Questões de Inglês - Sinônimos | Synonyms para Concurso

It is not uncommon for English language lessons to favour communication over accuracy: real life is nothing like a classroom! In real-life situations, when you make a mistake in the language you are learning, context provides ample information as to what the intended message is. In fact, most of the time, impeccable accuracy is not needed at all! “Don’t worry about making mistakes,” I used to tell my English language students. “Communicating is the most important thing!”

While making mistakes when trying to master a language might seem counter-intuitive, letting learners freely communicate and negotiate meaning is key to success. A learner who communicates a lot while making a few mistakes is much more likely to develop confidence for dealing with real-life situations than a learner who communicates very little because they’re afraid of making any. In communicative language teaching, for example, the teacher is tasked with both encouraging the learner to express themselves and with providing corrective feedback in a way that is not obstructive to communication. 

This means that if a learner says, “I go swimming last night,” it is much more effective to respond with, “Oh, that’s nice, you went swimming. What did you do after?” rather than, “No! You went swimming! Use past simple for past events!” – the former encourages the learner to continue their narrative while the latter is much more likely to make the learner stop in their tracks, re-evaluate the context, and think twice before expressing themselves again in the future, for the fear of making a mistake again. Teachers need to be careful not to parrot back everything the students say in this manner, of course, but the technique can be an effective method of acknowledging the content of a student’s response, while also providing feedback on accuracy.

The importance of the freedom to make mistakes in language learning is also supported by research in psychology, which suggests that learners who try a task without having mastered it completely experience improved retention of new information. A similar experiment in the context of language learning also indicates that the process of making mistakes activates a greater network of related knowledge in the brain, which leads to superior learning outcomes.

It is believed that the key to help learners feel relaxed and ready for communicating freely in the classroom is authenticity. This means that there should be both a real communicative need for a learner to speak and the authentic reaction from those around to what the learner has said.

Here are a few ways of how such authentic communicative interactions can be practiced in the classroom: 

• surround learners with the English language – encourage them to speak to you and each other in English;

• don’t worry about diverging from topics that are not strictly covered in your lesson plan;

• model communication by telling your students stories and anecdotes about your own life and encourage them to do the same;

• let your learners have fun with English – give them colloquial expressions to try and ask them to share some expressions

; • do not overcorrect – make a note of errors and cover it in subsequent lessons;

• avoid the temptation to turn what was intended as speaking practice into a full-on grammar lesson.

While easier said than done, especially when the outcome of an exam is at stake, it is worth remembering that people that our learners might come to interact with outside of the classroom are driven by the natural desire to understand the people they communicate with. This is especially powerful when practiced in the context of a classroom. They set the learners up for success in real-life communication. In other words, when communication is the goal, mistakes are secondary, and that’s real life, isn’t it?

Adapted from: https://wwwcambridgeenglish.org/blog/mistakes-help-you-learnfreedom-to-fail-in-games-and-language-learning/

Dogs will eat almost anything—cats, not so much. Here’s why.

     Why are cats such picky eaters when dogs seem willing to wolf down just about anything they encounter? It’s a question many pet parents likely ask themselves while __________ their feline friend to swallow a pill or prying another slobbery piece of mulch from their puppy’s mouth.

      There’s still a lot scientists don’t know about animal taste preferences. But, thanks to a small but growing body of research, researchers are starting to unravel some of the mysteries around our four-legged friends’ flavor fancies. Here’s what we know so far.

       Accidentally drop a cupcake on the ground and your dog will probably scarf it down in one bite. Your cat, on the other hand, may turn up her nose. One possible reason for their ____________ behaviors? Cats can’t taste sweetness.

       Since they couldn’t just ask cats directly, researchers figured this out by analyzing their DNA. House cats, tigers, and cheetahs have a “broken” version of the gene Tas1r2, which works with another gene, Tas1r3, to enable sweetness detection. Though Tas1r3 appears to function perfectly fine in cats, Tas1r2 is an “unexpressed pseudogene” that’s missing 247 letters. Without them, Tas1r2 does not produce a crucial protein needed to form a receptor for sweetness on cats’ taste buds.

       To take the study a step further, they gave 25 felines the choice between a bowl of plain water and one that’d been spiked with molecules that provide umami flavor. As ___________, the cats strongly preferred the umami water, and more specifically, water containing umami compounds present in tuna. That may help explain why felines love the saltwater fish so much.

(Source: National Geographic — adaptation.)

        EAL classrooms are spaces to build communicative competence in the English language. That language has a unique role for many people around the world. For those without financial resources who do not live in English dominant countries, the digital sphere is perhaps the only space in which authentic use of the language is likely to take place. For learners situated in inner circle countries, effective use of the language can make the difference between social, economic and political exclusion, or inclusion. This is also true for a lesser extent in outer circle countries. For those in expanding circle countries, English is becoming a language of the global elite in political, economic, and academic life. In all of these circles, it is often used as a lingua franca. Sociocultural theory states that true competence in encoding and decoding language can only exist when there is an understanding of the cultural realities attached to the communication when it is used. Digital media provide the vector of communication for a tremendous number of communicative acts in all of the circles, but communication in the digital medium carries special attributes that are not necessarily obvious or transparent. Therefore, it seems imperative to arm language users with an understanding of communication issues the digital realm as well as an understanding of the implication of communication in this space. Furthermore, there is an ethical responsibility to empower language users from a variety of background with equal agency and therefore equal voice. Doing so requires more than just technical skills, but also skills of critique and critical language awareness, productive ability, and an understanding of agency and rights claims that stretch from the linguistic to the economic and political. By reimagining Critical Language Awareness as a component of a multiliteracy approach that encompasses the full spectrum of analogue to digital communication in English, teachers, students, and policy makers can work toward making language studies as relevant, authentic, and empowering as possible. 

Adapted from: (PDF) English as an Additional Language: Enhancing Critical Digital Literacy (researchgate.net)

From: https://www.facebook.com/photo

Text I

     Just as spoken languages are the basis for our conversations with people, so design languages are the basis for our interactions with products and services. Spoken languages consist of words and rules of grammar. By analogy, design languages consist of design elements and guidelines for their combination. People use spoken language to express themselves. Product designers use design languages to design expressive objects. When a designer uses a design language to design a product, the resulting product expresses what it is, what it does, how it is to be used, and the experiences to which it has the potential to contribute. When people use a design language to use a product, the resulting experience of use is simple and straightforward. The best design languages take the design of experience on step further by making interactions between people and objects pleasant and continuously meaningful. Design languages play a very important role in the expression of the “unfolding of meaning” of objects. 

[Fonte: Usability, Paul S. Adler & Terry A. Winograd,

Oxford University Press, 1992, pg. 18]

By RICK CALLAHAN

(Adapted from

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/03/19/AR2007031900335.html)

    The Senate approved sweeping deficit-reduction legislation last night that would save about $35 billion over the next five years by cutting federal spending on prescription drugs, agriculture supports and student loans, while clamping down on fraud in the Medicaid program.

     Yesterday's action is part of an effort by congressional Republicans to demonstrate fiscal discipline after widespread complaints of profligate spending on Capitol Hill. ....51.... many Democrats and some moderate Republicans are concerned that the effort may go too far, prominent Republicans in the Senate and House said the cuts were necessary to slow the rate of spending and control a deficit projected to total $314 billion by the end of the fiscal year.

      During a speech yesterday, former House majority leader Tom Delay (R-Tex) repeatedly apologized for excessive spending by Congress, including recent highway legislation that was ....52.... with lawmakers’ pet projects. After noting that House Republicans have voted to cut taxes every year since winning the majority in 1994, DeLay acknowledged, “Our record on spending has not been as consistent, ....53.... .”

(Adapted from washingtonpost.com)

What life in medieval Europe was really like

      A time of innovation, philosophy, and legendary works of art: the realities of the medieval period (500 to 1500 C.E.) in Europe may surprise you. Many know the years before the Renaissance and _________________ that followed as Europe’s “Dark Ages,” a time of backward, slovenly, and brutal people who were technologically primitive and hopelessly superstitious.

     Sure, it would take until the 19th century for the germ theory of disease to overtake the concept of humors and “miasmas” that could damage human health. But the ___________ image of medieval people as slovenly, unwashed, and lacking hygiene is false. In fact, both indoor and outdoor bathing were beloved in Europe. People not only made and used soap at home, but they frequented bathhouses—some public, some private, some merely fronts for brothels.

      A myth persists that during the Middle Ages, the unenlightened believed Earth was flat and worried that ships might even fall off the planet’s edge. That’s patently false: People knew the planet was a sphere as far back as ancient Greece (12th to 9th centuries B.C.), and had relatively complex astronomical and planetary ______________ by the time Christopher Columbus made his voyage to the Americas in 1492.

      The so-called “Dark Ages” is a myth historians have spent years trying to disprove. The myth seems to stem from some authors’ use of “dark” to refer to everything from a 14th-century poet’s complaints about the quality of local literature to a 17th-century historian’s failed attempt to find historical sources from centuries earlier.

(Fonte: National Geographic — adaptado.)

         We propose a new proxy for ex ante uncertainty of firm value and test it. Our results show that there is a larger level of uncertainty at the beginning of trading on Nasdaq than on the NYSE. This in turn is associated with larger levels of underpricing for Nasdaq IPOs. We suggest that this may be due to the different informational efficiency of the two trading systems.

By Stephan Herrera

February 13, 2003

New York, January 1, 2006:

Sweden announces that one of its biotechnology companies is the first in the world to enter clinical trials with a new drug that could cure Alzheimer's disease. Four years ago this type of research was all but stopped in the United States by political and ethical questions − which is ....58.... Sweden now seems in the best position to capture a $25 billion market.

    Any day now, the U.S. Congress is expected to pass a sweeping new law that could dramatically inhibit researchers from working with stem cells taken from human embryos. Such cells, which can be used to grow a whole host of new cells and organs, could fundamentally change the way we treat heretofore intractable maladies like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, cancer, stroke, liver failure, and heart disease. The only problem is that these cells by definition are derived from human embryos, many of which are cloned or come from unused fetuses collected at fertility clinics. The argument, from a certain segment of the American political spectrum, is that ....59.... methods are morally wrong. They are ....60.... a form of abortion or an activity that could eventually lead to human cloning.

   

(Adapted from http://www.redherring.com/investor/2003/02/biotech021303.html)

Sonia Falconieri, Albert Murphy and Daniel Weaver

    There are two major methods of opening trading of initial public offerings (IPOs) in the U.S. The NYSE is an order-driven market ....51.... a call auction allows supply and demand to be aggregated (at one location) prior to the start of trading. ....52.... , Nasdaq is a quote-driven market. Dealers can only specify their best quotes, and participants have ....53.... idea of supply and demand away from the inside quotes.

(http://www.nyse.com/marketinfo/p1020656068262.html?displayPage=% 2Fmarketinfo%2Fmarketinfo.html)