Questões Militares

        Most teachers recognise the need for the students’ awareness about the potential relevance and utility of the language and skills they are teaching. And researchers have confirmed the importance of this need.

        In ESP (English for specific purposes) materials, for example, it is relatively easy to convince the learners that the teaching points are relevant and useful by relating them to known learner interests and to ‘real-life’ tasks, which the learners need or might need to perform in the target language. In general English materials this is obviously more difficult; but it can be achieved by researching what the target learners are interested in and what they really want to learn the language for. An interesting example of such research was a questionnaire in Namibia which revealed that two of the most important reasons for secondary school students to wish to learn English were so they would be able to write love letters in English and so that they would be able to write letters of complaint for villagers to the village headman and from the village headman to local authorities.

        Perception of relevance and utility can also be achieved by relating teaching points to challenging classroom tasks and by presenting them in ways which could facilitate the achievement of the task outcomes desired by the learners. The ‘new’ learning points are not relevant and useful because they will help the learners to achieve longterm academic or career objectives, but because they could help the learners to achieve short-term task objectives now. Of course, this only works if the tasks are begun first and the teaching is then provided in response to discovered needs. This is much more difficult for the materials writer than the conventional approach of teaching a predetermined point first and then getting the learners to practise and then produce it.

The Associated Press

    A French astronaut has used a video call from space to sound the alarm about worsening repercussions from climate change that he can see ______ the International Space Station.

       Entire regions of Earth in flames. Storms trailing destruction in their wake. And the haunting fragility of humanity’s only home floating like a blue — but also tarnished — pearl in the vastness of space.

      Through the portholes ______ the International Space Station, French astronaut Thomas Pesquet has an arresting view of global warming’s repercussions. He used a video call from space to sound the alarm Thursday, as negotiators, government officials and activists continued meeting at a U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

        “We see the pollution of rivers, atmospheric pollution, things like that.”

        “We saw entire regions burning from the space station, ______ Canada, in California,” he said. “We saw all of California covered ______ a cloud of smoke and flames with the naked eye from 400 kilometers (250 miles) up.”