da Moita Lopes and Maria Antonieta Celani among others, were involved in the formulation of the Parameters. Even more important than that, a lot of teachers, individually or collectively, with or without supervision, were already trying the focus on reading as an alternative to the failure of previous practices before the Parameters were elaborated. Two well-known examples are those from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In São Paulo, The Catholic University (PUCSP) became a national center for foreign language teacher education, through the development of a Brazilian ESP project focusing on reading (CELANI, 2005)**. In Rio de Janeiro, a discussion conducted by the city educational authorities and the teachers in public schools (concerning the contents and methodology of each school discipline), during the administrations of Saturnino Braga and Marcelo Alencar, led to the proposition that the focus on reading for foreign language teaching reflected the will of most teachers who participated in the discussion.

Another important characteristic of the Parameters that should not be overlooked is their emphasis on teacher's autonomy. This emphasis can be seen clearly in the fact that no content or method is imposed upon the teachers. What one can find are suggestions and relevant information for teachers to make their own decisions, taking into consideration the context within which they work. In other words, the Parameters do not force any teacher to limit their focus on the teaching of reading, if they believe they can go further than that.

In spite of all these positive points, since their publication, it is possible to identify a strong resistance to the focus on reading on the part of many teachers. The reasons for this resistance will be discussed in the following sections of this paper. […] (p.333-334)

*MOITA LOPES, Luiz Paulo da. Oficina de Lingüística Aplicada: a natureza social e educacional dos processos de ensino / aprendizagem de línguas. Campinas: Mercado de Letras, 1996.

**CELANI, M. A. Introduction. In: CELANI, M. A. et al. ESP in Brazil: 25 years of evolution and reflection. Campinas-SP: Mercado de Letras, São Paulo: Educ, 2005. p. 13-26.

(Adapted from: Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada. vol.12. nº.2. Belo Horizonte. Apr./June 2012, p. 331-348. Available at: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1984-63982012000200006 Accessed on April 15^th, 2019)

Answer questions 26 to 29 according to TEXT I.