Questões de Inglês - Pronomes | Pronouns para Concurso

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      ‘English’, as a language, has for some time been seen as a global phenomenon and, therefore, as no longer defined by fixed territorial, cultural and social functions. At the same time, people using English around the world have been shaping it and adapting it to their contexts of use and have made it relevant to their socio-cultural settings. English as a Lingua Franca, or ELF for short, is a field of research interest that was born out of this tension between the global and the local, and it originally began as a ramification of the World Englishes framework in order to address the international, or, rather, transnational perspective on English in the world. The field of ELF very quickly took on a nature of its own in its attempt to address the communication, attitudes, ideologies in transnational contexts, which go beyond the national categorisations of World Englishes (such as descriptions of Nigerian English, Malaysian English and other national varieties). ELF research, therefore, has built on World Englishes research by focusing on the diversity of English, albeit from more transnational, intercultural and multilingual perspectives.

      ELF is an intercultural medium of communication used among people from different socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and usually among people from different first languages. Although it is possible that many people who use ELF have learnt it formally as a foreign language, at school or in an educational institution, the emphasis is on using rather than on learning. And this is a fundamental difference between ELF and English as a Foreign Language, or EFL, whereby people learn English to assimilate to or emulate native speakers. In ELF, instead, speakers are considered language users in their own right, and not failed native speakers or deficient learners of English. Some examples of typical ELF contexts may include communication among a group of neuroscientists, from, say, Belgium, Brazil and Russia, at an international conference on neuroscience, discussing their work in English, or an international call concerning a business project between Chinese and German business experts, or a group of migrants from Syria, Ethiopia and Iraq discussing their migration documents and requirements in English. The use of English will of course depend on the linguistic profile of the participants in these contexts, and they may have another common language at their disposal (other than English), but today ELF is the most common medium of intercultural communication, especially in transnational contexts.

        So, research in ELF pertains to roughly the same area of research as English as a contact language and English sociolinguistics. However, the initial impetus to conducting research in ELF originated from a pedagogical rationale – it seemed irrelevant and unrealistic to expect learners of English around the world to conform to native norms, British or American, or even to new English national varieties, which would be only suitable to certain socio-cultural and geographical locations. So, people from Brazil, France, Russia, Mozambique, or others around the world, would not need to acquire the norms originated and relevant to British or American English speakers, but could orientate themselves towards more appropriate and relevant ways of using English, or ELF. Researchers called for “closing a conceptual gap” between descriptions of native English varieties and new empirical and analytical approaches to English in the world. With the compilation of a number of corpora, ELF empirical research started to explore how English is developing, emerging and changing in its international uses around the world. Since the empirical corpus work started, research has expanded beyond the pedagogical aim, to include explorations of communication in different domains of expertise (professional, academic, etc.) and in relation to other concepts and research, such as culture, ideology and identity.

Adapted from https://www.gold.ac.uk/glits-e/ back-issues/english-as-a-lingua-franca/

FDA clears first diagnostic radiology app, Mobile MIM

By Brian Dolan

February 04, 2011

    Mobile MIM was one of the very first medical applications to debut in Apple's AppStore when it first launched in 2008, but the application also has the distinction of being the first medical application pulled from the store because of regulatory concerns. Today those concerns are over: The US Food and Drug Administration has officially granted the mobile radiology application a 510(k) clearance.

     “The application is the first cleared by the FDA for viewing images and making medical diagnoses based on computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and nuclear medicine technology, such as positron emission tomography (PET)," the FDA stated in a press release this morning. "It is not intended to replace full workstations and is indicated for use only when there is no access to a workstation.”

    MIM's experience is one of the few public accounts of the nuances of FDA regulation of mobile health services. The clearance some two and a half years later of an app that originally launched with Apple's AppStore is surely a milestone for mobile health.

(Adapted from https://www.mobihealthnews.com) 

    The quest for universal administrative standards to promote the effective application of public laws and policies gave birth to the field of public administration. Woodrow Wilson argued for a distinction between politics and administration, arguing that the former was more concerned with democracy, justice, and equality, while the latter was more concerned with efficiency, as he postulated that “administration lies beyond the proper domain of politics; administrative questions are not political questions” (Wilson, 1887). 

    According to Waldo (1948), the means and measurements of efficiency were the same for all administrations: democracy, if it were to survive, could not afford to ignore the lessons of centralization, hierarchy and discipline. Bureaucracy as an organisational type has seen its heyday in the field of public administration, owing to Woodrow Wilson’s Transfer of Administrative Principles.

    That notwithstanding, the field has gone through paradigmatic evolution over time by a quest for management paradigm derived from the discipline of business administration. The management approach is said to hold the promise of future public sector reform, replacing the administrative approach traditionally provided by public administration. A new concept arises when the management perspective is combined with an emphasis on the public sector: public management. 

    Courses and programmes, as well as whole academic institutions and colleges, are adapting by switching from the term “public administration” to “public management”. Considering the growing demands for efficiency in the public sector, the transition from a public administration to a public management framework seems to be the right step.

M.O. Obimpeh and J.A. Dankwa. Public administration – public management interface: how different is the “management” from the “administration”? Internet: (adapted)