Questões

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    Clifford the Big Red Dog looks fabulous on an iPad. He sounds good, too — tap the screen and hear him pant as a blue truck roars into the frame. “Go, truck, go!” cheers the narrator. But does this count as story time? Or is it just screen time for babies? It is a question that parents, pediatricians and researchers are struggling to answer as children’s books, just like all the other ones, migrate to digital media.

     For years, child development experts have advised parents to read to their children early and often, citing studies showing its linguistic, verbal and social benefits. In June, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised doctors to remind parents at every visit that they should read to their children from birth, prescribing books as enthusiastically as vaccines and vegetables.

     On the other hand, the academy strongly recommends no screen time for children under 2, and less than two hours a day for older children. 

     At a time when reading increasingly means swiping pages on a device, and app stores are bursting with reading programs and learning games aimed at infants and preschoolers, which bit of guidance should parents heed? 

     The answer, researchers say, is not yet entirely clear. “We know how children learn to read,” said Kyle Snow, the applied research director at the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “But we don’t know how that process will be affected by digital technology.” 

     Part of the problem is the newness of the devices. Tablets and e-readers have not been in widespread use long enough for the sorts of extended studies that will reveal their effects on learning.

     Dr. Pamela High, the pediatrician who wrote the June policy for the pediatrics group, said electronic books were intentionally not addressed. “We tried to do a strongly evidence-based policy statement on the issue of reading starting at a very young age,” she said. “And there isn’t any data, really, on e-books.”

    But a handful of new studies suggest that reading to a child from an electronic device undercuts the dynamic that drives language development. “There’s a lot of interaction when you’re reading a book with your child,” Dr. High said. “You’re turning pages, pointing at pictures, talking about the story. Those things are lost somewhat when you’re using an e-book.”

     In a 2013 study, researchers found that children ages 3 to 5 whose parents read to them from an electronic book had lower reading comprehension than children whose parents used traditional books. Part of the reason, they said, was that parents and children using an electronic device spent more time focusing on the device itself than on the story (a conclusion shared by at least two other studies).

     “Parents were literally putting their hands over the kids’ hands and saying, ‘Wait, don’t press the button yet. Finish this up first,’ ” said Dr. Julia Parish-Morris, a developmental psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the lead author of the 2013 study that was conducted at Temple University. Parents who used conventional books were more likely to engage in what education researchers call “dialogic reading,” the sort of back-and-forth discussion of the story and its relation to the child’s life that research has shown are key to a child’s linguistic development.

     Complicating matters is that fewer and fewer children’s e-books can strictly be described as books, say researchers. As technology evolves, publishers are adding bells and whistles that encourage detours. “What we’re really after in reading to our children is behavior that sparks a conversation,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple and co-author of the 2013 study. “But if that book has things that disrupt the conversation, like a game plopped right in the middle of the story, then it’s not offering you the same advantages as an old-fashioned book.”

     Of course, e-book publishers and app developers point to interactivity as an educational advantage, not a distraction. Many of those bells and whistles — Clifford’s bark, the sleepy narration of “Goodnight Moon,” the appearance of the word “ham” when a child taps the ham in the Green Eggs and Ham app — help the child pick up language, they say.

     There is some evidence to bear out those claims, at least in relation to other technologies. A study by the University of Wisconsin in 2013 found that 2-year-olds learned words faster with an interactive app as opposed to one that required no action.

     But when it comes to learning language, researchers say, no piece of technology can substitute for a live instructor — even if the child appears to be paying close attention.

     Patricia K. Kuhl, a director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington, led a study in 2003 that compared a group of 9-month-old babies who were addressed in Mandarin by a live instructor with a group addressed in Mandarin by an instructor on a DVD. Children in a third group were exposed only to English.

    “The way the kids were staring at the screen, it seemed obvious they would learn better from the DVDs,” she said. But brain scans and language testing revealed that the DVD group “learned absolutely nothing,” Dr. Kuhl said. “Their brain measures looked just like the control group that had just been exposed to English. 

     The only group that learned was the live social interaction group.” In other words, “it’s being talked with, not being talked at,” that teaches children language, Dr. Hirsh-Pasek said. 

     Similarly, perhaps the biggest threat posed by e-books that read themselves to children, or engage them with games, is that they could lull parents into abdicating their educational responsibilities, said Mr. Snow of the National Association for the Education of Young Children. 

    “There’s the possibility for e-books to become the TV babysitters of this generation,” he said. “We don’t want parents to say, ‘There’s no reason for me to sit here and turn pages and tell my child how to read the word, because my iPad can do it.’ ” 

     But parents may find it difficult to avoid resorting to tablets. Even literacy advocates say the guidelines can be hard to follow, and that allowing limited screen time is not high on the list of parental missteps. “You might have an infant and think you’re down with the A.A.P. guidelines, and you don’t want your baby in front of a screen, but then you have a grandparent on Skype,” Mr. Snow said. “Should you really be tearing yourself apart? Maybe it’s not the world’s worst thing.” 

     “The issue is when you’re in the other room and Skyping with the baby cause he likes it,” he said. Even if screen time is here to stay as a part of American childhood, good old-fashioned books seem unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Parents note that there is an emotional component to paper-andink storybooks that, so far, does not seem to extend to their electronic counterparts, however engaging. 

From: www.nytimes.com, OCT. 11, 2014 

The World Might Be Running Low on Americans

    The world has been stricken by scarcity. Our post-pandemic pantry has run bare of gasoline, lumber, microchips, chicken wings, ketchup packets, cat food, used cars and Chickfil-A sauce. Like the Great Toilet Paper Scare of 2020, though, many of these shortages are the consequence of near-term, Covid-related disruptions. Soon enough there will again be a chicken wing in every pot and more than enough condiments to go with it.

    But there is one recently announced potential shortage that should give Americans great reason for concern. It is a shortfall that the nation has rarely had to face, and nobody quite knows how things will work when we begin to run out.

    I speak, of course, of all of us: The world may be running low on Americans — most crucially, tomorrow’s working-age, childbearing, idea-generating, community-building young Americans. Late last month, the Census Bureau released the first results from its 2020 count, and the numbers confirmed what demographers have been warning of for years: The United States is undergoing “demographic stagnation,” transitioning from a relatively fast-growing country of young people to a slow-growing, older nation.

    Many Americans might consider slow growth a blessing. Your city could already be packed to the gills, the roads clogged with traffic and housing prices shooting through the roof. Why do we need more folks? And, anyway, aren’t we supposed to be conserving resources on a planet whose climate is changing? Yet demographic stagnation could bring its own high costs, among them a steady reduction in dynamism, productivity and a slowdown in national and individual prosperity, even a diminishment of global power.

    And there is no real reason we have to endure such a transition, not even an environmental one. Even if your own city is packed like tinned fish, the U.S. overall can accommodate millions more people. Most of the counties in the U.S. are losing working-age adults; if these declines persist, local economies will falter, tax bases will dry up, and local governments will struggle to maintain services. Growth is not just an option but a necessity — it’s not just that we can afford to have more people, it may be that we can’t afford not to.

    But how does a country get more people? There are two ways: Make them, and invite them in. Increasing the first is relatively difficult — birthrates are declining across the world, and while family-friendly policies may be beneficial for many reasons, they seem to do little to get people to have more babies. On the second method, though, the United States enjoys a significant advantage — people around the globe have long been clamoring to live here, notwithstanding our government’s recent hostility to foreigners. This fact presents a relatively simple policy solution to a vexing long-term issue: America needs more people, and the world has people to send us. All we have to do is let more of them in.

    For decades, the United States has enjoyed a significant economic advantage over other industrialized nations — our population was growing faster, which suggested a more youthful and more prosperous future. But in the last decade, American fertility has gone down. At the same time, there has been a slowdown in immigration.

    The Census Bureau’s latest numbers show that these trends are catching up with us. As of April 1, it reports that there were 331,449,281 residents in the United States, an increase of just 7.4 percent since 2010 — the second-smallest decade-long growth rate ever recorded, only slightly ahead of the 7.3 percent growth during the Depression-struck 1930s.

    The bureau projects that sometime next decade — that is, in the 2030s — Americans over 65 will outnumber Americans younger than 18 for the first time in our history. The nation will cross the 400-million population mark sometime in the late 2050s, but by then we’ll be quite long in the tooth — about half of Americans will be over 45, and one fifth will be older than 85.

    The idea that more people will lead to greater prosperity may sound counterintuitive — wouldn’t more people just consume more of our scarce resources? Human history generally refutes this simple intuition. Because more people usually make for more workers, more companies, and most fundamentally, more new ideas for pushing humanity forward, economic studies suggest that population growth is often an important catalyst of economic growth.

    A declining global population might be beneficial in some ways; fewer people would most likely mean less carbon emission, for example — though less than you might think, since leading climate models already assume slowing population growth over the coming century. And a declining population could be catastrophic in other ways. In a recent paper, Chad Jones, an economist at Stanford, argues that a global population decline could reduce the fundamental innovativeness of humankind. The theory is simple: Without enough people, the font of new ideas dries up, Jones argues; without new ideas, progress could be imperiled.

    There are more direct ways that slow growth can hurt us. As a country’s population grows heavy with retiring older people and light with working younger people, you get a problem of too many eaters and too few cooks. Programs for seniors like Social Security and Medicare may suffer as they become dependent on ever-fewer working taxpayers for funding. Another problem is the lack of people to do all the work. For instance, experts predict a major shortage of health care workers, especially home care workers, who will be needed to help the aging nation.

    In a recent report, Ali Noorani, the chief executive of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration-advocacy group, and a co-author, Danilo Zak, say that increasing legal immigration by slightly more than a third each year would keep America’s ratio of working young people to retired old people stable over the next four decades. 

    As an immigrant myself, I have to confess I find much of the demographic argument in favor of greater immigration quite a bit too anodyne. Immigrants bring a lot more to the United States than simply working-age bodies for toiling in pursuit of greater economic growth. I also believe that the United States’ founding idea of universal equality will never be fully realized until we recognize that people outside our borders are as worthy of our ideals as those here through an accident of birth.

Read the text to answer the question from. 

    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)