Questões de Concursos Língua Inglesa

The condition, where ovaries don't regularly release eggs, produce high levels of 'male' hormones and cause polycystic ovaries, is said to affect one in 10 UK women.

And seven in 10 were not aware that excessive hair growth, infertility (53 per cent) and irregular periods (46 per cent) were symptoms of the condition.

And 72 per cent of women experience at least one of the signs without necessarily knowing it could be linked to the disorder, with weight gain (24 per cent), acne or oily skin (17 per cent) and excess hair growth (10 per cent) most common.

As a result, 57 per cent wish there was more awareness of polycystic ovary syndrome, to stop it being such a taboo subject.

Chloé Fallon, beauty expert for Philips Lumea IPL hair removal devices, which commissioned the research to support PCOS Awareness Month this September, said: "This is a remarkably common condition that there's not enough awareness of.

"Instead, lots of women are left struggling to deal with a wide range of symptoms that can really impact their health and their confidence on a daily basis."

The study also found 76 per cent of all adults believe men should be more informed about women's health issues such as PCOS.

And 14 per cent of the women polled have experienced excessive hair growth on the face, chest or abdomen.

Of these, 25 per cent claim this affected their day-to-day life 'very significantly', while only 17 per cent weren't affected at all.

Women who were affected felt constantly worried about their appearance (58 per cent), afraid of judgement from colleagues (32 per cent) or unable to wear certain clothes (21 per cent).

While 29 per cent avoided social situations where possible, and 16 per cent stopped dating, according to the OnePoll.com figures.

A huge 95 per cent of women attempted hair removal themselves, whether by shaving, plucking or using a hair removal cream.

And 47 per cent felt very self-conscious about the issue while they were affected.

Philips Lumea IPL hair removal devices, which claims its intense pulsed light technology products can reduce hair regrowth for up to 12 months, has teamed with social media content creator, Zoe Antonia to share her storythe condition.

She said: "My PCOS journey started at 17, with a few rogue chin hairs, raging cystic acne and irregular periods which got diagnosed as PCOS.

"My body and facial hair growth made me feel so self-conscious as a teen and I often questioned whether there was something wrong with me.

"However, along the way I learnt to accept this part of me and sharing this journey online I found out that many other women struggle with similar symptoms to me, and sharing such raw unfiltered images online became a source of strength and helped me to build confidence outside of my looks.

"Alongside various nutrition and lifestyle changes I've made to reduce hair growth, using my IPL hair removal device has helped me to significantly reduce my hair re-growth, especially on areas like my lower belly, upper lip and chin area.

Chloé Fallon added: "Topics around women's health like PCOS, including the symptoms and misconceptions are important discussions to have, and ones we hope in the near future people will feel more confident openly talking about without judgement, like Zoe is able to with her followers."

Taking the article above as a reference, judge the following item.

Four in ten Brits have never heard of a condition that plagues millions and can leave sufferers infertile | The Sun.

Read the following text to answer the question.

By Leo Selivan

In this article, informed by the Lexical Approach, I reflect on grammar instruction in the classroom […]. I consider the problems with ‘traditional’ grammar teaching before arguing that what we actually need is more grammar input as well as showing how lexis can provide necessary ‘crutches’ for the learner.

Lexis = vocabulary + grammar

The shift in ELT from grammar to lexis mirrors a similar change in the attitude of linguists. In the past linguists were preoccupied with the grammar of language; however the advances in corpus linguistics have pushed lexis to the forefront. The term ‘lexis’, which was traditionally used by linguists, is a common word these days and frequently used even in textbooks.

Why use a technical term borrowed from the realm of linguistics instead of the word ‘vocabulary’? Quite simply because vocabulary is typically seen as individual words (often presented in lists) whereas lexis is a somewhat wider concept and consists of collocations, chunks and formulaic expressions. It also includes certain patterns that were traditionally associated with the grammar of a language, e.g. If I were you…, I haven’t seen you for ages etc.

Recognising certain grammar structures as lexical items means that they can be introduced much earlier, without structural analysis or elaboration. Indeed, since the concept of notions and functions made its way into language teaching, particularly as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) gained prominence, some structures associated with grammar started to be taught lexically (or functionally). I’d like to is not taught as ‹the conditional› but as a chunk expressing desire. Similarly many other ‹traditional› grammar items can be introduced lexically relatively early on.

Less grammar or more grammar?

You are, no doubt, all familiar with students who on one hand seem to know the ‘rules’ of grammar but still fail to produce grammatically correct sentences when speaking or, on the other, sound unnatural and foreign-like even when their sentences are grammatically correct. Michael Lewis, who might be considered the founder of the Lexical Approach, once claimed that there was no direct relationship between the knowledge of grammar and speaking. In contrast, the knowledge of formulaic language has been shown by research to have a significant bearing on the natural language production.

Furthermore, certain grammar rules are practically impossible to learn. Dave Willis cites the grammar of orientation (which includes the notoriously difficult present perfect and the uses of certain modal verbs) as particularly resistant to teaching. The only way to grasp their meaning is through continuous exposure and use.

Finally, even the most authoritative English grammars never claim to provide a comprehensive description of all the grammar, hence the word ‘introduction’ often used in their titles (for instance, Huddleston & Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar or Halliday’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar).

If grammarians do not even attempt to address all areas of grammar, how can we, practitioners, cover all the aspects of grammar in our teaching, especially if all we seem to focus on is a limited selection of discrete items, comprised mostly of tenses and a handful of modal verbs? It would seem that we need to expose our students to a lot of naturally occurring language and frequently draw their attention to various grammar points as they arise.

For example, while teaching the expression fall asleep / be asleep you can ask your students:

• Don’t make any noise – she’s fallen asleep.

• Don’t make any noise – she’s asleep.

What does’s stand for in each of these cases (is or has)?

One of the fathers of the Communicative Language Teaching Henry Widdowson advocated using lexical items as a starting point and then ‘showing how they need to be grammatically modified to be communicatively effective’ (1990:95). For example, when exploring a text with your students, you may come across a sentence like this:

• They’ve been married for seven years.

You can ask your students: When did they get married? How should you change the sentence if the couple you are talking about is no longer married?

The above demonstrates how the teacher should be constantly on the ball and take every opportunity to draw students’ attention to grammar. Such short but frequent ‘grammar spots’ will help to slowly raise students’ awareness and build their understanding of the English grammar system.

[…]

Conclusion

So is there room for grammar instruction in the classroom? Certainly yes. But the grammar practice should always start with the exploitation of lexical items. Exposing students to a lot of natural and contextualised examples will offer a lexical way into the grammar of the language.

To sum up, grammar should play some role in language teaching but should not occupy a big part of class time. Instead grammar should be delivered in small but frequent portions. Students should be encouraged to collect a lot of examples of a particular structure before being invited to analyse it. Hence, analysis should be preceded by synthesis.

Lastly, language practitioners should bear in mind that grammar acquisition is an incremental process which requires frequent focus and refocus on the items already studied.

Available at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professionaldevelopment/teachers/knowing-subject/articles/grammar-vs-lexisor-grammar-through. Accessed on: April 29, 2024.

Read Text I and answer the fourteen questions that follow it

Text I The “literacy turn” in education: reexamining

what it means to be literate

In response to the phenomena of mass migration and the emergence of digital communications media that defined the last decade of the 20th century, the New London Group (NLG) called for a broader view of literacy and literacy teaching in its 1996 manifesto, A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. The group argued that literacy pedagogy in education must (1) reflect the increasing cultural and linguistic diversity of the contemporary globalized world, and (2) account for the new kinds of texts and textual engagement that have emerged in the wake of new information and multimedia technologies. In order to better capture the plurality of discourses, languages, and media, they proposed the term ‘multiliteracies’.

Within the NLG’s pedagogy of multiliteracies, language and other modes of communication are viewed as dynamic resources for meaning making that undergo constant changes in the dynamics of language use as learners attempt to achieve their own purposes. Within this broader view of literacy and literacy teaching, learners are no longer “users as decoders of language” but rather “designers of meaning.” Meaning is not viewed as something that resides in texts; rather, deriving meaning is considered an active and dynamic process in which learners combine and creatively apply both linguistic and other semiotic resources (e.g., visual, gesture, sound, etc.) with an awareness of “the sets of conventions connected with semiotic activity [...] in a given social space” (NLG, 1996, p. 74).

Grounded within the view that learning develops in social, cultural, and material contexts as a result of collaborative interactions, NLG argued that instantiating literacy-based teaching in classrooms calls on the complex integration and interaction of four pedagogical components that are neither hierarchical nor linear and can at times overlap: situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice. […]

Although the NLG’s pedagogy of multiliteracies was conceived as a “statement of general principle” (1996, p. 89) for schools, the group’s call for educators to recognize the diversity and social situatedness of literacy has had a lasting impact on foreign language (FL) teaching and learning. The reception of the group’s work along with that of other scholars from critical pedagogy appeared at a time when the field was becoming less solidly anchored in theories of L2 acquisition and more interested in the social practice of FL education itself. In the section that follows, we describe the current state of FL literacy studies as it has developed in recent years, before finally turning to some very recent emerging trends that we are likely to see develop going forward.

(Adapted from: https://www.colorado.edu/center/altec/sites/default/files/ attachedfiles/moving_toward_multiliteracies_in_foreign_language_teaching.pdf)