Questões de Concurso

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    Stephen R. Covey (2017) once explained the importance of priorities by using an experience he had in a business class. He stated that a professor stood in front of a group of students and set a large canning jar in front of them. He filled it to the top with rocks and asked the students if it was full. They responded yes. Then he took out a bucket of sand and filled the jar again, and students watched as the sand poured inside the spaces between the large rocks. The professor asked again if the jar was full. This time students hesitated, and with good reason. The professor proceeded to fill the jar with a pitcher of water, after which he asked the students to explain the purpose behind this visual demonstration. After several incorrect responses, (including something along the lines of. There is always room for more stuff in your life), the professor gave his answer, which amounts to this: Unless you put the rocks in first, they will never fit into the jar.

    This story demonstrates the principle of prioritizing, of knowing what matters most and what matters least, and that what matters most must be placed in the first position. No doubt, this is a very relevant way to analyze your own ecosystem1 .

    As you move forward in developing a lifestyle that incorporates language learning, you must constantly reflect on whether or not you have prioritized your tasks well. If you imagine your ecosystem as the canning jar, and your language tasks as items that fill up the jar, you can see how making the right decisions will increase your chances of not only enjoying the learning process but making it more successful. Always remember that it is not just “doing a lot of language stuff” that will bring you success but rather that by putting priorities in their place, language learning can happen on its own. Let’s talk about how to prioritize language learning tasks by using the metaphor of the canning jar itself and discuss two concepts: fixed and fluid.

(Dixon, Shane. The language learner guidebook: powerful tools to help you conquer any language. [S.l.]: Wayzgoose, 2018. Adaptado)

1 A language ecosystem describes a holistic environment that encourages and extends the learning and application of language beyond the classroom through a diverse system of tasks and incentives.

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    Today, many of the pedagogical springs and rivers of the last few decades are appropriately captured in the term Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), now a catch phrase for language teachers. CLT is an eclectic blend of the contributions of previous methods into the best of what a teacher can provide in authentic uses of the second language in the classroom. Indeed, the single greatest challenge in the profession is to move significantly beyond the teaching of rules, patterns, definitions, and other knowledge “about” language to the point that we are teaching our students to communicate genuinely, spontaneously, and meaningfully in the second language. 

    A significant difference between current language teaching practices and those of, say, a half a century ago, is the absence of proclaimed “orthodoxies” and “best” methods. We are well aware that methods, as they were conceived of 40 or 50 years ago or so, are too narrow and too constrictive to apply to a wide range of learners in an enormous number of situational contexts. There are no instant recipes. No quick and easy method is guaranteed to provide success. As Bell (2003), Brown (2001), Kumaravadivelu (2001), and others have appropriately shown, pedagogical trends in language teaching now spur us to develop a principled basis—sometimes called an approach (Richards & Rodgers, 2001)—upon which teachers can choose particular designs and techniques for teaching a foreign language in a specific context. Every learner is unique. Every teacher is unique. Every learner-teacher relationship is unique, and every context is unique. Your task as a teacher is to understand the properties of those relationships and contexts.

(BROWN, H. Douglas. Principles of language learning and teaching. 5. ed. Londres: Longman, 2006)