TEXT

    Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator. But does this count as story time? Or is it just screen time for babies? It is a question that parents, pediatricians and researchers are struggling to answer as children’s books, just like all the other ones, migrate to digital media.

     For years, child development experts have advised parents to read to their children early and often, citing studies showing its linguistic, verbal and social benefits. In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to remind parents at every visit that they should read to their children from birth, prescribing books as enthusiastically as vaccines and vegetables.

     On the other hand, the academy strongly recommends no screen time for children under 2, and less than two hours a day for older children. 

     At a time when reading increasingly means swiping pages on a device, and app stores are bursting with reading programs and learning games aimed at infants and preschoolers, which bit of guidance should parents heed? 

     The answer, researchers say, is not yet entirely clear. “We know how children learn to read,” said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “But we don’t know how that process will be affected by digital technology.” 

     Part of the problem is the newness of the devices. Tablets and e-readers have not been in widespread use long enough for the sorts of extended studies that will reveal their effects on learning.

     Dr. Pamela High, the pediatrician who wrote the June policy for the pediatrics group, said electronic books were intentionally not addressed. “We tried to do a strongly evidence-based policy statement on the issue of reading starting at a very young age,” she said. “And there isn’t any data, really, on e-books.”

    But a handful of new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development. “There’s a lot of interaction when you’re reading a book with your child,” Dr. High said. “You’re turning pages, pointing at pictures, talking about the story. Those things are lost somewhat when you’re using an e-book.”

     In a 2013 study, researchers found that children ages 3 to 5 whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension than children whose parents used traditional books. Part of the reason, they said, was that parents and children using an electronic device spent more time focusing on the device itself than on the story (a conclusion shared by at least two other studies).

     “Parents were literally putting their hands over the kids’ hands and saying, ‘Wait, don’t press the button yet. Finish this up first,’ ” said Dr. Julia Parish-Morris, a developmental psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the lead author of the 2013 study that was conducted at Temple University. Parents who used conventional books were more likely to engage in what education researchers call “dialogic reading,” the sort of back-and-forth discussion of the story and its relation to the child’s life that research has shown are key to a child’s linguistic development.

     Complicating matters is that fewer and fewer children’s e-books can strictly be described as books, say researchers. As technology evolves, publishers are adding bells and whistles that encourage detours. “What we’re really after in reading to our children is behavior that sparks a conversation,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple and co-author of the 2013 study. “But if that book has things that disrupt the conversation, like a game plopped right in the middle of the story, then it’s not offering you the same advantages as an old-fashioned book.”

     Of course, e-book publishers and app developers point to interactivity as an educational advantage, not a distraction. Many of those bells and whistles — Clifford’s bark, the sleepy narration of “Goodnight Moon,” the appearance of the word “ham” when a child taps the ham in the Green Eggs and Ham app — help the child pick up language, they say.

     There is some evidence to bear out those claims, at least in relation to other technologies. A study by the University of Wisconsin in 2013 found that 2-year-olds learned words faster with an interactive app as opposed to one that required no action.

     But when it comes to learning language, researchers say, no piece of technology can substitute for a live instructor — even if the child appears to be paying close attention.

     Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, led a study in 2003 that compared a group of 9-month-old babies who were addressed in Mandarin by a live instructor with a group addressed in Mandarin by an instructor on a DVD. Children in a third group were exposed only to English.

    “The way the kids were staring at the screen, it seemed obvious they would learn better from the DVDs,” she said. But brain scans and language testing revealed that the DVD group “learned absolutely nothing,” Dr. Kuhl said. “Their brain measures looked just like the control group that had just been exposed to English. 

     The only group that learned was the live social interaction group.” In other words, “it’s being talked with, not being talked at,” that teaches children language, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said. 

     Similarly, perhaps the biggest threat posed by e-books that read themselves to children, or engage them with games, is that they could lull parents into abdicating their educational responsibilities, said Mr. Snow of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 

    “There’s the possibility for e-books to become the TV babysitters of this generation,” he said. “We don’t want parents to say, ‘There’s no reason for me to sit here and turn pages and tell my child how to read the word, because my iPad can do it.’ ” 

     But parents may find it difficult to avoid resorting to tablets. Even literacy advocates say the guidelines can be hard to follow, and that allowing limited screen time is not high on the list of parental missteps. “You might have an infant and think you’re down with the A.A.P. guidelines, and you don’t want your baby in front of a screen, but then you have a grandparent on Skype,” Mr. Snow said. “Should you really be tearing yourself apart? Maybe it’s not the world’s worst thing.” 

     “The issue is when you’re in the other room and Skyping with the baby cause he likes it,” he said. Even if screen time is here to stay as a part of American childhood, good old-fashioned books seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Parents note that there is an emotional component to paper-andink storybooks that, so far, does not seem to extend to their electronic counterparts, however engaging. 

From: www.nytimes.com, OCT. 11, 2014 

Instrução: Leia o texto para responder à questão.

      I started to run because I felt desperately unfit. But the biggest pay-off for me was – and still is – the deep relaxation that I achieve by taking exercise. It tires me out but I find that it does calm me down. When I started running seven years ago, I could manage only 400 meters before I had to stop. Breathless and aching, I walked the next quarter of a mile, alternating these two activities for a couple of kilometers.

      When I started to jog I never dreamt of running in a marathon, but a few years later I realized that if I trained for it, the London Marathon, one of the biggest British sporting events, would be within my reach. My story shows that an unfit 39-year-old, as I was when I started running, who had taken no serious exercise for twenty years, can do the marathon – and that this is a sport in which women can beat men. But is it crazy to do it? Does it make sense to run in the expectation of becoming healthier?

      My advice is: if you are under forty, healthy and feel well, you can begin as I did by jogging gently until you are out of breath, then walking, and alternating the two for about three kilometers. Build up the jogging in stages until you can do the whole distance comfortably.

                                          (Headway Intermediate – Student’s Book. Oxford University Press. Adaptado.)

Text 2

       Because of the bright lights of the modern cities, when we look up at the sky we can see no more than 100 stars. But from dark parts of the Earth, the naked eye can see more than 5,000! And modern telescopes tell a very different story.

         With the help of some of the world’s most powerful instruments to measure the brightness of all the galaxies in one sector of the cosmos, Australian astronomers say it is probable that there are 70 sextillion stars in the visible Universe. In other words and numbers, seven followed by 22 zeroes, a really astronomical figure.

       That is more than the total number of grains of sand in all the world’s beaches and deserts, and that is only the visible Universe within range of our telescopes.

       Dr. Simon Driver, of the Australian National University, has a theory that some of them probably have life. Dr. Driver’s theory is not exactly new, and those planets are so distant, he says, that there is no real possibility for us to see or contact anyone living on them. 

Retirado do livro “Inglês série Brasil”, p. 8, 2008

PRISONS AND MOBILE PHONES

Bricking the intruders

If mobile phones can’t be kept out of prisons, can they be made useless?

Oct 14th 2010 | RAIFORD, FLORIDA AND PARCHMAN, MISSISSIPPI

THE striking thing about mobile phones in American prisons is not that they exist—though they do, in great numbers—but the ingenuity used to get and keep them. There are the usual entry methods: from visitors, corrupt guards or in packages hurled over the fence. But phones often take more exotic paths. In South Carolina a potato gun was used to fire phones over prison walls from a distance of a third of a mile. In Mississippi a suspiciously heavy and bounceless basketball in the recreation yard was found to contain 19 phones and chargers. (…)

Available on http://www.economist.com/node/17257847?story_id=17257847, accessed on November 4, 2010

A TOOL FOR SPIES

When Iran’s opposition protesters used Twitter and other forms of social media last year to let the world know about their regime’s brutal post election crackdown, activists praised Twitter as the tool of revolution and freedom. But now Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has figured out how to twist this tool into one of repression. Though as recently as this past January Chávez was decrying Twitter as a weapon of terrorists, he’s since turned into an avid Twitterer himself ( his account, the country’s most popular, boasted more than half a million followers at press time ), as well as a devoted Facebook user and blogger.

      Far from embracing the democratic spirit of the Web, though, the Venezuelan strongman is using his accounts and blog to exhort people to spy on each other. At the launch of his Twitter account, Chávez enjoined the Boliviarian faithful to use it to keep an eye on state enemies, namely the wealthy. My Twitter account is open for you to denounce them, “ Chávez announced on his television program. El Presidente has hired a staff of 200 to deal with tweeted “requests, denunciations, and other problems,” which have resulted in actions against allegedly credit-stingy banks and currency speculators. He’s now considering going a step further and ruling that all Venezuelan Web sites must move from U.S.- based servers to domestic ones - which would, of course, make them far easier to control. Big Brother would be proud.

              (Newsweek – June 14, 2010. By Mac Margolis and Alex Marin)