Text I

The purpose of reading and the balance between skills and language affect the teaching of reading in English for Specific Purposes. Two contributions to the approach to reading in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) are of prime importance, as in Urquhart and Weir (1998).

One of them is the shift from text as a linguistic object to text as a vehicle of information (JOHNS and DAVIES, 1983). The key principles for ESP learners are that extracting information accurately and quickly is more significant than language details; that understanding the macrostructure comes before language study; and that application of the information in the text is extremely important. The reader first processes the language and then links the ideas to prior knowledge.

The second significant contribution to teaching reading on ESP courses is the recognition that good reading requires language and skills. According to Hosenfeld (1977), less successful foreign language leamners had a fragmented approach to text, while successful learners went for overall meaning, guessing or skipping language and information. As referred in Alderson (1984), several hypotheses were tested about the role of language and skills, showing that poor reading in a foreign language is due in partto poor reading in L1, together with an inadequate knowledge ofthe foreign language. The learners need to reach a threshold level of L2 before they are able to transfer any L1 skills to their L2 reading tasks.

The reading component of an ESP course thus requires a balance between skills and language development. Some of the crucial skills to be learnt or transferred into the new language are, as referred in Dudley-Evans and St John (1998): selecting what is relevant for the current purpose; using all the features of the text such as headings, layout; skimming for content and meaning; scanning for specifics; identifying organisational patterns; understanding relations within a sentence and between sentences; using cohesive and discourse markers; predicting, inferring and guessing; identifying main ideas, supporting ideas and examples; processing and evaluating the information during reading; transferring or using the information while or after reading.

Most of these skills are composed of several processes, of which skimming and scanning are useful first stages for determining whether to read a text or which parts to read carefully. Once a text has been identified as relevant, then ESP readers need to read carefully, extract meaning and consider the author's attitude.

Adapted from: BOJOVIC, M. Reading Skills and Reading

Comprehension in English for Specific Purposes. The

International Language Conference on The importance of

Learning Professional Foreign Languages for Communication

between Cultures, 2010.

Das opções a seguir, aquela que se configura como o melhor título para o Texto I é:

Leia o texto a seguir e responda a questão.

Teaching English in the Brazilian countryside

“In Brazil, countryside youth want to learn about new places, new cultures and people. However, they think their everyday lives are an obstacle to that, because they imagine that country life has nothing to do with other parts of the world”, says Rafael Fonseca. Rafael teaches English in a language school in a cooperative coffee cultivation in Paraguaçu. His learners are the children of rural workers.

Rafael tells us that the objective of the project being developed in the cooperative is to give the young people more opportunities of growth in the countryside, and that includes the ability to communicate with international buyers. “In the future, our project may help overcome the lack of succession in countryside activities because, nowadays, rural workers’ children become lawyers, engineers, teachers, and sometimes even doctors, but those children very rarely want to have a profession related to rural work”, says Rafael.

“That happens”, he adds, “because their parents understand that life in the countryside can be hard work and they do not want to see their children running the same type of life that they have. Their children also believe that life in the country does not allow them to have contact with other parts of the world, meet other people and improve cultural bounds. The program intends to show them that by means of a second language they can travel, communicate with new people and learn about new cultures as a means of promoting and selling what they produce in the country, and that includes receiving visitors in their workplace from abroad.”

Rafael’s strategy is to contextualize the English language and keep learners up-to-date with what happens in the global market. “Integrating relevant topics about countryside living can be transformative in the classroom. The local regional and cultural aspects are a great source of inspiration and learning not only for the young, but for us all.”

Adapted from http://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2019/01/21/teaching-english-in-the-brazilian-classroom/

Choose the alternative with the correct reference for the underlined words from the text.

Cold Front and Wild Fires Cause São Paulo to Go Dark during The Day

Darkness washed over São Paulo on Monday, around 3 pm, surprising residents. The phenomenon can be explained by the sum of the arrival of a cold front in the east of the state, with heavy clouds, and winds that have brought particulate matter originating from fires in Paraguay and Bolivia.

Franco Nadal Villela, a meteorologist of Inmet (National Institute of Meteorology), explained what happened in São Paulo on Monday:

"The darkening of the sky was quite intense. Two things working together caused it. First, the cold front from the east of São Paulo, bringing in a lot of moisture from the ocean. This cold front is bringing in cold air." said Villela, who then spoke about the effect of the fires. "There are wild fires of great magnitude happening in Paraguay, in the Pantanal region. Since the weekend, strong winds have brought (fine dust) from Mato Grosso do Sul, reaching São Paulo. The (fine dust) helps in the formation of clouds, and when they form together with it, the sky gets even darker, "he added. He said fires in the Bolivian region also contributed to the dark sky.

Adapted from: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/internacional/e n/scienceandhealth/2019/08/cold-front-andwild-fires-cause-sao-paulo-to-go-dark-duringthe-day.shtml

In to the Text, “Darkness washed over São Paulo on Monday, around 3 pm” means that the phenomenon occurred:

Text III

Students connect what they learn to what they already know, interpreting incoming information, and even sensory perception, through the lens of their existing knowledge, beliefs, and assumptions (Vygotsky, 1978; National Research Council, 2000). In fact, there is widespread agreement among researchers that students must connect new knowledge to previous knowledge in order to learn (Bransford & Johnson, 1972; Resnick, 1983). However, the extent to which students are able to draw on prior knowledge to effectively construct new knowledge depends on the nature of their prior knowledge, as well as the instructor' s ability to harness it.

How Does Studenis' Prior Knowledge Aff ect Their Leaming?.

Available at https://www.colorado.edu/ftep/sites/

default/files/attached-files/ftep_memo_to_faculty_88_0.pdf.

Access: January 9, 2020.

O principal objetivo do Texto III é:

Analyze the propositions that follow according to the text and chose the correct alternative.

I. This text has been produced because these days fake news has become very common and needs to be combated.

II. The chart presented aims at furnishing readers with clues that can be used in order to avoid being a victim of fake news.

III. The pervasive power of false rumors vary according to hoaxes and frequency of the kind of information being released and spread online.

IV. The reliability of the news is regarded higher when broadcast on social media.

V. More than 50% of the population has been trying to combat fake news.

According to the text, identify the propositions below as true (T) or false (F) and chose the correct alternative, from top to bottom.

( ) The pronoun their (line 3) refers to ‘hoaxes’.

( ) The word misleading (line 2) could be replaced by ‘deceptive’ without change in meaning.

( ) The pronoun it (line 7) refers to ‘digital media’.

( ) The meaning of the sentence ‘Fake news has been one of the most hotly-debated socio-political topics of recent years’ (line 1) is that ‘lately fake news has been one of the socio-political issues most often agreed to be harmful’.