Questões de Concurso Sobre verbos frasais | phrasal verbs em inglês

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 4 (for questions 42, 43, 44, 45, and 46)

                                                                       Social networks

Going into the small room at the end of the corridor, Roberta sat down _______ ¹ the computer. It was the computer she had bought when her old one’s hard disk had started to go wrong. Her new computer was a laptop with a lot of extra features and she needed it for her online work _______ ² her students. Roberta had started to worry that her students would be bored unless she used modern technology in her teaching.

She turned_______ ³ the switch at the back of her computer. She looked at the email messages waiting for her answer, but she ignored them. Then she looked at the homework posted on a special site she created for the students, but she didn’t feel like correcting it. Instead she went to her favorite social network site and looked at the news about her friends. She sent messages to her favorite people and she had many online conversations _______ ⁴ teaching and other things. She posted some new messages on her own web page and then watched a film clip on a video site which her friend had told her about.

_______ ⁵ now, it was late and she realized that she had spent too much time talking to her friends online. She was very tired. She would have to do all her work in the morning.

(HARMER, J. Essential Teacher Knowledge: core concepts in English language teaching, p. 42. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2012. Adaptado.)

The Amazon Forest

The Amazon is often called the lungs of the earth and produces 20% of the world’s oxygen. For this reason, many people are trying to stop deforestation in the rainforest. Brazil, for example, is working hard to help the rainforest survive.

A few years ago, the Brazilian government put forward a plan called ARPA (Amazon Region Protected Areas). It had the support of many international agencies, including the World Bank, and the German Development Bank, KfW. The main aim was to build new areas of protected rainforest, maintain areas of the rainforest that hadn’t yet been destroyed, and stop deforestation. Deforestation contributes greatly to global warming because carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere when trees get cut down and burned.

One of the first areas to be recognized as part of ARPA was the Tumucumaque Mountains National Park. It is 38,800 km² and is the same size as Switzerland, a small country in Central Europe. It’s the world’s largest protected tropical national park, and the second largest national park. It is home to certain species of jaguar, eagle, and lizard, which can only survive in the rainforest. Many of these species are under threat from climate change and deforestation.

In order to work in the park, conservationists need a reliable map. However, no map existed, and they didn’t have enough knowledge to make one on their own. They came up with the idea of involving local tribes to help them, combining modern and ancient methods to produce a map. The tribes learned to use global positioning system handsets (GPS), in conjunction with their local knowledge of the area, which included fishing and hunting grounds, and places of historical or mythical importance. Aerial photos were a 20useful aid in the process as well. This method of map-making is now the key to the future of rainforests, in Brazil and the rest of the world too.