Questões de 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.)