Questões de Concurso

Text V

Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies

Some Final Remarks

    Planning language assessment from a structuralist view of language has been a fairly easy task, since it aims at testing the correct use of grammar and lexical structures. This has been a very comfortable way to evaluate students’ performance in many regular schools or language institutes due to the stability of standardized answers. From the perspective of the new literacy studies, the comfort of teaching and assessing objective and homogeneous linguistic contents is replaced by a wider spectrum of language teaching and assessing possibilities, whose key elements turn to be difference and critique. Typical activities based on this new approach would enable students to make and negotiate meanings in a much more flexible way, corroborating the novel notion of unstable, dynamic, collaborative and distributed knowledge.

    The inclusion of contents of such nature in language assessments may be, at a first glance, a very laborious process due to the fact we are simply not accustomed to that. Actually, we sometimes find ourselves deprived from the teaching skills necessary to apply a more critical teaching approach, a fact that is much the results of our positivist educational background.

    Nonetheless, since the emergent digital epistemology will require subject more capable of designing and redesigning meaning critically towards a great deal of representational modes, we need to reconsider our teaching approaches, go further and seek theories that take such issues into account. By redefining the notions of language and knowledge, we, thus, assume that the new literacy studies from the last decades may offer very good insights to the field of foreign language teaching.

    The re-conceptualization of language assessment according to the new literacies project presented in this paper does not intend to suggest prompt fixed answers, but it takes the risk of outlining possible activities, signaling certain changes regarding its characteristics and contents, as previously shared.

    The increasing importance of the new literacy and multiliteracies studies and their fruitful theoretical insight for the rethinking of pedagogical issues invite us to review our foreign language teaching practices in a different perspective. By sharing some of our local findings, we attempt to corroborate the collaborative and distributed knowledge discussed by the literacies theory itself and hope to be contributing to the new educational demands of the emerging epistemological basis.

From: DUBOC, A.P.M. Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies. Lenguaje 37 (1), 2009. pp. 159-178, p. 175-176.

Text I

Nurturing Multimodalism

    […]

   New learning collaborations call on the teacher as learner, and the learner as teacher. The teacher is a lifelong learner; this is simply more apparent in the Information Age. In instances of best practice, collaborative learning partnerships are forged between and among teachers for strategic, bottom-up, in-house professional development. This allows teachers to share in reflective, on-going, contextualized learning, tailored to their collective knowledge. This sharing also includes the learner as teacher. ELT typically employs learner-centered activities: these can include learners sharing their knowledge of strategic digital literacies with others in the classrooms.

   The digital universe, so threatening to adult notions of socially sanctioned literacies, is intuitive to children, who have been socialized into it, and for whom digital literacies are exploratory play. Adults may find new ways of communicating digitally to be quite baffling and confronting of our communicative expertise; children do not. Instant messaging systems, such as MSN, AOL, ICQ, for example, provide as natural a medium for communicating to them as telephones did for the baby-boomer generation. It is not fair for the teacher to treat Information and Communication Technologies as auxiliary communication with learners for whom it is mainstream and primary.

    Learning spaces are important. Although teachers seldom have much individual say in the layout of teaching spaces, collaborative relationships may help to encourage integrated digitization, where computers are not segregated in laboratories but are interspersed throughout the school environment. In digitally infused curricula, postmodern literacies do not supplant but complement modern literacies, so that access to information is driven by purpose and content rather than by the media available.

Adapted from: LOTHERINGTON, H. From literacy to multiliteracies in ELT. In: CUMMINS, J.; DAVISON, C. (Eds.) International Handbook of English Language Teaching. New York: Springer, 2007, p. 820. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226802846_From_Literacy_to_Multiliter acies_in_ELT 

Square Dance

João loved Teresa who loved Raimundo

who loved Maria who loved Joaquim who loved Lili

who didn’t love anyone.

João went to the United States, Teresa to a convent,

Raimundo died in an accident, Maria became a spinster,

Joaquim committed suicide, and Lili married J. Pinto Fernandes,

who had nothing to do with the story.

(Carlos Drummond de Andrade translated by

Richard Zenith in “Multitudinous Heart”

Text 4 (for questions 42, 43, 44, 45, and 46)

                                                                       Social networks

Going into the small room at the end of the corridor, Roberta sat down _______ ¹ the computer. It was the computer she had bought when her old one’s hard disk had started to go wrong. Her new computer was a laptop with a lot of extra features and she needed it for her online work _______ ² her students. Roberta had started to worry that her students would be bored unless she used modern technology in her teaching.

She turned_______ ³ the switch at the back of her computer. She looked at the email messages waiting for her answer, but she ignored them. Then she looked at the homework posted on a special site she created for the students, but she didn’t feel like correcting it. Instead she went to her favorite social network site and looked at the news about her friends. She sent messages to her favorite people and she had many online conversations _______ ⁴ teaching and other things. She posted some new messages on her own web page and then watched a film clip on a video site which her friend had told her about.

_______ ⁵ now, it was late and she realized that she had spent too much time talking to her friends online. She was very tired. She would have to do all her work in the morning.

(HARMER, J. Essential Teacher Knowledge: core concepts in English language teaching, p. 42. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2012. Adaptado.)