Questões

Executive Secretary

We are looking for a competent Executive Secretary to support high-ranking officials in our company. You will be the one to organize and maintain the executive’s schedule and assist them by performing a variety of administrative tasks.

Executive secretaries must be quick professionals with great time-management and multitasking abilities. It is with their diligence and competence in their work that executives can focus on their managerial responsibilities without worrying for other tasks.

The goal is to contribute to the efficiency of the overall business by ensuring all assigned administrative duties are carried on timely and efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Maintain executive’s agenda and assist in planning appointments, board meetings, conferences, etc;

• Attend meetings and keep minutes;

• Receive and screen phone calls and redirect them when appropriate;

• Handle and prioritize all outgoing or incoming correspondence (e-mail, letters, packages etc.);

• Make travel arrangements for executives;

• Handle confidential documents ensuring they remain secure;

• Prepare invoices or financial statements and provide assistance in bookkeeping;

• Monitor office supplies and negotiate terms with suppliers to ensure the most cost-effective orders;

• Maintain electronic and paper records ensuring information is organized and easily accessible;

• Conduct research and prepare presentations or reports as assigned.

Requirements 

• Proven experience as executive secretary or similar administrative role;  Proficient in MS Office and “back-office” software (e.g. ERP);

• In depth knowledge of office management as well as technical vocabulary of relevant industry;

• Familiarity with basic research methods and reporting techniques;

• Excellent organizational and time-management skills;

• Outstanding communication and negotiation abilities;

• Integrity and confidentiality;

• Degree in business administration or relative field.

(Adapted from: https://resources.workable.com/executive-secretary-job-description)

READ THE FOLLOWING TEXTTO ANSWER QUESTION.

TEXT 4 

According to the Brazilian National Education Guidelines and Framework Law enacted in 2017, English language teaching is mandatory from the sixth year of elementary school until the last years of high school. However, the curriculum does not guarantee that all Brazilian students will receive English teaching. In 2013, Data Popular, a Brazilian research institute, drafted a report for the British Council analyzing the problems concerning knowledge of English in Brazil. The report claims that the low level of English proficiency amongst Brazilians reflects the educational opportunities available in the country […]. 

To understand the reasons why English teaching does not seem efficient for all students, it is important to highlight the English language teaching provision in Brazil. Formal English teaching in Brazil takes place in four different contexts: English schools, bilingual schools, regular private schools, and public schools. In general, people who wish to learn English believe that effective learning occurs only in private English schools or bilingual schools because the structure (the teaching methods and the quality of support materials) is more likely to provide successful learning. The focus in those institutions is on oral expression. Learners have more exposure to the target language because classes are taught entirely in English, and teachers are usually well trained to comply with that requirement. In addition, groups are smaller, so students can receive personal support and enjoy a comfortable learning environment, not to mention access to multimedia resources. 

(Adapted from: https://academic.oup.com/eltj/75/1/103/6169556)

        When a person (or team or firm or government) decides how to act in dealings with other people (or teams or firms or governments), there must be some cross-effect of their actions; what one does must affect the outcome for the other. For the interaction to become a strategic game, however, we need the participants’ mutual awareness of this cross-effect. What the other person does affects you; if you know this, you can react to his actions, or take advance actions to forestall the bad effects his future actions may have on you and to facilitate any good effects, or even take advance actions so as to alter his future reactions to your advantage. If you know that the other person knows that what you do affects him, you know that he will be taking similar actions. And so on. It is this mutual awareness of the cross-effects of actions and the actions taken as a result of this awareness that constitute the most interesting aspects of strategy.

        When each participant is significant in the interaction, either because each is a large player to start with or because commitments or private information narrow the scope of the relationship to a point where each is an important player within the relationship, we must think of the interaction as a strategic game. Such situations are the rule rather than the exception in business, in politics, and even in social interactions. Therefore, the study of strategic games forms an important part of all fields that analyze these matters.

Avinash Dixit et al. Games of strategy.

New York: W.W. Norton & Coadapted, 2015 (adapted).

Text V

Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies

Some Final Remarks

    Planning language assessment from a structuralist view of language has been a fairly easy task, since it aims at testing the correct use of grammar and lexical structures. This has been a very comfortable way to evaluate students’ performance in many regular schools or language institutes due to the stability of standardized answers. From the perspective of the new literacy studies, the comfort of teaching and assessing objective and homogeneous linguistic contents is replaced by a wider spectrum of language teaching and assessing possibilities, whose key elements turn to be difference and critique. Typical activities based on this new approach would enable students to make and negotiate meanings in a much more flexible way, corroborating the novel notion of unstable, dynamic, collaborative and distributed knowledge.

The inclusion of contents of such nature in language assessments may be, at a first glance, a very laborious process due to the fact we are simply not accustomed to that. Actually, we sometimes find ourselves deprived from the teaching skills necessary to apply a more critical teaching approach, a fact that is much the results of our positivist educational background.

    Nonetheless, since the emergent digital epistemology will require subject more capable of designing and redesigning meaning critically towards a great deal of representational modes, we need to reconsider our teaching approaches, go further and seek theories that take such issues into account. By redefining the notions of language and knowledge, we, thus, assume that the new literacy studies from the last decades may offer very good insights to the field of foreign language teaching.

    The re-conceptualization of language assessment according to the new literacies project presented in this paper does not intend to suggest prompt fixed answers, but it takes the risk of outlining possible activities, signaling certain changes regarding its characteristics and contents, as previously shared.

    The increasing importance of the new literacy and multiliteracies studies and their fruitful theoretical insight for the rethinking of pedagogical issues invite us to review our foreign language teaching practices in a different perspective. By sharing some of our local findings, we attempt to corroborate the collaborative and distributed knowledge discussed by the literacies theory itself and hope to be contributing to the new educational demands of the emerging epistemological basis.

From: DUBOC, A.P.M. Language Assessment and the new Literacy Studies. Lenguaje 37 (1), 2009. pp. 159-178, p. 175-176.