Leia o texto para responder às questões de números 27 a 34.

In teaching, “fidelity” refers to closely following specific procedures for how to teach a lesson or respond to student behavior. For example, following a curriculum to fidelity might mean a teacher is required to read from a script, use a certain tone or expression, or teach from a designated page in a guidebook on a specific day. While prevalent across the country, this kind of micromanaging is more common in schools that serve low-income and minority students.

I’m a former elementary school teacher in the United States and I now study how teachers make ethical decisions. This includes how they observe their students and try to help them – regardless of whether their decisions align with a prescribed curriculum.

In a recent study, I interviewed 12 teachers about how they deal with problems that arise in the classroom every day. These teachers discussed how they came up with responses based on best practices they had learned from their own experience as teachers. They also spoke of the knowledge acquired in professional development courses.

Of the nine who worked in public schools, however, all but one of the teachers were influenced by pressure to follow a curriculum to fidelity. This kindergarten teacher described how, when she was teaching preschool, her students who lived in a rural area did not understand references to crossing busy city streets in a book she was required to read as part of the curriculum. She brought her students outside to the parking lot to practice street crossing and listen to the noises of local traffic. This was not part of the curriculum. Had the teacher followed the curriculum strictly, the students may not have been able to grasp the lesson from the book.

Research shows that flexibility in teaching methods and curricula allows teachers and students to participate more fully in the learning process – and even promotes a more democratic society. Instead of mandating that teachers stick to the curriculum word for word, schools should trust teachers and ask why they want to teach. Working with teachers should begin with the belief in their good intentions.

(Cara Elizabeth Furman. http://theconversation.com, 11.12.2024. Adaptado)

Leia o texto para responder às questões de números 27 a 34.

In teaching, “fidelity” refers to closely following specific procedures for how to teach a lesson or respond to student behavior. For example, following a curriculum to fidelity might mean a teacher is required to read from a script, use a certain tone or expression, or teach from a designated page in a guidebook on a specific day. While prevalent across the country, this kind of micromanaging is more common in schools that serve low-income and minority students.

I’m a former elementary school teacher in the United States and I now study how teachers make ethical decisions. This includes how they observe their students and try to help them – regardless of whether their decisions align with a prescribed curriculum.

In a recent study, I interviewed 12 teachers about how they deal with problems that arise in the classroom every day. These teachers discussed how they came up with responses based on best practices they had learned from their own experience as teachers. They also spoke of the knowledge acquired in professional development courses.

Of the nine who worked in public schools, however, all but one of the teachers were influenced by pressure to follow a curriculum to fidelity. This kindergarten teacher described how, when she was teaching preschool, her students who lived in a rural area did not understand references to crossing busy city streets in a book she was required to read as part of the curriculum. She brought her students outside to the parking lot to practice street crossing and listen to the noises of local traffic. This was not part of the curriculum. Had the teacher followed the curriculum strictly, the students may not have been able to grasp the lesson from the book.

Research shows that flexibility in teaching methods and curricula allows teachers and students to participate more fully in the learning process – and even promotes a more democratic society. Instead of mandating that teachers stick to the curriculum word for word, schools should trust teachers and ask why they want to teach. Working with teachers should begin with the belief in their good intentions.

(Cara Elizabeth Furman. http://theconversation.com, 11.12.2024. Adaptado)

Leia a tirinha.

Read the comic strip to answer questions 49 and 50.

(Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. https://www.gocomics.com/search/ full_results?category=comic&page=3&short_name=calvinandhobbes&terms =elementary+school)

Read the text to answer questions from 46 to 48.

Two concepts – acquisition and learning – play key roles in the study of language. Although there are people who use the two terms interchangeably, in reality they embody two different processes in the development of communicative competence. Language acquisition is an intuitive and subconscious process, similar to that of children when they develop their mother tongue – natural, incidental, and often unconscious. Language learning, by contrast, is a conscious process that involves studying rules and structures.

Talking about the rules and structures of a language not only implies knowing the grammatical and spelling rules, but also understanding how that language is used in social contexts. For example, to show affection in a personal letter, we can say goodbye with “sending you hugs and kisses”, but not with “I would like to provide you with a hug”. Understanding which words tend to appear together and the level of formality they carry (known as “register”) is part of knowing a language.

By understanding acquisition and learning, we can improve our performance as learners. Immersing ourselves in an environment where the language we want to learn is used can foster acquisition, as can classes that encourage more communicative ways of learning which replicate situations that could arise in real contexts. Nevertheless, a grammatical explanation will help us to learn the rules of the language. The key is to combine the two approaches.

(Vazquez-Calvo, B. 2023. Adaptado)

Read the text to answer the questions from 26 to 37.

It happens that the publication of this edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary comes 250 years after the appearance of the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, compiled by Samuel Johnson. Much has changed since then. The English that Johnson described in 1755 was relatively well defined, still essentially the national property of the British. Since then, it has dispersed and diversified, has been adopted and adapted as an international means of communication by communities all over the globe. English is now the name given to an immensely diverse variety of different usages. This obviously poses a problem of selection for the dictionary maker: which words are to be included in a dictionary, and thus granted recognition as more centrally or essentially English than the words that are left out?

Johnson did not have to deal with such diversity, but he too was exercised with this question. In his Plan of an English Dictionary, published in 1747, he considers which words it is proper to include in his dictionary; whether ‘terms of particular professions’, for example, were eligible, particularly since many of them had been derived from other languages. ‘Of such words,’ he says, ‘all are not equally to be considered as parts of our language, for some of them are naturalized and incorporated, but others still continue aliens...’. Which words are deemed to be sufficiently naturalized or incorporated to count as ‘parts of our language’, ‘real’ or proper English, and thus worthy of inclusion in a dictionary of the language, remains, of course, a controversial matter. Interestingly enough, even for Johnson the status of a word in the language was not the only, nor indeed the most important consideration. For being alien did not itself disqualify words from inclusion; in a remark which has considerable current resonance he adds: ‘some seem necessary to be retained, because the purchaser of the dictionary will expect to find them’. And, crucially, the expectations that people have of a dictionary are based on what they want to use it for. What Johnson says of his own dictionary would apply very aptly to The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD): ‘The value of a work must be estimated by its use: It is not enough that a dictionary delights the critic, unless at the same time it instructs the learner...’.

(Widdowson, H. Hornby, A.S. 2010. Adaptado)

Read the comic strip to answer questions 49 and 50.

(Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. https://www.gocomics.com/search/ full_results?category=comic&page=3&short_name=calvinandhobbes&terms =elementary+school)