Questões de Concurso Comentadas sobre inglês

Based on the following excerpt from Charlotte's Web by E.B. White:

'Wilbur was lonely. The sheep were asleep. His stomach was empty.'
What is the correct form of the verb 'to be' used in these sentences and why? 

How would you use the verb 'to be' to ask a question about Harry's profession?

The Internet has changed people lives, speech styles, jobs, communication, and education. Modern cell phones, digital cameras, and other new devices have affected the way we use language. People communicate with each other through electronic mail, instant messaging, and texts. They might “chat” in different virtual rooms, join interesting online groups, comment on news websites, and write in blogs and “wikis.” These practices construct new forms of “discourse, identity, authorship, and language” (Kern, 2006, p.183). The English language is widely used on the Internet and is considered to be the most common Internet language. English language has many new expressions and abbreviations that appear on the Internet. These Internet expressions have grown in popularity. People use several terms to describe them, such as texting language, textese, Internet language, digital language, and chatting language. Such expressions build up a new variety of English that is very common among Internet users, bloggers, chatters, gamers, and teenagers in general. It is considered an informal written language, much like slang, which is an informal spoken variety of the language. This paper uses the term “texting language” (TL) to mean all these kinds of messages, expressions, and abbreviations.

http://www.universitypublications.net/ijas/0703/pdf/V4G323.pdf


If you like to share your opinion in comment threads or chat rooms politely, you should use the abbreviation 

Identity is intrinsically embedded in the social hierarchy of our postmodern world particularly since technological globalization has facilitated contact between people, cultures, and languages, thus shortening distances, removing boundaries, and fueling the notion of the world as a global village (Bauman, 1999). Social relations have indeed become more complex as identities tend to be less coherent and stable entities. This is to say that the more diverse and complex human encounters and relationships are, the more multifaceted and plural the roles they assume in individual and in social practices will be. Yet identities may be the product of social, cultural, or institution instantiation (Weedon,2004) and subjectivities are constituted by the discourses generated by institutional, social, and cultural practices within historical contexts. Identities are always relational and negotiable (Norton, 2000). Language, seen as more than a linguistic system of signs with regularities and applicability, is a social practice that engages subjects into meaningful exchanges where identities are negotiated and constructed. When social practice is seen in relation to language use and education, particularly in the case of foreign language teachers, their lived experiences, beliefs, and knowledge help them build their identity transforming their practices. Identity “reflects the social, historical and political context of an individual’s lived experiences” (Hall, 2002, p. 31); it is not a sole identity, but identities, related to different traditional demographic categories such as ethnicity, race, nationality, migration, gender, social class, and language.
https://www.redalyc.org/journal/3057/305762630004/html



For the foreign language teachers,  

Reading the cartoon, we infer that 

From a more pedagogical standpoint, suggestions have been made to use certain activities for activating readers’ existing schema or at least providing learners with crucial information about the topic they will be reading (Ajideh, 2003; Brown, 2001; Chastain, 1988; Chen & Graves, 1995; Grabe, 1991). The use of reading activities can promote strategic reading behaviors by students at pre-, while-, and postreading (Alyousef, 2006; Ur, 1996) stages. In turn, reading activities can promote interpretation of the text through the interaction between the reader and the text (Wallace, 1992) and thus play a vital role in schema activation in order to comprehend and interpret the text better (Chen & Graves, 1995; Grabe & Stoller, 2002). Despite the fairly well-documented impact of background knowledge on reading comprehension and a host of activities suggested, it still remains to be explored whether, or to what extent, the lack of cultural knowledge can be compensated through the use of reading activities. Erten and Karakaş (2007) noted that our knowledge on the value of these activities mainly stems from pedagogical recommendations or personal experiences and often lacks scientific scrutiny. Only a handful of studies have investigated which is more effective, using a particular activity on the same text (e.g., Karakaş, 2005) or making use of different activities on the same text with different groups of students (e.g., Chen & Graves, 1995; Erten & Karakaş, 2007; Shen, 2004).
Erten & Razı: The effects of cultural familiarity on reading comprehension https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ838389.pdf

Regarding the suggestions for reading activities that require the student to use Skimming, rate T for true sentences and F for false sentences:

(  ) Prepare a text for a treasure hunt, which must be enigmatic so that students highlight the key words and find clues to the treasure.
(  ) Distribute short texts in English, with vocabulary already known to the students, and ask them to read for a few minutes. Afterwards, ask each student to tell you what their perception of the text was.
(  ) Write short advertising texts and ask students to read and guess what type of advertising it is.
(  ) Distribute texts in English of different genres to students, ask them to read them quickly and answer what the text is about. 

According to Block (1992), there is now no more debate on "whether reading is a bottom-up, languagebased process or a top-down, knowledge-based process." It is also no more problematic to accept the influence of background knowledge on both L1 and L2 readers. Research has gone even further to define the control readers execute on their ability to understand a text.

This control, Block (1992) has referred to as 

The pronoun in “The ones highlighted” (1^st paragraph) refers to: 

“No matter” in “No matter what we are reading” can be replaced without change in meaning by: 

Based on the text, mark the statements below as TRUE (T) or FALSE (F).

( ) This text aims at helping teachers improve their practice.
( ) When reading comics, one should read only the words written on the page.
( ) Visual cues are irrelevant when teaching reading to students.

The statements are, respectively: 

The sentence that presents the verb form in the passive voice is: 

The figure of speech that the excerpt “by weaving together a series of knowledge representations into a cohesive tapestry” (3^rd paragraph) offers is a(n): 

The opposite of the adverb in “The teaching and learning activities often involve” (3^rd paragraph) is: 

The modal verb in “The teacher can design learning experiences” (3^rd paragraph) indicates:

The adjective in “a sole focus on language in literacy (2^nd paragraph) is similar in meaning to:

The word “shift” in “shift in the pedagogical approaches” (2^nd paragraph) implies a(n): 

In the excerpt “to negotiate a range of contexts and patterns of intercultural meanings as well as the prevalence of multimodal texts” (1^st paragraph), “as well as” signals a(n): 

Analyse the assertions below based on Text I:

I. The digital age has been demanding changes to curriculum content.
II. In a multimodal approach, teachers bear in mind students’ identities.
III. Teachers should prevent students from bringing world knowledge into the classroom.

Choose the correct answer:

Based on Text I, mark the statements below as TRUE (T) or FALSE (F).

( ) The concept of literacy has become more complex over time.
( ) In today’s literacy classroom, the issue of fake news is to be avoided.
( ) Multimodal communicative practices aim at targets beyond language learning.

The statements are, respectively,

Check the item that displays the CORRECT simple past form for one of the verbs below: