Questões de Concursos Inglês

Read the Text I and answer the five questions that follow it.

Text I

Correspondence

Human genome editing: potential seeds of conflict

Recently, The Lancet published an important declaration regarding the necessity of regulating and legislating for human genome editing. We agree with their opinions that the human genome editing technology and resulting research can have both positive and negative effects on human society. The use of genome editing for research and commercial purposes has sparked debates in both biological and political realms. However, most of them have mainly focused on the effects of human genome editing on the patients themselves, and little attention has been paid to their offspring.

Several films, such as Gattaca and Gundam SEED, have addressed the conflicts that arise from human genome editing. Such conflicts not only exist within the generation who have experienced editing but are also transmitted to their offspring. For example, in these films, the offspring of people without genome editing felt a sense of unfairness regarding the inferiority of their physical (or other non-edited domains) status, whereas the offspring of people with genome editing grew up in a biased, discriminated against, and ostracized environment. They could have lived in peace with a strong and well regulated government; however, when the tenuous grip of government weakens, jealousy and resentment can lead to ruins. Although these scenes still exist in films, they might become increasingly plausible in decades to come. Using the concept of preparedness, access, countermeasures, tools, and trust, we should prepare legitimate human genome editing, establish access to deal with imminent or potential discrimination, develop countermeasures and tools for prevention and resolution of conflict, and entrust future generations with the responsibility to use them wisely.

Bing-Yan Zeng, Ping-Tao Tseng, *Chih-Sung Liang

Adapted from: www.thelancet.com, vol. 401, June 24, 2023 athttps://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0140-6736%2823%2901084-X

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 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)

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)

Text CB1A2

Currently, the Digital Euro has not been launched — though there are signs that a launch may be coming sooner rather than later. By October 2025, the ECB (European Central Bank) has indicated a second phase of the preparation for the Digital Euro. By then, the ECB will have prepared an outreach plan, procurement standards, and technology providers.

The Digital Euro has potential downsides, many of them echoed in the other launches of central bank digital currencies. For example, the central bank will become a technology company focused on procurement with central points of failure. This was a breeding ground for corruption for the bureaucrat fortunate enough to make these technical choices in China.

While the Digital Euro is slated to “coexist” with cash, this also comes when EU (European Union) nations are voting on ending end-to-end encryption (a critical digital privacy tool) and have started to restrict cash with limits being placed on how much you can spend in cash to accelerate its slow demise.

User privacy is said to be the ECB’s “chief concern” as it has been designing the central bank’s digital currency. Certainly, the ECB is aware of public perception that has negative surveillance, control, and privacy implications in mind. The ECB has been at pains to say that the Digital Euro will “coexist” with cash and that unlike the e-CNY (China’s central bank digital coin) it will not be tied to a “social credit” score or place limits on how money is spent.

A big part of the ECB’s drive towards the Digital Euro is to compete and pry Europeans away from Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and “stablecoins”.

Central bank digital currencies are a direct liability of the central bank. Since the central bank has the power to issue currency, this means that the central bank can essentially create “digital euros” if it wishes to. The architecture and data within a central bank digital currency are usually built completely by the central bank supported by private vendors of its choice. In China, the central bank has turned away from a distributed ledger technology to a centralized data store, in which the technical details are pretty scant. Hence, the central bank controls everything, and the system has no external access.

Internet: <www.forbes.com/sites> (adapted).

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

In foreign language education, the teaching of culture remains a hotly debated issue. What is culture? What is its relation to language? Which and whose culture should be taught? What role should the learners’ culture play in the acquisition of knowledge of the target culture? How can we avoid essentializing cultures and teaching stereotypes? And how can we develop in the learners an intercultural competence that would shortchange neither their own culture nor the target culture, but would make them into cultural mediators in a globalized world? This paper explores these issues from the perspective of the large body of research done in Australia, Europe and the U.S. in the last twenty years. It links the study of culture to the study of discourse (see, e.g., Kramsch 1993, 1998, 2004) and to the concept of translingual and transcultural competence proposed by the Modern Language Association (e.g., Kramsch, 2010).

(https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1127430)

Read the text to answer question.

No one who speaks English has any difficulty understanding the meaning of a sentence like ‘It’s warm in here’. We all recognise that it is a comment on the temperature in some place or other. But why it is being said, and what the speaker wishes to convey by saying it, depends entirely on two things: the context in which it is said and what the speaker wants people to understand (...) The meaning of language depends on where it occurs within a larger stretch of discourse, and thus the relationship that the different language elements have with what comes before and after them. In other words, speakers and writers have to be able to operate with more than just words and grammar; they have to be able to string utterances together.

Our ability to function properly in conversation or writing depends not only on reacting to the context in which we are using the language, but also on the relationship between words and ideas in longer texts.

Words can also mean more than one thing, for example, ‘book’ (= something to read, to reserve, a list of bets, etc.), ‘beat’ (= to win, to hit, to mix, e.g. an egg, the ‘pulse’ of music/a heart) and ‘can’ (= ability, permission, probability – and a container made of metal). Notice that, in these examples, not only can the same form have many meanings, but it can also be different parts of speech.

With so many available meanings for words and grammatical forms, it is the context the word occurs in which determines which of these meanings is being referred to. If we say, ‘I beat him because I ran faster than he did’, ‘beat’ is likely to mean won rather than physically assaulted or mixed (though there is always the possibility of ambiguity, of course).

(Harmer, 1998. Adaptado)