Questões de Concursos

TEXT I

Is English language teaching for you? A guide to a new career

Marie Therese Swabey

June 14, 2021

Whether you’re just starting out or thinking of a career change, teaching English as a foreign language is one of the most rewarding professional journeys you can embark on.

In English language teaching, there is a lot of career potential. As you develop your skills and take on more responsibilities, you can enjoy a long-term career. Many professionals become senior teachers or teacher trainers, or move into management or materials writing.

Why become an English language teacher?

There are lots of reasons you might want to become an English language teacher. For a start, you can make a real difference in people’s lives. According to a 2019 survey by Wall Street English,18% of professionals who have learned English report that they feel happier at work; 12% say they feel happier in general; and half of English speakers earn 25% more because of their language skills.

Moreover, English language teaching is an immensely flexible profession. You can decide whether to take a public or private job, or offer lessons on your own. Your working conditions are flexible too. You might prefer to work in a local school or academy, but many English language teaching jobs also allow you to work online from home. And if you’re feeling adventurous, there are lots of opportunities to live and work abroad, in a new country and culture. If you do travel further afield, you might even learn a new language of your own.

English language teaching is a career that encourages creativity. You’ll become an expert at designing lessons and making learning materials to meet the needs of your students. Best of all ... it’s fun! You spend your day with interesting, engaging people who are keen to learn. What could be better than that?

What do English language teachers do every day?

It probably goes without saying that language educators teach students English on a day-to-day basis. But there are plenty of other aspects to the job as well.

English language teachers assess their learners through quick tests and official exams. They use this information to define learning objectives, and then plan courses and classes that meet their students’ needs.

Language teachers use a range of coursebooks and English language teaching materials, including a variety of audio, visual and digital tools. At the same time, they find and create teaching and learning materials of their own.

In the process of developing learners’ reading, listening, speaking andwriting abilities, teachers also help students develop confidence in presenting and communicating ideas. Furthermore, language teachers encourage students to develop important 21st century skills, such as creativity, collaboration, leadership, autonomous learning and adaptability. These skills are transferable and will help learners in many areas throughout their lives.

What do you need to become an English language teacher?

Being a good English teacher requires more than just being able to speak the language fluently. You’ll also need a comprehensive knowledge of English grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary, combined with excellent communication skills. Teachers of young learners will also need to have an understanding of how to teach engaging, effective classes to children.

It helps if you are comfortable speaking in front of other people, managing groups of learners, and able to plan and organise your time. And it’s important to have a friendly, sympathetic nature and a good degree of cultural sensitivity. After all, you’ll be working with people from all over the world and all walks of life.

Where can you teach?

There are opportunities to teach the English language almost everywhere. For example, you can teach English in an Englishspeaking country such as the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or Ireland. You’ll find many private and public programmes and classes for people who have come to work or study, and who need to improve their English.

Alternatively, you can teach English in schools and universities in countries where English is the official language – but not always how people communicate on a daily basis. Nigeria, Malta, India and Sierra Leone are examples. You might also prefer to teach in non-English-speaking countries, where you’ll have the opportunityto immerse yourself in the local culture and learn a new language too.

In terms of teaching environments, there are opportunities to teach in private academies, public schools, universities, offices, private homes and online.

Who do you teach?

There is an extensive list of people who want to learn to speak English. Many teachers start out with a variety of class types to find out which they like best. Your options include (but are not limited to):

• •adults in private groups or one-to-one classes
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• •adults in language schools, colleges or universities
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• •professionals such as business people, medical professionals, pilots, etc. who require English for a specific purpose
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• •students who are preparing for an official exam
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• •people who have moved to an English-speaking country and need to improve their English
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• •young learners in one-to-one classes or groups, or online
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• •young learners in private language schools, or in secondary/ primary schools.

Adapted from: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/blog/is-english-language-teachingfor-you. Accessed on May 2, 2024

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Building on the professional consensus that no method could claim supremacy, Prabhu (1990) asks why there is no best method. He suggests that there are three possible explanations: (1) different methods are best for different teaching / learning circumstances; (2) all methods have some truth or validity; and (3) the whole notion of what is a good or a bad method is irrelevant. Prabhu argues for the third possibility and concludes that we need to rethink what is “best” such that classroom teachers and applied linguists can develop shared pedagogical perceptions of what real-world classroom teaching is.

H.D. Brown (2002), in his critique of methods, adds the following two observations: (1) so-called designer methods seem distinctive at the initial stage of learning but soon come to look like any other learner centered approach; and (2) it has proven impossible to empirically (i.e., quantitatively) demonstrate the superiority of one method over another. Brown (2002) concludes that classroom teachers do best when they ground their pedagogy in “well-established principles of language teaching and learning” (p.17).

So what are these well-established principles that teachers should apply in the post methods era? One of the early concrete proposals comes from Kamaravadivelu (1994), who offers a framework consisting of 10 macro strategies, some of which are summarized below:

– Maximize learning opportunities. The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge but to create and manage as many learning opportunities as possible.

– Facilitate negotiated interaction. Learners should initiate classroom talk (not just respond to the teacher’s prompts) by asking for clarification, by confirming, by reacting, and so on, as part of teacher-student and student-student interaction.

– Activate intuitive heuristics. Teachers should provide enough data for learners to infer underlying grammatical rules, since it is impossible to explicitly teach all rules of the L2.

– Integrate language skills. The separation of listening, reading, speaking, and writing is artificial. As in the real-world, learners should integrate skills: conversation (listening and speaking), note-taking (listening and writing), self-study (reading and writing), and so on.

– Raise cultural consciousness. Teachers should allow learners to become sources of cultural information so that knowledge about the culture of the L2 and of other cultures (especially those represented by the students) becomes part of classroom communication.

– Ensure social relevance: acknowledge that language learning has social, political, economic, and educational dimensions that shape the motivation to learn the L2, determine the uses to which the L2 will be put, and define the skills and proficiency level needed in the L2.

(Celce-Murcia, M. 2001. Adaptado)

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Building on the professional consensus that no method could claim supremacy, Prabhu (1990) asks why there is no best method. He suggests that there are three possible explanations: (1) different methods are best for different teaching / learning circumstances; (2) all methods have some truth or validity; and (3) the whole notion of what is a good or a bad method is irrelevant. Prabhu argues for the third possibility and concludes that we need to rethink what is “best” such that classroom teachers and applied linguists can develop shared pedagogical perceptions of what real-world classroom teaching is.

H.D. Brown (2002), in his critique of methods, adds the following two observations: (1) so-called designer methods seem distinctive at the initial stage of learning but soon come to look like any other learner centered approach; and (2) it has proven impossible to empirically (i.e., quantitatively) demonstrate the superiority of one method over another. Brown (2002) concludes that classroom teachers do best when they ground their pedagogy in “well-established principles of language teaching and learning” (p.17).

So what are these well-established principles that teachers should apply in the post methods era? One of the early concrete proposals comes from Kamaravadivelu (1994), who offers a framework consisting of 10 macro strategies, some of which are summarized below:

– Maximize learning opportunities. The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge but to create and manage as many learning opportunities as possible.

– Facilitate negotiated interaction. Learners should initiate classroom talk (not just respond to the teacher’s prompts) by asking for clarification, by confirming, by reacting, and so on, as part of teacher-student and student-student interaction.

– Activate intuitive heuristics. Teachers should provide enough data for learners to infer underlying grammatical rules, since it is impossible to explicitly teach all rules of the L2.

– Integrate language skills. The separation of listening, reading, speaking, and writing is artificial. As in the real-world, learners should integrate skills: conversation (listening and speaking), note-taking (listening and writing), self-study (reading and writing), and so on.

– Raise cultural consciousness. Teachers should allow learners to become sources of cultural information so that knowledge about the culture of the L2 and of other cultures (especially those represented by the students) becomes part of classroom communication.

– Ensure social relevance: acknowledge that language learning has social, political, economic, and educational dimensions that shape the motivation to learn the L2, determine the uses to which the L2 will be put, and define the skills and proficiency level needed in the L2.

(Celce-Murcia, M. 2001. Adaptado)

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What is organized crime?

Organized crime was characterised by the United Nations, in 1994, as: “group organization to commit crime; hierarchical links or personal relationships which permit leaders to control the group: violence, intimidation and corruption used to earn profits or control territories or markets; laundering of illicit proceeds both in furtherance of criminal activity and to infiltrate the legitimate economy; the potential for expansion into any new activities and beyond national borders; and cooperation with other organized transnational criminal groups.”

It is increasingly global. Although links between, for example, mafia groups in Italy and the USA have existed for decades, new and rapid means of communication have facilitated the development of international networks. Some build on shared linguistic or cultural ties, such as a network trafficking drugs and human organs, which links criminal gangs in Mozambique, Portugal, Brazil, Pakistan, Dubai and South Africa. Others bring together much less likely groups, such as those trafficking arms, drugs and people between South Africa, Nigeria, Pakistan and Russia, or those linking the Russian mafia with Colombian cocaine cartels or North American criminal gangs with the Japanese Yakuza. Trafficked commodities may pass from group to group along the supply chain; for instance heroin in Italy has traditionally been produced in Afghanistan, transported by Turks, distributed by Albanians, and sold by Italians.

Organized crime exploits profit opportunities wherever they arise. Globalization of financial markets, with free movement of goods and capital, has facilitated smuggling of counterfeit goods (in part a reflection of the creation of global brands), internet fraud, and money-laundering. On the other hand, organized crime also takes advantage of the barriers to free movement of people across national borders and the laws against non-medicinal use of narcotics: accordingly it earns vast profits in smuggling migrants and psychoactive drugs. Briquet and Favarel have identified deregulation and the “rolling back of the state” in some countries as creating lacunae that have been occupied by profiteers. The political changes in Europe in the late 1980s fuelled the growth in criminal networks, often involving former law enforcement officers. Failed states, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo or Sierra Leone, have provided further opportunities as criminal gangs smuggle arms in and commodities out, for example diamonds, gold, and rare earth metals, often generating violence against those involved in the trade and in the surrounding communities. Finally, there are a few states, such as the Democratic Republic of Korea and Burma and Guinea-Bissau (once described as a narco-state) where politicians have been alleged to have played an active role in international crime.

Organized criminal gangs have strong incentives. Compared with legitimate producers, they have lower costs of production due to the ability to disregard quality and safety standards, tax obligations, minimum wages or employee benefits. Once established, they may threaten or use violence to eliminate competitors, and can obtain favourable treatment by regulatory authorities either through bribes or threats.

(www.globalizationandhealth.com. Adaptado)

Text 6

The sociolinguistics of English as Lingua Franca (EFL) pronunciation.

As far as sociolinguistics is concerned, the first task is to problematise the notion of standard accent. Essentially there is no such thing as a ‘standard’ accent, merely prestige accents, primarily RP and General American English (GA), stigmatised accents both native and (more often) non-native (see Lippi-Green, 1997; Bonfiglio, 2002), and a range of variously tolerated regional and social accents between the two extremes. The so-called BritishEnglish standard accent (RP) is claimed nowadays to be used by a mere fraction of British Native Speakers (NSs), possibly only three per cent in its unmodified form (see Trudgill, 2002: 171). The vast majority of NSs of English speak with regionallyand/or socially-modified accents, whether tolerated or stigmatised. Clearly, then, the RP accent cannot be ‘standard’ in the sense of being a widely-used norm. Instead, ‘standard’ refers accent-wise to a level of pronunciation assumed by many to be better in some way than the others, and is thus standard only in the sense of a level of excellence to be aspired to. Excellence, however, is not something that can be measured linguistically: it is not intrinsic to an accent, but merely reflects the value judgements of the elitist group who habitually use it or would if they could.

It should be a matter for teachers and their learners to decide whether they wish to subscribe to the (linguistically-unsound) belief in the superiority of RP. In some communication contexts an RP accent will undoubtedly provide them with a social advantage. This is more likely to be the case if learners intend to use their English to communicate and blend in largely with NSs, especially if the communication will take place in NS countries. Even here, though, their awareness should be raised to the fact that the majority of NSs with whom they communicate will not have an RP accent. At the most, it will probably be regionallymodified RP. On the other hand, having been apprised of the facts of sociolinguistic variation, learners may prefer to project their own (L2) regional and social identity through their accent. In this case their goal is more likely to be an accent that retains a clear trace of their L1, provided that it does not threaten the intelligibility of their pronunciation in their target (probably ELF) communication contexts.

JENKINS, J. Teaching Pronunciation for English as a Lingua Franca: A Sociopolitical Perspective. In GNUTZMANN, C.; INTEMANN, F. (Org.) The Globalization of English and the English Language Classroom. Oxford: OUP, 2005. p. 145-158.

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What is a consumer society?

A consumer is a person who buys things, and a consumer society is a society that encourages people to buy and use goods. Some people think that a consumer society provides people with better lives. People in consumer societies tend to live more comfortably. They eat a wider variety of food. They go to restaurants more often. They also buy a lot of products, maybe more than they need. Products such as TVs, cell phones, and computers used to be luxuries. Today people can buy these things more easily than ever before. The market for these goods is growing faster all the time. Consumer societies encourage people to buy bigger and better products. For example, “smarter” phones come out every year. In a consumer society, people are often buying newer and more advanced products. This creates a lot of waste. Nowadays, many people are thinking more seriously about the effects of consumer societies on the environment, and they are trying to become more responsible consumers. (https://www.eltngl.com/assets/downloads/grex_pro 0000000538/grex2_su8.pdf).