Questões de Concurso

Planes top 800 mph as near-record winds sweep high over Mid-Atlantic

(Available at: www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/02/18/record-jet-stream-winds-dc-flights/ – text specially adapted for this test)

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    Whenever a global economic transformation takes place, a single city usually drives it forward. Ghent, in modern-day Belgium, was at the core of the burgeoning global wool trade in the 13th century. The first initial public offering took place in Amsterdam in 1602. London was the financial centre of the first wave of globalisation during the 19th century. Today the city is San Francisco. 

    California’s commercial capital has no serious rival in generative artificial intelligence (AI), a breakthrough technology that has caused a bull market in American stocks and which, many economists hope, will power a global productivity surge. Almost all big AI start-up companies are based in the Bay Area, which comprises the city of San Francisco and Silicon Valley (largely based in Santa Clara county, to the south). OpenAI is there, of course; so are Anthropic, Databricks and Scale AI. Tech giants, including Meta and Microsoft, are also spending big on AI in San Francisco. According to Brookings Metro, a think tank, last year San Francisco accounted for close to a tenth of generative AI job postings in America, more than any other city of the country. New York, with four times as many residents, was second. 

Internet: <www.economist.com> (adapted). 

Plurilingualism and translanguaging: commonalities and divergences

Both plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices in the education of language minoritized students remain controversial, for schools have a monolingual and monoglossic tradition that is hard to disrupt, even when the disrupting stance brings success to learners. At issue is the national identity that schools are supposed to develop in their students, and the Eurocentric system of knowledge, circulated through standardized named languages, that continues to impose what Quijano (2000) has called a coloniality of power.

All theories emerge from a place, an experience, a time, and a position, and in this case, plurilingualism and translanguaging have developed, as we have seen, from different loci of enunciation. But concepts do not remain static in a time and place, as educators and researchers take them up, as they travel, and as educators develop alternative practices. Thus, plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes look the same, and sometimes they even have the same practical goals. For example, educators who say they use plurilingual pedagogical practices might insist on developing bilingual identities, and not solely use plurilingualism as a scaffold. And educators who claim to use translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes use them only as a scaffold to the dominant language, not grasping its potential. In the United States, translanguaging pedagogies are often used in English-as-a-Second Language programs only as a scaffold. And although the potential for translanguaging is more likely to be found in bilingual education programs, this is also at times elusive. The potential is curtailed, for example, by the strict language allocation policies that have accompanied the growth of dual language education programs in the last decade in the USA, which come close to the neoliberal understanding of multilingualism espoused in the European Union.

It is important to keep the conceptual distinctions between plurilingualism and translanguaging at the forefront as we develop ways of enacting them in practice, even when pedagogies may turn out to look the same. Because the theoretical stance of translanguaging brings forth and affirms dynamic multilingual realities, it offers the potential to transform minoritized communities sense of self that the concept of plurilingualism may not always do. The purpose of translanguaging could be transformative of socio-political and socio-educational structures that legitimize the language hierarchies that exclude minoritized bilingual students and the epistemological understandings that render them invisible. In its theoretical formulation, translanguaging disrupts the concept of named languages and the power hierarchies in which languages are positioned. But the issue for the future is whether school authorities will allow translanguaging to achieve its potential, or whether it will silence it as simply another kind of scaffold. To the degree that educators act on translanguaging with political intent, it will continue to crack some openings and to open opportunities for bilingual students. Otherwise, the present conceptual differences between plurilingualism and translanguaging will be erased.

Source: GARCÍA, Ofelia; OTHEGUY, Ricardo. Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, v. 23, n. 1, p. 17-35, 2020.

Garcia e Otheguy (2020)