Questões para Concursos

Read the text to answer question: In foreign language education, the teaching of culture remains a hotly debated issue. What is culture? What is its relation to language? Which and whose culture should be taught? What role should the learners’ culture play in the acquisition of knowledge of the target culture? How can we avoid essentializing cultures and teaching stereotypes? And how can we develop in the learners an intercultural competence that would shortchange neither their own culture nor the target culture, but would make them into cultural mediators in a globalized world? This paper explores these issues from the perspective of the large body of research done in Australia, Europe and the U.S. in the last twenty years. It links the study of culture to the study of discourse (see, e.g., Kramsch 1993, 1998, 2004) and to the concept of translingual and transcultural competence proposed by theModern Language Association (e.g., Kramsch, 2010). Special attention will be given to the unique role that the age-old Persian culture can play in fostering the cultural mediators of tomorrow. (KRAMASCH, Claire. Cultura no ensino de língua estrangeira . Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso, São Paulo, LAEL/PUC-SP, v. 19, n. 4, 2024)

Read the text to answer question: In foreign language education, the teaching of culture remains a hotly debated issue. What is culture? What is its relation to language? Which and whose culture should be taught? What role should the learners’ culture play in the acquisition of knowledge of the target culture? How can we avoid essentializing cultures and teaching stereotypes? And how can we develop in the learners an intercultural competence that would shortchange neither their own culture nor the target culture, but would make them into cultural mediators in a globalized world? This paper explores these issues from the perspective of the large body of research done in Australia, Europe and the U.S. in the last twenty years. It links the study of culture to the study of discourse (see, e.g., Kramsch 1993, 1998, 2004) and to the concept of translingual and transcultural competence proposed by theModern Language Association (e.g., Kramsch, 2010). Special attention will be given to the unique role that the age-old Persian culture can play in fostering the cultural mediators of tomorrow. (KRAMASCH, Claire. Cultura no ensino de língua estrangeira . Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso, São Paulo, LAEL/PUC-SP, v. 19, n. 4, 2024)

Read the text to answer question: Today, many of the pedagogical springs and rivers of the last few decades are appropriately captured in the term Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), now a catch phrase for language teachers. CLT is an eclectic blend of the contributions of previous methods into the best of what a teacher can provide in authentic uses of the second language in the classroom. Indeed, the single greatest challenge in the profession is to move significantly beyond the teaching of rules, patterns, definitions, and other knowledge “about” language to the point that we are teaching our students to communicate genuinely, spontaneously, and meaningfully in the second language. A significant difference between current language teaching practices and those of, say, a half a century ago, is the absence of proclaimed “orthodoxies” and “best” methods. We are well aware that methods, as they were conceived of 40 or 50 years ago or so, are too narrow and too constrictive to apply to a wide range of learners in an enormous number of situational contexts. There are no instant recipes. No quick and easy method is guaranteed to provide success. As Bell (2003), Brown (2001), Kumaravadivelu (2001), and others have appropriately shown, pedagogical trends in language teaching now spur us to develop a principled basis—sometimes called an approach (Richards & Rodgers, 2001)—upon which teachers can choose particular designs and techniques for teaching a foreign language in a specific context. Every learner is unique. Every teacher is unique. Every learner-teacher relationship is unique, and every context is unique. Your task as a teacher is to understand the properties of those relationships and contexts. (BROWN, H. Douglas. Principles of language learning and teaching. 5. ed. Londres: Longman, 2006)

Read the text to answer the question from. It happens that the publication of this edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary comes 250 years after the appearance of the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, compiled by Samuel Johnson. Much has changed since then. The English that Johnson described in 1755 was relatively well defined, still essentially the national property of the British. Since then, it has dispersed and diversified, has been adopted and adapted as an international means of communication by communities all over the globe. English is now the name given to an immensely diverse variety of different usages. This obviously poses a problem of selection for the dictionary maker: which words are to be included in a dictionary, and thus granted recognition as more centrally or essentially English than the words that are left out? Johnson did not have to deal with such diversity, but he too was exercised with this question. In his Plan of an English Dictionary , published in 1747, he considers which words it is proper to include in his dictionary; whether ‘terms of particular professions’, for example, were eligible, particularly since many of them had been derived from other languages. ‘Of such words,’ he says, ‘all are not equally to be considered as parts of our language, for some of them are naturalized and incorporated, but others still continue aliens...’. Which words are deemed to be sufficiently naturalized or incorporated to count as ‘parts of our language’, ‘real’ or proper English, and thus worthy of inclusion in a dictionary of the language, remains, of course, a controversial matter. Interestingly enough, even for Johnson the status of a word in the language was not the only, nor indeed the most important consideration. For being alien did not itself disqualify words from inclusion; in a remark which has considerable current resonance he adds: ‘some seem necessary to be retained, because the purchaser of the dictionary will expect to find them’. And, crucially, the expectations that people have of a dictionary are based on what they want to use it for. What Johnson says of his own dictionary would apply very aptly to The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD): ‘The value of a work must be estimated by its use: It is not enough that a dictionary delights the critic, unless at the same time it instructs the learner...’. (Widdowson, H. Hornby , A.S. 2010. Adaptado)

Leia o texto a seguir para responder à questão: Foreign language pronunciation instruction in a communicative language teaching context: amounts, practices and beliefs The aim of this research was to examine three important components of foreign language pronunciation instruction and the connections between them: amount, actual practices, and teachers’ beliefs. The data consisted of 45 video-recorded lessons in French-as-a-foreign-language in six secondary schools in Norway and semistructured interviews conducted with the same teachers whose instruction was previously video-recorded. The video-recorded lessons were analysed for amount and actual practices of pronunciation instruction and the interviews were analysed for teachers’ background in and beliefs about phonetics and pronunciation pedagogy. Results indicated that: (1) on average, pronunciation instruction accounted for a very small part of the teaching time (less than 2%); (2) despite the emphasis on segmentals and suprasegmentals in pronunciation teaching literature, explicit teaching of segmental and suprasegmental features of speech was rare in the recorded material; (3) there is a need for more training in and knowledge of phonetics and pronunciation pedagogy. These findings might be used to address concerns regarding the role of pronunciation instruction in foreign language teaching and to define factors that may account for the difficulty of making pronunciation instruction an integral part of language teaching. (Altijana Brkan, Eva Thue Vold. https://www.uv.uio.no. Adaptado)

Read the following extract to answer question. A friend of mine who is an orchestral conductor was asking me (early in our acquaintance) about what I did for a living. When I told him that apart from other activities, I wrote books about how to teach English he said ‘Books in the plural? Surely once you’ve written one, there’s nothing more to say!’ I wanted to reply that he had just argued himself out of a job (I mean, how many performances of Beethoven symphonies have there been in the twenty-first century alone?), but someone else laughed at his question, another musician made a different comment, the conversation moved on, and so Martin-the-conductor’s flippant enquiry evaporated in the convivial atmosphere of a British pub. But his question was a good one. Surely we know how to teach languages? After all, people have been doing it successfully for two thousand years or more, and some aspects of teaching in the past have probably not changed that much. But other things have, and continue to change. Which is (I suppose) why every time I re-examine past assumptions about teaching, I find myself questioning and reinterpreting things I thought were fixed. And of course, I am not alone in this. We all do it all the time – or at least we do if we haven’t closed our minds off from the possibility of change and renewal. Language teaching, perhaps more than many other activities, reflects the times it takes place in. Language is about communication, after all, and perhaps that is why philosophies and techniques for learning languages seem to develop and change in tune with the societies which give rise to them. Teaching and learning are very human activities; they are social just as much as they are (in our case) linguistic. But it’s not just society that changes and evolves. The last decades have seen what feels like unprecedented technological change. The Internet has seen to that, and other educational technology has not lagged behind. And it’s exciting stuff. I’ve tried to reflect that excitement and newness in parts of this new edition. (Jeremy Harmer, How to teach English . Adaptado)

Read the text to answer question: It is suggested that the field of language teaching has moved away from a reliance on prescriptive methods towards a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of language learning. For example, Richards and Rodgers (1986) note that there have been calls to abandon the search for a single “supermethod” and to instead focus on equipping teachers with “a repertoire of methods and skills that can be used selectively in different contexts”. This reflects a move away from the idea that there is one “right” way to teach language, and towards an approach that values flexibility, adaptability, and a recognition of the diverse contexts in which language learning takes place (Richards, 2001). Realistically speaking, each method has its own advantages and disadvantages; up till now, no method has been empirically proven the best for all language educators to blindly adopt without discussion. For example, the current great enthusiasm for (and wide adoption of) the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method in Egypt can be attributed to the failure of the previously adopted method (i.e. the Grammar-Translation Method) to meet the national language learning goals. It failed to develop a language learner who can communicate properly in English. This does not mean that the CLT will stay forever, especially in this Information and Communication Technology-dominated age (ICT) that has been changing the nature of language and how it should be taught (Abdallah, 2011). (M. Abdallah, 2024. Disponível em: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED660475.pdf. Adaptado)

Read the text to answer question: It is suggested that the field of language teaching has moved away from a reliance on prescriptive methods towards a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of language learning. For example, Richards and Rodgers (1986) note that there have been calls to abandon the search for a single “supermethod” and to instead focus on equipping teachers with “a repertoire of methods and skills that can be used selectively in different contexts”. This reflects a move away from the idea that there is one “right” way to teach language, and towards an approach that values flexibility, adaptability, and a recognition of the diverse contexts in which language learning takes place (Richards, 2001). Realistically speaking, each method has its own advantages and disadvantages; up till now, no method has been empirically proven the best for all language educators to blindly adopt without discussion. For example, the current great enthusiasm for (and wide adoption of) the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method in Egypt can be attributed to the failure of the previously adopted method (i.e. the Grammar-Translation Method) to meet the national language learning goals. It failed to develop a language learner who can communicate properly in English. This does not mean that the CLT will stay forever, especially in this Information and Communication Technology-dominated age (ICT) that has been changing the nature of language and how it should be taught (Abdallah, 2011). (M. Abdallah, 2024. Disponível em: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED660475.pdf. Adaptado)

Read the paragraph and answer question: William Shakespeare (23 April 1564 – 23 April 1616), who was an English playwright, poet and actor, is regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and one of the most famous in the history of humanity. He was very fond of creating words, of which Arch-villain is an example. He also created words by attaching prefixes or suffixes to existing phrases. In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare popped ‘un’ in front of ‘comfortable’ to create a word that’s now used every day by people around the world. (https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore. Adaptado)