Questões de Inglês - Uso dos adjetivos | Use of adjectives para Concurso

The opening ceremony of the Olympic Games traditionally offers the host city the opportunity to celebrate sporting excellence and international unity while also presenting to the world a flattering portrait of its own nation, informed by its own culture. [...]

[...] Entitled ‘Ça ira’ (‘It’ll be all right’), the show garnered mixed reviews in the French press. It was described variously as magical or catastrophic, as an astonishing apotheosis or a distressing accumulation of kitsch. Lady Gaga performed up and down a flight of stairs, dressed in feathers. The French singer Philippe Katerine, covered in blue body paint and dressed up as Bacchus, reclined in a platter of fruit. A threesome blossomed in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Decapitated figures of Marie-Antoinette holding their singing heads appeared at the windows of the Conciergerie. A floating piano was set on fire. The ceremony was conceived over two years by a committee made up of historian Patrick Boucheron (a member of the prestigious research institute, the Collège de France), the scriptwriter Fanny Herrero (creator of the Netflix series 10 Pour Cent/Call My Agent), the novelist Leïla Slimani (winner of the Goncourt literary prize for her novel Chanson douce/Lullaby), and the dramatist Damien Gabriac, who were all assembled in 2022 by the event’s master of ceremonies, theatre director Thomas Jolly. to co-write the script of their celebration of France. 

[...]

The man behind Le Puy du Fou is entrepreneur and politician Philippe de Villiers. Although de Villiers briefly served as Secretary of State for Culture under Socialist President François Mitterand, he is currently a member of French nationalist party Reconquête!, whose leader is the far-right firebrand Eric Zemmour. De Villiers is a Christian traditionalist who has expressed hostility towards Islam and has maintained that during the French Revolution a political ‘genocide’ was perpetrated against the Royalist people of Vendée.

It was therefore important for Jolly and his team firmly to distance their own project from Le Puy du Fou and to offer instead, as Jolly said: ‘the opposite of a virile, heroic and providential history’, of ‘an ode to grandeur’ or to the ‘manifestation of force’. Besides de Villiers’ theme park, another anti-model may have been the opening ceremony of the 2023 Rugby World Cup. Hosted by the popular actor Jean Dujardin and featuring a playful celebration of traditional French life, it was criticised for portraying a nostalgic and ‘rancid’ version of France. To be sure, at a time when France is politically and culturally riven, it would have seemed important to tell a national story that would unite rather than divide. In contrast, Jolly aimed for a celebration of ‘planetary multi-ethnicity’. But was it not in hindsight a mistake, a missed opportunity, to throw out, for fear that it might be politically toxic, anything that might be perceived as a celebration of French history, or the shared heritage that binds all French people together? 

Patrick Boucheron, the historian in Jolly’s team, has declared his ‘resistance’ to the idea of a ‘roman national’, the strengthening story a nation collectively weaves about itself – the word roman meaning in this instance at once a narrative and a romance. Boucheron favours instead a decentring of national consciousness and a deconstruction of national history. There was always a danger in rejecting historical greatness for ideological reasons. Louis XIV and Napoleon Bonaparte – both absent from the celebration – really do belong to all French; including them in the narrative would not have made it reactionary. Meanwhile Jolly’s desire systematically to foreground pop culture in order not to appear elitist often felt parochial. What is the long-term cultural significance of Nicky Doll, Paloma and Piche, stars of the reality show Drag Race France? Was the performance of John Lennon’s song Imagine really, as a sports historian declared in the newspaper Libération, ‘heavy with meaning’ because of its nature as a ‘political and cultural allegory’?

Wasn’t it also a pity not to celebrate France’s contemporary achievements, especially the rebuilding of Notre-Dame after its devastation by fire, and the Grand Paris Express transport network being developed for better integration of central Paris and its banlieues?

But above all, what was missing from the show, with rare exceptions – such as the sight of the Olympic cauldron rising into the sky tethered to a gigantic hot air balloon – was beauty. This signalled a lack of cultural confidence on the part of the ceremony’s storytellers. It was telling, for example, that Marcel Proust, one of France’s most exceptional writers, was featured as a caricatured carnival head, alongside Little Red Riding Hood and Marcel Marceau. Nor was placing the ceremony under the auspices of ‘Ça ira’, a 1790 anthem of the French Revolution as familiar to the French as the Marseillaise, an expression of intellectual confidence. Like the Marseillaise, ‘Ça ira’ is a call to violence – an ode to the systematic hanging of aristocrats from lamp-posts – and insisting, as Jolly did, that it can be reframed as a message of hope and of ‘union and unity within diversity’ is meaningless.

Ultimately, whether any of this landed with its audience remains doubtful. In spite of the driving rain, the French enjoyed the show’s wackiness, the party atmosphere, the excitement and anticipation of the Games. And the Games themselves were a wonderful success. But a message was sent nevertheless. And now that the Olympic truce is over, Emmanuel Macron must once again face up to a divided nation

In: https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/what-the-paris-olympics-openingceremony-reallymeant/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwuMC2BhA7EiwAmJKRrLbi3d14OiB6WRug_hjU2I-75FCfTsQ0RitnqNM3GJxOqz9UCUlUBoCZ4IQAvD_BwE

    Given the panorama of English instruction in Brazil, particularly in the states of Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso, and considering the results of the surveys conducted with universities and teachers in both states, some conclusions and recommendations could be drawn.

    Nationally, English instruction has been gaining importance and visibility through curriculum reform and the new model of upper secondary school. It is an enormously significant achievement that, for the first time, English has become mandatory in all public and private schools from 6th grade onward. The BNCC offers clarity on the competencies and abilities that students should develop at each education level. However, if, on the one hand, making English compulsory was an important step, on the other hand, the implementation of this policy is still incomplete. The main issue is the limited amount of instructional time in English in the national curriculum guidelines. As the cases of Mato Grosso and Minas Gerais illustrate, the result is that students have insufficient exposure to the language, with only two classes per week in secondary schools and one class per week in upper secondary. Under these conditions, it is unlikely that learners will develop full proficiency in the language, and teachers will have the instructional time to focus on all the necessary competencies and abilities required by the BNCC.

    Another important consideration is the link between initial training for English teachers and how it interacts with the routines and challenges of the classroom. There is room for improvement when considering the mismatch between the programs of study at universities and the pedagogical practice required of English teachers and strengthened ties and communication between State Education Departments and the teacher training programs at universities.

    Universities face additional challenges, such as the low English proficiency of students in the initial training courses. Initial training institutions face difficulties in thoroughly preparing future teachers regarding language proficiency and the pedagogical elements related to being an effective teacher. In this sense, the situation can create a vicious cycle; students leave schools with a low proficiency level in English, and those who decide to take the initial training courses to become English teachers and enter universities cannot fully develop proficiency as pedagogical competencies. Therefore, they enter schools not fully prepared to be teachers and face all the challenges of a classroom.

    Another critical challenge is class size and the heterogeneity of students’ ability levels, which could limit teachers’ ability to implement some pedagogical practices, such as working with practicing speaking. This is not only a challenge faced by English teachers, but all teachers and that policymakers need to keep in mind. In addition, teachers commonly work in more than one school at a time and sometimes teach other subjects to meet the required hours of instructional time stipulated in their contracts.

   The surveys with teachers demonstrated that many have never participated in a professional development session specifically designed for English teachers. For those who have, not all considered the helpful training to improve their knowledge and practice. This points to the fact that more attention needs to be paid to the continuous training courses offered to English teachers. These training courses should be frequent and address specific challenges, taking into account the pedagogical issues and areas that English teachers identify as most critical.

    Briefly, it is important to highlight the windows of opportunity that have been opened in Brazil with the BNCC and the new upper secondary model. Through their education ministries, state governments have made significant efforts to adapt their regional curricula to the competencies and abilities listed on the BNCC and implement the first pilots and designed pathways for upper secondary schools. It remains a question of how the rest of those two processes will be implemented, but there are positive signs that English may gain more importance at a national level. At least in Minas Gerais and Mato Grosso, there is already a movement to increase the importance of the discipline.

    While Minas Gerais has developed a few specific training courses for English teachers focused on improving their pedagogical knowledge through the program “Pathways for Educators” and intends to create a training pathway for upper secondary students focused in English, Mato Grosso has implemented English in all primary schools in the state and launched the program “More English,” with resources to help teachers and students. Those efforts are aligned with the national reforms and illustrate the political willingness of states to promote more actions to improve teachers’ and students’ proficiency in English.

    In these states and, to some extent, at the national level, the foundations have been set to put English instruction in the spotlight as a crucial discipline to the integral development of students. However, much work and resources are still needed to realize this goal. Therefore, the following recommendations are intended to advise decision-makers at universities and State Education Departments.