Leia o texto a seguir e responda às questões 51, 52 e 53.

Romance and Reality

Military service is demanding and dangerous. As I write this, American soldiers serve in remote and hostile environments. For young leaders in today's Army, the war on terror constitutes a difficult and sometimes tragic reality.

Meanwhile, in the small classrooms of West Point, young cadets consider war through the eyes of Rudyard Kipling, Carl Sandburg, and John McCrae. During his or her plebe year, every West Point cadet takes a semester of English literature, reading and discussing poetry from Ovid to Owen, Spenser to Springsteen. Cadets must also recite poems from memory, a challenge that many graduates recall years later as one of their toughest hurdles.

Why, in an age of increasingly technical and complex warfare, would America's future combat leaders spend sixteen weeks studying the likes of irony, rhyme, and meter?

Poetry confronts cadets with new ideas that challenge their worldview. The West Point curriculum includes poetry, history, philosophy, politics, and law, because these subjects provide a universe of new ideas, different perspectives, competing values and conflicting emotions. In combat, our graduates face similar challenges: whether to fire at a sniper hiding in a mosque, or how to negotiate agreements between competing tribal leaders. Schoolbook solutions to these problems do not exist; combat leaders must rely on their own morality, their own creativity, their own convictions. In teaching cadets poetry, we teach them not what to think, but how to think.

Adapted from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/search?query=romance+and+reality.

Leia o texto a seguir e responda às questões 45, 46 e 47.

(Título omitido propositadamente)

Often when mentoring, in a one-to-one session, it will be clear that the mentee’s worst critic is the one they see very regularly – daily, in fact. Often when they are tired and stressed. Often when they are at a low point. It’s the one they look (1)________ the mirror.

I mean most of the time, the worst critic lives inside people’s head. It might be the criticism that you heard at school or college. It might be the voice of so-called friends. It might be a parent or guardian, sibling or perfect cousin. You can’t always shut those voices up. No matter how much you want to. You can, however, recognise that they are internal voices and cultivate a strategy to counteract them.

If you can have an internal critic, you can also have an internal cheerleader. One technique is to give yourself advice that you would give your best friend in that situation. If you’re worrying about not being good (2)________ something, what would you say to your best friend in that state? You’d probably tell them that it would be alright, they’ll sail through it, that you believe (3)________ them. If you can do it for your best friend, you can do it for yourself.

Adapted from https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article.

Read the text to answer.

Dear Madam:

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. Hence, I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Your very sincerely and respectfully,

Abraham Lincoln.

(Lederer, Richard. The miracle of language. Pocket Books, New York, NY.)

Available at: https://newh.org/news/back-to-school/. Accessed on: April 26, 2022. 

By Clare Lavery

Keeping students’ attention and stopping them from getting distracted is a big challenge. Here are some reasons why students’ attention may wander and ways to keep your classes on track.

• Keep in control. Anticipation is the best form of teacher defence so keep scanning the room, making eye contact with all students. You will catch those who are starting to fidget, look out of window or chat to their mates. Then you can react accordingly before the noise level has distracted everyone and created a situation.

• Keep in tune with the class. Don’t just glide along with the best. If one student answers your questions this is not proof that all the others are following what is being discussed. Aim for responses from as wide a sample as possible. Don’t just accept answers from the 3 or 4 class leaders or you will leave the rest behind.

• Keep checking understanding. Try not to use questions like “Do you understand?” or “Has everyone got that?” Students are notoriously wary of admitting they haven’t understood, especially if their peers are feigning comprehension! Use further questions to see if they have understood the concepts.

• Keep demonstrating. Attention wanders when they don’t know what to do and are too afraid to admit it. Keep your instructions to a minimum and demonstrate what to do rather than giving lengthy or detailed explanations. If nearly half of them are clearly unsure and starting to flounder or chat in their mother tongue, take action. Call on the pairs who are doing the task successfully to demonstrate their work as an example for others then try again. 

Changing the pace

Here are some tried and tested techniques for changing the pace of the lesson to keep students awake.

• Chant. Select a weekly chant which rouses students. Students stand or sit, clap along or snap their fingers and repeat the rap you have devised. This can be a quotation for higher levels or a sentence construction covered by lower levels. Make it short, snappy and fun.

• Drill. Use some quick-fire questioning around the class and involve as many as possible. Then get the students to do the questions as well as supplying answers. Use visuals as prompts for this questioning.

• Play a game. Do a 10-minute revision game involving everyone pooling ideas, words or questions. Even a spelling game for beginners does the trick. Word association or memory games work well!

• Give a dictation. They do have to concentrate here! It might be just a short piece of text or a list of words. It could be some lines from a song in the charts.

Available at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/ strategies-keeping-attention. Accessed on: April 26, 2022

Why can group work be a challenge in monolingual classes?

[1] Firstly, and most obviously, the lack of a need to communicate in English means that any communication between learners in that language will seem artificial and arguably even unnecessary. Secondly, the fact that all the learners in the class share a common culture (and are often all from the same age group) will mean that there will often be a lack of curiosity about what other class members do or think, thus making questionnaire-based activities superfluous. Thirdly, there is the paradox that the more interesting and motivating the activity is (and particularly if it involves a competitive element of some sort), the more likely the learners are to use their mother tongue in order to complete the task successfully or to finish first. Finally, the very fact that more effort is involved to communicate in a foreign language when the same task may be performed with much less effort in the mother tongue will also tend to ensure that very little English is used.

Is group work worth the effort?

[2] Taken as a whole, these factors will probably convince many teachers that it is simply not worth bothering with pair and group work in monolingual classes. This, however, would be to exclude from one’s teaching a whole range of potentially motivating and useful activities and to deny learners the opportunity to communicate in English in class time with anyone but the teacher.

[3] Simple mathematics will tell us that in a one-hour lesson with 20 learners, each learner will speak for just 90 seconds if the teacher speaks for half the lesson. In order to encourage learners in a monolingual class to participate in pair and group work, it might be worth asking them whether they regard speaking for just three per cent of the lesson to be good value and point out that they can increase that percentage substantially if they try to use English in group activities.

[4] At first, learners may find it strange to use English when communicating with their peers but this is, first and foremost, a question of habit and it is a gradual process. For the teacher to insist that English is used may well be counter-productive and may provoke active resistance. If the task is in English, on the other hand, and learners have to communicate with each other about the task, some English will inevitably be used. It may be very little at first but, as with any habit, it should increase noticeably as time goes by. Indeed, it is not unusual to hear more motivated learners in a monolingual situation communicating with each other in English outside the classroom. 

Conclusion

[5] If the benefits of using English to perform purposeful communicative tasks are clearly explained to the class and if the teacher is not excessively authoritarian in insisting that English must be used, a modest and increasing success rate can be achieved. It is far too much to expect that all learners will immediately begin using English to communicate with their peers all the time. But, if at least some of the class use English some of the time, that should be regarded as a significant step on the road to promoting greater use of English in pair and group work in the monolingual classroom.

Available at: https://www.onestopenglish.com/methodologytips-for-teachers/classroom-management-pair-and-group-workin-efl/esol/146454.article. Accessed on: April 26, 2022.

Friday the 13th is considered a day on which bad things occur. It is a superstition. A superstition is a belief in something ominous without an actual reason. The origin of this superstition is unclear. Both Friday and the number 13 have been considered unlucky for hundreds of years. Bad luck associated with the number 13 may have biblical roots. Some believe Eve bit the apple from the Tree of Knowledge on the 13th day. Others point to the idea that there were 13 people present for Jesus’s Last Supper, the day before Good Friday. The number 13 was considered so unlucky, that many hotels and buildings were built without a 13th floor! It wasn’t until the 20th century, however, that Friday and “13” were paired together in bad luck. In 1907, author Thomas Lawson wrote Friday, the Thirteenth. The book was about a stock broker who purposely caused the stockmarket to crash on that day.

The Friday the 13th superstition, however, gained serious traction with the Friday the 13th horror film series. Originally released in 1980, the story centers around the “ghost” of Jason Voorhees. In the movie, Jason, with his iconic hockey mask, hunts the hapless characters who come to vacation at Crystal Lake – the lake he drowned in as a child. Twelve movies later, the Friday the 13th series remains one of the most successful horror film franchises in history.

Is Friday the 13th actually unlucky compared to other days? Not really. There is no actual evidence to suggest that events that have occurred on Friday the 13th throughout history are worse than events that have occurred on other days. Some studies have shown that Friday the 13th is actually safer than other days because people are more anxious and attentive. People may actually find Friday the 13th to be lucky. It is thought that air travel is cheaper and booking a wedding is much cheaper on Friday the 13th than on other days. It is clear, however, that Friday the 13th will be around for a long time. Over the next 4,800 months, the 13th will occur on Friday more than any other day!