Questões de Concursos Professor de Inglês

O texto seguinte servirá de base para responder às questões de 1 a 9.

Valdivia Figurines and the appeal of 'the oldest'

(1º§) The logo for the Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture website is about my favourite thing of the afternoon which is saying a lot since I spent much of the day reading about giant Olmec heads. Three Valdivia Figurines in the colours of the Ecuadorian flag? I am sold! Golly, I love Valdivia figurines for all the right and all the wrong reasons.

(2º§) There are two things that can easily be said about Valdivia figurines: they are VERY Ecuadorian and they are VERY looted. The first explains why they appear prominently on the Ministry of Culture website (and on stencilled graffiti around Quito circa 2007). Ancient Ecuador has played second fiddle to Ancient Peru since the early days of archaeology. The Valdivia culture, however, represents something that Peru doesn't have, 'the oldest'. Everyone loves 'the oldest', national pride, etc. etc.

(3º§) Who else loves 'the oldest'? Collectors and Museums. If the Valdivia pottery sequence is the oldest in the new world, collectors want a slice of that pie. Heck, even better than some junky pottery, the Valdivia made interesting figurines: lovely ladies that look good on stark black backgrounds in auction catalogues. They are part of 'the oldest' yet they also look good.

(4º§) Valdivia sites are famously looted and Valdivia figurines are famously faked. A few years back I started doing some initial work into looting in Ecuador (which led to fieldwork in Quito and the cloud forest that didn't really go anywhere as of yet) and I, like anyone else going down that road, came across Bruhns and Hammond's 1983 Journal of Field Archaeology piece 'A Visit to Valdivia'. Knowing nothing at all about Ecuador at the time, I had never heard of Valdivia, a wonder since the only Ecuadorian archaeology books that Cambridge owns are a few by the late Betty Meggars and Emilio Estrada from the 1950s and 1960s which link uber-ancient Ecuador to Jomon Period Japan (yeah...I know). As Bruhns and Hammond relate, Meggars detected faking at Valdivia immediately after the start of her excavations: practical jokers who discovered a market for their copies. As the market for the pieces grew, the presumed fakes get more and more elaborate and fanciful...and Valdivia sites were just looted to pieces.

(5º§) So really with Valdivia we are left with a situation where we don't know what is real. It is directly comparable to the Cycladic Figurine problem: the corpus is mostly looted, it contains tons of forms not found in the limited archaeological excavations that have been conducted, and we intellectual consumers of artefacts don't know what to believe. To me Valdivia figurines are the perfect looting Catch 22: they warrant study so that the interested public can learn about 'the oldest', but they can't be studied because collectors wanted 'the oldest' so sites were looted and buckets of fakes were produced.

(6º§) In 2007 I bought a fake Valdivia figurine in Otavalo which now stands in a Spondylus shell on my counter and watches me cook. The fella selling it to me told me it was real. I knew it wasn't but made to put it back saying something along the lines that law breaking makes me sick. He quickly agreed that it wasn't real and cut his asking price by a ton. Que Sera. Three cheers, Ecuadorian Ministry of Culture, your logo is the best.

https://www.anonymousswisscollector.com/2012/09/valdivia-figurines-a

nd-appeal-of-oldest.html

O texto I refere-se a questão

TEXTO I

The study of language acquisition is fundamentally the process by which humans, and some believe even certain higher animals, acquire the capacity to perceive, produce and use words to understand and communicate. This is a central topic in the disciplines of linguistics, cognitive science, and psychology. Moreover, it holds considerable interest in educational science, anthropology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, reflecting the breadth of its implications and impact.

The language learning process is multifaceted, influenced by a multitude of factors. Among these are the learner's cognitive abilities, encompassing memory, attention, perceptual and reasoning skills. Equally important is the learner's social environment – family, peers, teachers and the broader cultural context, which can provide opportunities for exposure to the language, affect the learner's attitudes and motivation, and determine the nature of the language input.

Exposure to the language, both in terms of quality and quantity, is also a critical factor. This involves interaction with proficient users of the language and access to diverse linguistic contexts. The role of motivation cannot be overstated. It can greatly enhance the learner's engagement, persistence and performance.

The complex interplay of these factors shapes the trajectory of language learning, with every individual's path being unique. Nevertheless, there are patterns and regularities in the process that researchers strive to identify and understand. These insights not only enrich our understanding of human cognition and social interaction but also have practical implications for language teaching and learning.

Plurilingualism and translanguaging: commonalities and divergences

Both plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices in the education of language minoritized students remain controversial, for schools have a monolingual and monoglossic tradition that is hard to disrupt, even when the disrupting stance brings success to learners. At issue is the national identity that schools are supposed to develop in their students, and the Eurocentric system of knowledge, circulated through standardized named languages, that continues to impose what Quijano (2000) has called a coloniality of power.

All theories emerge from a place, an experience, a time, and a position, and in this case, plurilingualism and translanguaging have developed, as we have seen, from different loci of enunciation. But concepts do not remain static in a time and place, as educators and researchers take them up, as they travel, and as educators develop alternative practices. Thus, plurilingual and translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes look the same, and sometimes they even have the same practical goals. For example, educators who say they use plurilingual pedagogical practices might insist on developing bilingual identities, and not solely use plurilingualism as a scaffold. And educators who claim to use translanguaging pedagogical practices sometimes use them only as a scaffold to the dominant language, not grasping its potential. In the United States, translanguaging pedagogies are often used in English-as-a-Second Language programs only as a scaffold. And although the potential for translanguaging is more likely to be found in bilingual education programs, this is also at times elusive. The potential is curtailed, for example, by the strict language allocation policies that have accompanied the growth of dual language education programs in the last decade in the USA, which come close to the neoliberal understanding of multilingualism espoused in the European Union.

It is important to keep the conceptual distinctions between plurilingualism and translanguaging at the forefront as we develop ways of enacting them in practice, even when pedagogies may turn out to look the same. Because the theoretical stance of translanguaging brings forth and affirms dynamic multilingual realities, it offers the potential to transform minoritized communities sense of self that the concept of plurilingualism may not always do. The purpose of translanguaging could be transformative of socio-political and socio-educational structures that legitimize the language hierarchies that exclude minoritized bilingual students and the epistemological understandings that render them invisible. In its theoretical formulation, translanguaging disrupts the concept of named languages and the power hierarchies in which languages are positioned. But the issue for the future is whether school authorities will allow translanguaging to achieve its potential, or whether it will silence it as simply another kind of scaffold. To the degree that educators act on translanguaging with political intent, it will continue to crack some openings and to open opportunities for bilingual students. Otherwise, the present conceptual differences between plurilingualism and translanguaging will be erased.

Source: GARCÍA, Ofelia; OTHEGUY, Ricardo. Plurilingualism and translanguaging: Commonalities and divergences. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, v. 23, n. 1, p. 17-35, 2020.

Garcia e Otheguy (2020)

Read the excerpt to answer the question.

“JACK: We must get married at once. There is no time to be lost.

GWENDOLEN: Married, Mr. Worthing?

JACK: Well... surely. You know that I love you, and you let me to believe, Miss Fairfax, that you were not absolutely indifferent to me.

GWENDOLEN: I adore you. But you haven't proposed to me yet. Nothing has been said at all about marriage. The subject has not even been touched on.

JACK: Well... may I propose to you now?

GWENDOLEN: I think it would be an admirable opportunity. And to spare you any possible disappointment, Mr. Worthing, I think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully determined to accept you.”

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest