Questões de Concursos IF RN

As fashions in language teaching come and go, the teacher in the classroom needs reassurance that there is some bedrock beneath the shifting sands. Once solidly founded on the bedrock, like the sea anemone, the teacher can sway to the rhythms of any tides or currents, without the trauma of being swept away purposelessly.

Adapted from: Rivers, Wilga M. Communicating Naturally in a Second Language: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press, 1992. p. 373.

For question, read the text below and select which answers best fit the question.

When I talk about practice, I mean something individual. If you look at professional golfers or tennis players, you will observe that the practice composes the basis of their preparation for tournaments. Of course it does, (1) for these are individual sports. [...] Part of what is fascinating, and slightly repellent, about sports lies in that curious inversion of values (2) insofar much that we admire in ordinary life - humility, compassion, unwillingness to take advantage of the weakness of others - is reversed on the field of play. Professional sport is all about winning. And, within reason the more you practice (and the more you train) the better your chances of doing so.

Adapted from: WALLACE, David Foster. String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis. Little, Brown and Company, 2011.

“The reactions against people who speak Spanish are probably not new," says Heidi Beirich, a researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The SPLC monitors hate groups in the US, which they define as any organisation that - based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities - has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. In this sense, the SPLC qualifies as hate groups several organisations that it considers anti-immigrant, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Washington DC-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

Also on their list is ProEnglish, which advocates for English to be designated as the official language of the United States. All of them were created in recent decades by John Tanton, a white American far-right nationalist, who died in July of this year. Mr. Tanton founded at least 12 anti-immigrant organisations, six of which have been designated hate groups by the SPLC. The aforementioned ProEnglish is one of the main organisations pushing the "English Only" movement, also known as "English First" or "Official English" movement. Part of ProEnglish's official platform states: "In a pluralistic nation such as ours, the function of government should be to foster and support the similarities that unite us, rather than institutionalise the differences that divide us." The organisation focuses its efforts on lobbying to convince legislators and public opinion of the need to adopt English as an official language at all levels of government.

While ProEnglish establishes on its website that "the right to use other languages must be respected", the group has been criticised by those who consider their agenda to be discriminatory. “They are careful to be called ProEnglish and not ‘antiSpanish’. But it is clear that their ideology is supremacist, referring to English as a symbol of US cultural heritage when this country has never been a project only in English, says SPLC researcher Heidi Beirich.

Adapted from: DIÉZ, Beatriz. “‘English Only': The movement to limit Spanish speaking in US’”. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50550742

by Amanda Gorman

[…]

"When the day comes we step out of the shade,

aflame and unafraid.

The new dawn blooms as we free it.

For there is always light,

if only we’re brave enough to see it,

if only we’re brave enough to be it."

Adapted from: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/20/amanda-gormans-inaugural-poem-the-hill-we-climb-fulltext.html.

Read the lines of Bon Jovi’s Misunderstood.

Should I… could I have said the wrong things right a thousand times?

If I could just rewind, I see it in my mind

If I could turn back time, you’d still be mine

You cried, I died

I should have shut my mouth, things headed south

As the words slipped off my tongue, they sounded dumb

If this old heart could talk, it’d say you’re the one

I’m wasting time

When I think about it

I should have drove all night

Would have run all the lights, I was misunderstood

I stumbled like my words

Did the best I could, damn

Misunderstood

Could I… should I apologize for sleeping on the couch that night?

Staying out too late with all my friends

You found me passed out in the yard again

You cried, I tried

To stretch the truth, but didn’t lie

It’s not so bad

You think about it

Available at: https://www.letras.mus.br/bon-jovi/64854/

Read the lines of Bon Jovi’s Misunderstood.

Should I… could I have said the wrong things right a thousand times?

If I could just rewind, I see it in my mind

If I could turn back time, you’d still be mine

You cried, I died

I should have shut my mouth, things headed south

As the words slipped off my tongue, they sounded dumb

If this old heart could talk, it’d say you’re the one

I’m wasting time

When I think about it

I should have drove all night

Would have run all the lights, I was misunderstood

I stumbled like my words

Did the best I could, damn

Misunderstood

Could I… should I apologize for sleeping on the couch that night?

Staying out too late with all my friends

You found me passed out in the yard again

You cried, I tried

To stretch the truth, but didn’t lie

It’s not so bad

You think about it

Available at: https://www.letras.mus.br/bon-jovi/64854/

The term methods, as currently used in the literature on second and foreign language (L2) teaching, does not refer to what teachers actually do in the classroom; rather, it refers to established methods conceptualized and constructed by experts in the field. The exact number of methods that are commonly used is unclear. A book published in the mid sixties, for instance, provides a list of fifteen “most common” types of methods “still in use in one form or another in various parts of the world” (Mackey, 1965, p. 151). Two books published in the mid eighties (Larsen-Freeman, 1986; and Richards and Rodgers, 1986)—which have longoccupied the top two ranks among the books prescribed for methods classes in the United States—provide, between them, a list of eleven methods that are currently used. They are (in alphabetical order): Audiolingual Method, Communicative Methods, Community Language Learning, Direct Method, Grammar-Translation Method, Natural Approach, Oral Approach, Silent Way, Situational Language Teaching, Suggestopedia, and Total Physical Response.

It would be wrong to assume that these eleven methods provide eleven different paths to language teaching. In fact, there is considerable overlap in their theoretical as well as practical approaches to L2 learning and teaching. Sometimes, as Wilga Rivers (1991, p. 283) rightly points out, what appears to be a radically new method is more often than not a variant of existing methods presented with “the fresh paint of a new terminology that camouflages their fundamental similarity.” It is therefore useful, for the purpose of analysis and understanding, to cluster these methods in terms of certain identifiable common features. One way of doing that is to classify them as (a) language-centered methods, (b) learner-centered methods, and (c) learning-centered methods.

Adapted from: Kumaravadivelu, B. Beyond Methods: Macrostrategies for language teaching. Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.

Read the excerpt below from Pennycook’s The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language and answer the following question. More important for understanding the global spread of English are close and detailed understandings of the ways in which English is embedded in local economies of desire. We need to evaluate the global spread of English, and the role of English language teachers as its agents, critically and carefully in order to appreciate the ways in which demand for English is part of a larger picture of images of change, modernization, access and longing. It is tied to the languages, cultures, styles and aesthetics of popular culture with its particular attractions for youth, rebellion and conformity; it is enmeshed within local economies, and all the inclusions, exclusions and inequalities this may entail; it is bound up with changing modes of communication, from shifting internet uses to its role in text-messaging; it is increasingly entrenched in educational systems, bringing to the fore many concerns about knowledge, pedagogy, culture and curriculum. [...] To understand the power and politics of ELT, then, we need detailed understandings of the role English plays in relation to local languages, politics and economies. [...] We are never just teaching something called English but rather we are involved in economic and social change, cultural renewal, people’s dreams and desires.

Adapted from: PENNYCOOK, Alastair. The cultural politics of English as an international language. London: Longman, 1994.