Questões de Concurso
Comentadas sobre interpretação de texto | reading comprehension em inglês
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What is Alzheimer’s disease?
There are many types and causes of dementia, but Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form, accounting for between 60 and 70 per cent of all cases.
Common early symptoms of Alzheimer’s include short-term memory loss, apathy and depressed mood, but these symptoms are often just seen as being a part of normal ageing, making early diagnosis difficult.
Doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s on the basis of medical examination, patient history and cognitive tests, and can use imaging to rule out other forms of dementia. However, a definitive diagnosis of Alzheimer’s is only possible after death, when examination of brain tissue can reveal whether a person had the deposits of amyloid and tau proteins that are characteristic of the condition.
Source http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau3333(adapted)
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aau3333
This article was updated on 30 January 2019 to add more detail and comment
Access: April 20th, 2019
Smiling Can Actually Make People Happier, Study Finds
Researchers of a new study find that the simple act (1)______ smiling can actually make a person happier. Evidently, nearly 50 years of data shows facial expressions can affect an individual’s emotions or feelings.
Emotional Debate
For over 100 years, psychologists have been debating whether facial expressions can affect emotions. The argument became even more pronounced (2)______ 2016 after 17 teams of scientists failed to replicate a popular experiment that would supposedly show that smiling can actually make people happier.
While there are some studies that do not show a relationship (3)______facial expressions and emotional feelings, the researchers of the new study believe that they can’t focus on the data from just one. As such, they scoured data from 138 studies, which tested over 11,000 participants (4)_____ all over the world.
“But we can’t focus on the results of any one study. Psychologists have been testing this idea since the early 1970s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence,” said lead researcher Nicholas Coles, PhD.
Facial Expressions Affect People's Emotions
Based on the team’s meta-analysis, facial expressions do, in fact, have a small impact on emotions. For instance, a person who smiles will feel happier, a person who scowls will feel angrier, and a person who frowns will feel sadder. While the effects aren’t very powerful or long-lasting, it is significant enough to show a correlation.
According to researchers, their findings bring us closer to understanding how human emotions work and how the mind and body work together to shape how we experience emotions. That said, they do note that they are not saying that people can just smile their way to happiness, especially when it comes to mental health conditions such as depression.
The study is published in Psychological Bulletin.
Source: https://www.techtimes.com/articles/241396/20190413/smiling-can-actually-make-peoplehappier-study-finds.htm(adapted)Access: April 13th, 2019
Read the following statements and decide if they are true (T) or false (F) according to the text.
( ) A recent study show that facial expressions can affect individual’s emotion feeling.
( ) The body and mind are interconnected in the way we experience our emotions.
( ) The researchers have believed that the focus can't be either facial expressions or emotional feelings.
( ) People who scowls will never be in good mental health conditions.
The alternative that shows the correct sequence of the statements is
Planet’s ocean-plastics problem detailed in 60-year data set
Researchers find evidence of rising plastic pollution in an accidental source: log books for planktonmonitoring instruments. Matthew Warren
Scientists have uncovered the first strong evidence that the amount of plastic polluting the oceans has risen vastly in recent decades — by analysing 60 years of log books for plankton-tracking vessels.
Data recorded by instruments known as continuous plankton recorders (CPRs) — which ships have collectively towed millions of kilometres across the Atlantic Ocean — show that the trackers have become entangled in large plastic objects, such as bags and fishing lines, roughly three times more often since 2000 than in preceding decades.
This is the first time that researchers have demonstrated the rise in ocean plastics using a single, longterm data set, says Erik van Sebille, an oceanographer at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I’m excited that this has been finally done,” he says. The analysis was published on 16 April in Nature Communications.
Although the findings are unsurprising, long-term data on ocean plastics had been scant: previous studies looked mainly at the ingestion of plastic by sea creatures over shorter timescales, the researchers say.
Fishing for data
CPRs are torpedo-like devices that have been used since 1931 to survey plankton populations, by filtering the organisms from the water using bands of silk. Today, volunteer ships such as ferries and container ships tow a fleet of CPRs around the world’s oceans.
(…)Each time a ship tows a CPR, the crew fills in a log book and notes any problems with the device. So Ostle and her colleagues looked through all tow logs from the North Atlantic between 1957 and 2016, to determine whether plastic entanglements have become more common.
Evidence analysis
(…)Van Sebille says that because the study focused on large plastic items, it doesn’t reveal much about the quantity of microplastics — fragments fewer than 5 millimetres long — in the oceans. These tiny contaminants come from sources such as disposable plastic packaging, rather than from fishing gear.
Nevertheless, he adds, the study demonstrates that fisheries play a major part in plastic pollution, and will provide useful baseline data for tracking whether policy changes affect the levels of plastic in the oceans. “As fisheries become more professional, especially in the North Sea, hopefully we might see a decrease,” he says.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01252-0 (adapted).
Access: April 20th, 2019
TEXT IV
Throughout the last 15 years our society has undergone two major changes: Firstly, there has been a steady rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to migration, multiculturalism and global economic integration; secondly, there has been the rapid development of technological devices and the world-wide expansion of new communications media. These changes directly affect the lives of our pupils at home and at school and thus have an important impact on curricular development, teaching objectives, contents and methodologies – starting as early as in primary school.
[…]
While traditionally being literate solely referred to the ability to read and write in a standardized form of one language, literate practices today incorporate multimodal, critical, cultural, and media competencies next to traditional-functional language skills, like reading, writing, speaking, mediating, and listening in many languages.
One major aspect in this context is the changing nature of texts that has developed from advances in technology. Language learners today need to be able to cope with different kinds of texts, including multimodal, interactive, linear, and nonlinear texts, texts in different languages, texts with several possible meanings, texts being delivered on paper, screens, or live, and texts that comprise one or more semiotic system.
In order to prepare students to actively engage in a socially diverse, globalized, and technological world, teachers need to find new forms of teaching and learning and provide opportunities for their pupils to explore, learn about, and critically engage with a broad variety of texts and differing literate practices. Still, the question remains open as to how these principles and objectives of a multiliteracies pedagogy translate into examples of good practice in school settings.
(Source: adapted from ELSNER, D. Developing multiliteracies, plurilingual
awareness & critical thinking in the primary language classroom with
multilingual virtual talking books. Encuentro 20, 2011, pp. 27-
38.https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED530011)
TEXT IV
Throughout the last 15 years our society has undergone two major changes: Firstly, there has been a steady rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to migration, multiculturalism and global economic integration; secondly, there has been the rapid development of technological devices and the world-wide expansion of new communications media. These changes directly affect the lives of our pupils at home and at school and thus have an important impact on curricular development, teaching objectives, contents and methodologies – starting as early as in primary school.
[…]
While traditionally being literate solely referred to the ability to read and write in a standardized form of one language, literate practices today incorporate multimodal, critical, cultural, and media competencies next to traditional-functional language skills, like reading, writing, speaking, mediating, and listening in many languages.
One major aspect in this context is the changing nature of texts that has developed from advances in technology. Language learners today need to be able to cope with different kinds of texts, including multimodal, interactive, linear, and nonlinear texts, texts in different languages, texts with several possible meanings, texts being delivered on paper, screens, or live, and texts that comprise one or more semiotic system.
In order to prepare students to actively engage in a socially diverse, globalized, and technological world, teachers need to find new forms of teaching and learning and provide opportunities for their pupils to explore, learn about, and critically engage with a broad variety of texts and differing literate practices. Still, the question remains open as to how these principles and objectives of a multiliteracies pedagogy translate into examples of good practice in school settings.
(Source: adapted from ELSNER, D. Developing multiliteracies, plurilingual
awareness & critical thinking in the primary language classroom with
multilingual virtual talking books. Encuentro 20, 2011, pp. 27-
38.https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED530011)
Based on the article, mark the statements below as true (T) or false (F).
( ) Traditional pedagogy took into consideration multimodal, interactive, linear, and nonlinear texts.
( ) What students learn outside the school environment is not relevant to curricular development.
( ) Applications of multiliteracies pedagogy in the school environment are still needed.
The statements are, respectively,
TEXT IV
Throughout the last 15 years our society has undergone two major changes: Firstly, there has been a steady rise of cultural and linguistic diversity, due to migration, multiculturalism and global economic integration; secondly, there has been the rapid development of technological devices and the world-wide expansion of new communications media. These changes directly affect the lives of our pupils at home and at school and thus have an important impact on curricular development, teaching objectives, contents and methodologies – starting as early as in primary school.
[…]
While traditionally being literate solely referred to the ability to read and write in a standardized form of one language, literate practices today incorporate multimodal, critical, cultural, and media competencies next to traditional-functional language skills, like reading, writing, speaking, mediating, and listening in many languages.
One major aspect in this context is the changing nature of texts that has developed from advances in technology. Language learners today need to be able to cope with different kinds of texts, including multimodal, interactive, linear, and nonlinear texts, texts in different languages, texts with several possible meanings, texts being delivered on paper, screens, or live, and texts that comprise one or more semiotic system.
In order to prepare students to actively engage in a socially diverse, globalized, and technological world, teachers need to find new forms of teaching and learning and provide opportunities for their pupils to explore, learn about, and critically engage with a broad variety of texts and differing literate practices. Still, the question remains open as to how these principles and objectives of a multiliteracies pedagogy translate into examples of good practice in school settings.
(Source: adapted from ELSNER, D. Developing multiliteracies, plurilingual
awareness & critical thinking in the primary language classroom with
multilingual virtual talking books. Encuentro 20, 2011, pp. 27-
38.https://archive.org/details/ERIC_ED530011)
TEXT III

(Source: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Book)
Here are six reviews on Green Book:
1.
The screenplay essentially turns Shirley into a black man who thematically shapeshifts into whoever will make the story appealing to white audiences - and that’s inexcusable.
Lawrence Ware New York Times
2.
Green Book is effective and affecting while being careful to avoid overdosing its audience on material that some might deem too shocking or upsetting.
James Berardinelli ReelViews
3.
In a world that seems to get uglier every day, this movie’s gentle heart and mere humanity feel like a salve.
Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly
4.
A bizarre fish-out-of-water comedy masquerading as a serious awards-season contender by pretending to address the deep wound of racial inequality while demonstrating its profound inability, intellectually and dramatically, to do that.
Kevin Maher Times (UK)
5.
Sometimes life is stranger than art, sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art. If life starts imitating hopeful art - that’s uplifting. That’s the goal of art, as I see it. “Green Book” uplifts.
Mark Jackson Epoch Times
6.
There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative.
A.O. Scott New York Times
(Source: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/green_book/reviews/)
TEXT III

(Source: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Book)
Here are six reviews on Green Book:
1.
The screenplay essentially turns Shirley into a black man who thematically shapeshifts into whoever will make the story appealing to white audiences - and that’s inexcusable.
Lawrence Ware New York Times
2.
Green Book is effective and affecting while being careful to avoid overdosing its audience on material that some might deem too shocking or upsetting.
James Berardinelli ReelViews
3.
In a world that seems to get uglier every day, this movie’s gentle heart and mere humanity feel like a salve.
Leah Greenblatt Entertainment Weekly
4.
A bizarre fish-out-of-water comedy masquerading as a serious awards-season contender by pretending to address the deep wound of racial inequality while demonstrating its profound inability, intellectually and dramatically, to do that.
Kevin Maher Times (UK)
5.
Sometimes life is stranger than art, sometimes art imitates life, and sometimes life imitates art. If life starts imitating hopeful art - that’s uplifting. That’s the goal of art, as I see it. “Green Book” uplifts.
Mark Jackson Epoch Times
6.
There’s not much here you haven’t seen before, and very little that can’t be described as crude, obvious and borderline offensive, even as it tries to be uplifting and affirmative.
A.O. Scott New York Times
(Source: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/green_book/reviews/)
TEXT II
What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book
Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham.
The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics.
Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.)
Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos.
In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]
(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)
TEXT II
What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book
Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham.
The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics.
Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.)
Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos.
In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]
(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)
TEXT II
What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book
Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham.
The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics.
Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.)
Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos.
In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]
(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)
Based on the information provided by Text II, mark the statements below as true (T) or false (F).
( ) The movie is based on a fanciful story.
( ) The artist lived in a fancy apartment on top of a famous hall.
( ) The pianist guaranteed a permanent position with top orchestras.
The statements are, respectively,
TEXT II
What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book
Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham.
The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics.
Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.)
Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos.
In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]
(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)
TEXT II
What to Know About the Controversy Surrounding the Movie Green Book
Depending on who you ask, Green Book is either the pinnacle of movie magic or a whitewashing sham.
The film, which took home the prize for Best Picture at the 91st Academy Awards, as well as honors for Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor and Nick Vallelonga, Brian Currie and Peter Farrelly for Best Original Screenplay, depicts the burgeoning friendship between a black classical pianist and his ItalianAmerican driver as they travel the 1960s segregated South on a concert tour. But while Green Book was an awards frontrunner all season, its road to Oscar night was riddled with missteps and controversies over its authenticity and racial politics.
Green Book is about the relationship between two real-life people: Donald Shirley and Tony “Lip” Vallelonga. Shirley was born in 1927 and grew up in a well-off black family in Florida, where he emerged as a classical piano prodigy: he possessed virtuosic technique and a firm grasp of both classical and pop repertoire. He went on to perform regularly at Carnegie Hall— right below his regal apartment—and work with many prestigious orchestras, like the Chicago Symphony and the New York Philharmonic. But at a time when prominent black classical musicians were few and far between due to racist power structures, he never secured a spot in the upper echelons of the classical world. (African Americans still only make up 1.8 percent of musicians playing in orchestras nationwide, according to a recent study.)
Vallelonga was born in 1930 to working-class Italian parents and grew up in the Bronx. As an adult he worked as a bouncer, a maître d’ and a chauffeur, and he was hired in 1962 to drive Shirley on a concert tour through the Jim Crow South. The mismatched pair spent one and a half years together on the road — though it’s condensed to just a couple of months in the film — wriggling out of perilous situations and learning about each other’s worlds. Vallelonga would later become an actor and land a recurring role on The Sopranos.
In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son, Nick, approached his father and Shirley about making a movie about their friendship. For reasons that are now contested, Shirley rebuffed these requests at the time. […]
(Source: from http://time.com/5527806/green-book-movie-controversy/)
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
TEXT I
Critical Literacy, EFL and Citizenship
We believe that a sense of active citizenship needs to be developed and schools have an important role in the process. If we agree that language is discourse, and that it is in discourse that we construct our meanings, then we may perceive the foreign language classrooms in our schools as an ideal space for discussing the procedures for ascribing meanings to the world. In a foreign language we learn different interpretive procedures, different ways to understand the world. If our foreign language teaching happens in a critical literacy perspective, then we also learn that such different ways to interpret reality are legitimized and valued according to socially and historically constructed criteria that can be collectively reproduced and accepted or questioned and changed. Hence our view of the EFL classroom, at least in Brazil, as an ideal space for the development of citizenship: the EFL classrooms can adopt a critical discursive view of reality that helps students see claims to truth as arbitrary, and power as a transitory force which, although being always present, is also in permanent change, in a movement that constantly allows for radical transformation. The EFL classroom can thus raise students’ perception of their role in the transformation of society, once it might provide them with a space where they are able to challenge their own views, to question where different perspectives (including those allegedly present in the texts) come from and where they lead to. By questioning their assumptions and those perceived in the texts, and in doing so also broadening their views, we claim students will be able to see themselves as critical subjects, capable of acting upon the world.
[…]
We believe that there is nothing wrong with using the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom, since strictly speaking, the mother tongue is also foreign - it’s not “mine”, but “my mother’s”: it was therefore foreign as I first learned it and while I was learning to use its interpretive procedures. When using critical literacy in the teaching of foreign languages we assume that a great part of the discussions proposed in the FL class may happen in the mother tongue. Such discussions will bring meaning to the classroom, moving away from the notion that only simple ideas can be dealt with in the FL lesson because of the students’ lack of proficiency to produce deeper meanings and thoughts in the FL. Since the stress involved in trying to understand a foreign language is eased, students will be able to bring their “real” world to their English lessons and, by so doing, discussions in the mother tongue will help students learn English as a social practice of meaning-making.
(Source: Adapted from JORDÃO, C. M. & FOGAÇA, F. C. Critical Literacy in
The English Language Classroom. DELTA, vol. 28, no 1, São Paulo, p. 69-84,
2012. Retrieved from http://www.scielo.br/pdf/delta/v28n1a04.pdf).
Based on the information provided by Text I, mark the statements below as true (T) or false (F).
( ) EFL classrooms can widen students’ views of the world.
( ) Teachers should stimulate learners to accept historically constructed values without questioning them.
( ) A critical discursive perspective may help students to interpret reality in a contextualized way.
The statements are, respectively,