Questões Militares Sobre aspectos linguísticos | linguistic aspects em inglês

                      Teaching English in the Brazilian countryside

      “In Brazil, countryside youth want to learn about new places, new cultures and people. However, they think their everyday lives are an obstacle to that, because they imagine that country life has nothing to do with other parts of the world”, says Rafael Fonseca. Rafael teaches English in a language school in a cooperative coffee cultivation in Paraguaçu. His learners are the children of rural workers.

      Rafael tells us that the objective of the project being developed in the cooperative is to give the young people more opportunities of growth in the countryside, and that includes the ability to communicate with international buyers. “In the future, our project may help overcome the lack of succession in countryside activities because, nowadays, rural workers’ children become lawyers, engineers, teachers, and sometimes even doctors, but those children very rarely want to have a profession related to rural work”, says Rafael.

      “That happens”, he adds, “because their parents understand that life in the countryside can be hard work and they do not want to see their children running the same type of life that they have. Their children also believe that life in the country does not allow them to have contact with other parts of the world, meet other people and improve cultural bounds. The program intends to show them that by means of a second language they can travel, communicate with new people and learn about new cultures as a means of promoting and selling what they produce in the country, and that includes receiving visitors in their workplace from abroad.”

      Rafael’s strategy is to contextualize the English language and keep learners up-to-date with what happens in the global market. “Integrating relevant topics about countryside living can be transformative in the classroom. The local regional and cultural aspects are a great source of inspiration and learning not only for the young, but for us all.”

Adapted from http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2019/01/21/teaching-english-in-the-brazilian-classroom/

                        How much should your boss know about you?

                                                              By José Luis Penarredonda, 26 March 2018 

      We’re all being graded every day. The expensive plane tickets I bought recently have already popped up in my credit score. The fact that I've stopped jogging every morning has been noted by my fitness app - and, if it were connected with an insurance company, this change might push up my premiums. [...]. And, yes, my desirability and efficiency as a worker is also up for evaluation and can be given a number.

      HR departments are crunching increasing volumes of data to measure employees in a more granular way. From software that records every keystroke, or the ‘smart’ coffee machines that will only give you a hot drink if you tap it with your work ID badge there are more opportunities than ever for bosses to measure behaviour. Some analysts think this industry could be worth more than $1 billion by 2022.

      One big aim of data collection is to make “predictions about how long an'employee will stay, and it may influence hiring, firing, or retention of people" [...].

      One problem with this approach is that it’s blind to some of the non-quantifiable aspects of work. Some of the subtler things I do in order to be a better writer, for instance, are not quantifiable: having a drink with someone who tells me a great story, or imagining a piece on my commute. None of these things would show up in my ‘job score'. “A lot of the qualitative aspects of work are being written out,” says Moore, “because if you can’t measure them, they don't exist”.

The dilemma of data

      There are several good business reasons to collect data on employees - from doing better risk management to examining if social behaviours in the workplace can lead to gender discrimination. “Companies fundamentally don't understand how people interact and collaborate at work,” says Ben Waber, president and CEO of Humanyze, an American company which gathers and analyses data about the workplace. He says that he can show them.

      Humanyze gathers data from two sources. The first is the metadata from employees’ communications: their email, phone or corporate messaging service [...]. The second area is data gathered from gadgets like Bluetooth infrared sensors which detect how many people are working in one particular part of an office and how they move around. They also use 'supercharged' ID badges that, as Waber says, are beefed up with "microphones which don't record what you say, but do voice-processing in real time.” This allows measurement of the proportion of time you speak, or how often people interrupt you.

      After six weeks of research, the employer gets a 'big picture’ of the problem it wants to solve, based on the analysed data. If the aim, for instance, is to boost sales, they can analyse what their best salespeople do that others don’t.

     Waber sees it as “a lens of very large work issues, like diversity, inclusion, workload assessment, workspace planning, or regulatory risk”. His business case is that these tools will help companies save millions of dollars and even years of time [...].

                                                                           (Abridged from http://www.bbc.com)