Ten critical actions needed to address four major cybersecurity challenges:

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 

TEXT III -

My experience: one of the advantages of online tools is that they allow teachers and students to exercise their creativity

Cicinato do Carmo, English teacher that also works with initial and continuing education of teachers in Rio de Janeiro

Sept 20, 2021 

I have been an English teacher for about 30 years. During this period, in addition to working in the classroom, both in the public and private sectors, I have also been working with training, education and development of English language teachers at Troika – in continuing and initial education. At the moment, I coordinate an English program in Rio de Janeiro with teachers from kindergarten to high school, and I guide undergraduate interns that will be English teachers. 

Lyrics Training - Students are very fond of Lyrics Training. I've had experiences with students from elementary school to high school, each one has its specificity, its degree of difficulty and requirement. For example, high school students are very fond of challenges. For example, they really enjoy it when they select a more challenging level where they need to be quicker with answers. And even more so when they decide to organize themselves into groups and compete with each other singing songs. 

Youglish- Youglish is very interesting for vocabulary reinforcement in context, when we are exploring a particular word, which offers greater difficulty in understanding, contextualization and use. In addition to the pronunciation, it manages to bring, through videos and other resources, the context of use of that term. Sometimes teaching only the meaning of a word can give the wrong impression that it can be used in different contexts, but there are subtle meanings that need a more concrete communicative element so that the student can perceive its use.

Wordwall - Wordwall offers a bank with different game format options for the same content. One can create an activity, for example, with specific vocabulary of farm animals, and the website offers game possibilities based on that vocabulary list, such as memory game, train, cards, pac man, spin the wheel. The activities are geared towards secondary education. With the older ones, from the moment they are more used to the platform, we can open up for them to choose the type of game they prefer to do that activity.

Mentimeter - I use Mentimeter for preparing presentations. It's like PowerPoint, only interactive. It is a presentation tool filled with interactive elements with viewers. For example, if I have a question about the subject of the class, I present it on the slide and a code will appear. Then, by cell phone, students access and respond. And those answers can create a word cloud instantly, in real time. From there, we can move towards a discussion. I like to use the tool for warm up activities. For example, I ask “What did you have for breakfast today?”; and, based on the answers (milk, tea), we warm up with a discussion and then move on to the content of the class. 

ISLCollective - ISLCollective is very good for creating class material. It is an activity repository that is organized into interactive video sessions, PowerPoint and vocabulary or grammar worksheets. We teachers create content and feed the platform. You can search and use ready-made materials, or do something more customized, as it allows us to change and adapt these materials. It makes a copy of the original content with all rights reserved and assigned, but one can customize, delete or add something to the activity.

Gamilab - It is an educational game bank, which allows us to create very simple games, and whose platform is similar to mobile and video games. It has more gamification elements than many others we use, such as elements of the dynamics, mechanics and components that are part of the gamification process (difficulty level progression, challenges and rewards), with a well-described narrative.

One of the possibilities for creation is a mountain bike competition. As the runner walks the race path, golden boxes with questions (multiple choice) appear that must be answered in order for the player to win prizes. It is a competition like a video game, with great appeal for our students.

It is possible to create games for all levels, from kindergarten on, and it can be used both on computer and mobile. The games can be created individually or collaboratively – there is the ability to add collaborators, so that students can organize themselves into groups, each one at home, develop a game and present it to the class. They can send the link of the game they have created and everyone plays.

Live Worksheets - Live Worksheets website also makes it possible to create interactive exercises. We can create, for example, an exercise of connecting (matching), which can be done on the screen of the computer or cell phone itself, which makes it easier for the student as well.

These platforms are all free and students don't need to have an account, we can just use the link. The only thing is that, if I want to create some activity that can be measured later, I need everyone to be registered and to log in to the platform. Gamilab, ISLCollective and Live Worksheets, for example, generate a report and I can find out which students participated and what difficulties were encountered in relation to the score generated by each one of them.

Adapted from: https://www.inglesnasescolas.org/en/experience/my-experience-one-of-the-advantages-of-online-tools-is-that-they-allow-teachers-andstudents-to-exercise-their-creativity/. Accessed on January 15^th, 2022.

Answer question according to TEXTIII.

Instruction: Answer to questions 38 to 47 based on the text below. The Highlights throughout the text are cited in the questions.

Caribou

01 ____Large hoofed animals belonging to the deer family, caribou and reindeer are actually the

02 same species — Rangifer tarandus. There are differences between caribou and reindeer though.

03 Caribou are native to North America, whereas reindeer are native to northern Europe and Asia.

04 Alaska does have some reindeer, however, imported from Siberia in the late 19th and early 20th

05 centuries.

06 ____Some people use the term "reindeer" to refer to domesticated work animals, such as those

07 pulling Santa's sleigh, but there are both wild and domestic herds of reindeer. Caribou, on the

08 other hand, are wild-living and long-migrating. Indigenous groups herd reindeer and use them for

09 their meat. That's also likely why reindeer evolved to be stockier than caribou.

10 ____Caribou make one of the world's great large-animal migrations. As summer approaches,

11 they head north along well-trod annual routes. Some herds may travel more than 600 miles to

12 get to their summer grazing grounds. They'll spend the summer months feeding on the abundant

13 grasses and plants of the tundra. This is also when they give birth. When the first snows fall each

14 year, the caribou turn back south. Herds of female caribou, called cows, leave several weeks

15 before the males, which follow with yearling calves from the previous birthing season.

16 ____They are taller and lankier than reindeer, likely because they evolved to make these long

17 migrations. They are the only deer in which males and females both have antlers—though only

18 some females have them. Cows have one calf each year, which can stand after only a few minutes

19 and move on with its mother by the next day.

20 ____Caribou are classified as vulnerable to extinction, one step above endangered. Because

21 they're migratory, changes in the landscape, such as the appearance of new fences or other

22 human development on their migration routes, can be especially disruptive. Climate change is

23 also a threat. As the Arctic warms, they become more susceptible to diseases and parasites,

24 which could quickly spread through a herd.

(Available in: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/facts/caribou – text adapted especially

for this test).