Questões de Concursos Vocabulário Vocabulary

Text 4

Hope is the thing with feathers

(Emily Dickinson 1830 –1886)

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,

And on the strangest sea;

Yet, never, in extremity,

It asked a crumb of me.

* This poem is in the public domain. Available in:< https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254>

Text 4

Help students to learn vocabulary in context

The best internalization of vocabulary comes from encounters (comprehension or production) with words within the context of surrounding discourse. Data from linguistic corpora can provide real-world actual language that has been printed or spoken. Rather than isolating words and/or focusing on dictionary definitions, learners can benefit from attending to vocabulary within a communicative framework in which items appear. Students will then associate new words with a meaningful context to which they apply. For example, for a beginning level of students, pictures, realia, and gestures can be used to describe meaning incontext. For a more advanced level of students, encourage them to consult online corpora (e.g., the British National Corpus, or the Corpus of Contemporary American English: COCA) to gain knowledge of patterned sequences, particularly collocations or words that go together (Liu & Jiang, 2009).

Encourage students to develop word-learning strategies

Included in the discussion of teaching reading were such strategies as guessing vocabulary in context. A number of clues are available to learners to develop word-attack strategies.

Considering that only a small fraction of the word list can be covered inside the classroom, it is necessary for students to develop effective strategies for learning vocabulary on their own. Word-learning strategies refer to “the planned approaches that a word-learner takes as an agent of his or her own word learning” (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 297). Once they encounter unknown words, they can try to figure out how the words are used by asking questions such as:

• Is the word countable or uncountable?

• Is there a particular preposition that follows it?

• Is it a formal word?

• Does it have positive or negative connotations? (Zimmerman, 2014, p. 298)

An effective way to encourage word-learning is to urge students to use vocabulary notebooks to enter new words, and to review them daily, once they identify their learning goals. Studies show that in order to understand television shows learners need to know about 3,000 word families and have knowledge of proper nouns (Web & Rodgers, 2009). If they wish to read novels and newspapers comfortably, they need to have a vocabulary size of 8,000–9,000 word families (Nation, 2006). The fact that increasing vocabulary size will influence the degree to which they can understand and use language may motivate them to be determined to expand their vocabulary notebooks.

Unfortunately, professional pendulums have a disturbing way of swinging too far one way or the other, and sometimes the only way we can get enough perspective to see these overly long arcs is through hindsight. Hindsight has now taught us that there was some overreaction to the almost exclusive attention that grammar and vocabulary received in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century. So-called “natural” approaches in which grammar was considered damaging were equally overreactive. Advocating the “absorption” of grammar and vocabulary with no overt attention whatsoever to language forms went too far. We now seem to have a healthy respect for the place of form-focused instruction — attention to those basic “bits and pieces” of a language — in an interactive curriculum. And now we can pursue the business of finding better and better techniques for getting these bits and pieces into the communicative repertoires of our learners.

BROWN, H. D.; LEE, H.. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy. Fourth Edition. New York: Longman. 2015.

Magi Richani is the founder of San Francisco-based Nobell Foods, a startup company developing a new kind of cheese made from soybeans. She says plant-based cheese not only accommodates people who can’t consume dairy, but it also could be key to more sustainable food production worldwide. “The reality is that when you raise an animal for food, it’s not just the animals, you are actually growing crops, you are clearing land, and you’re raising the animal for years so it builds biomass,” Richani explained. “It’s an extremely inefficient supply chain.”

Nobell is particularly focused on creating plant-based casein, which is a protein produced when a cow gives birth and is present in the milk for its offspring. It is the ingredient that gives dairy cheese its unique stretchy texture. If Nobell is able to go to market and have the kind of impact it’s hoping to, then plant-based cheese could help us stretch toward a more sustainable future.

Internet: <newsweek.com> (adapted).