Questões

Text 1 – How children learn languages

Questions 31 to 39

How long does it take to learn a language?

Leia o texto para responder à questão.

    Building on the professional consensus that no method could claim supremacy, Prabhu (1990) asks why there is no best method. He suggests that there are three possible explanations: (1) different methods are best for different teaching / learning circumstances; (2) all methods have some truth or validity; and (3) the whole notion of what is a good or a bad method is irrelevant. Prabhu argues for the third possibility and concludes that we need to rethink what is “best” such that classroom teachers and applied linguists can develop shared pedagogical perceptions of what real-world classroom teaching is.

    H.D. Brown (2002), in his critique of methods, adds the following two observations: (1) so-called designer methods seem distinctive at the initial stage of learning but soon come to look like any other learner centered approach; and (2) it has proven impossible to empirically (i.e., quantitatively) demonstrate the superiority of one method over another. Brown (2002) concludes that classroom teachers do best when they ground their pedagogy in “well-established principles of language teaching and learning” (p.17).

    So what are these well-established principles that teachers should apply in the post methods era? One of the early concrete proposals comes from Kamaravadivelu (1994), who offers a framework consisting of 10 macro strategies, some of which are summarized below:

    – Maximize learning opportunities. The teacher’s job is not to transmit knowledge but to create and manage as many learning opportunities as possible.

    – Facilitate negotiated interaction. Learners should initiate classroom talk (not just respond to the teacher’s prompts) by asking for clarification, by confirming, by reacting, and so on, as part of teacher-student and student-student interaction.

    – Activate intuitive heuristics. Teachers should provide enough data for learners to infer underlying grammatical rules, since it is impossible to explicitly teach all rules of the L2.

    – Integrate language skills. The separation of listening, reading, speaking, and writing is artificial. As in the real-world, learners should integrate skills: conversation (listening and speaking), note-taking (listening and writing), self-study (reading and writing), and so on.

    – Raise cultural consciousness. Teachers should allow learners to become sources of cultural information so that knowledge about the culture of the L2 and of other cultures (especially those represented by the students) becomes part of classroom communication.

    – Ensure social relevance: acknowledge that language learning has social, political, economic, and educational dimensions that shape the motivation to learn the L2, determine the uses to which the L2 will be put, and define the skills and proficiency level needed in the L2.

(Celce-Murcia, M. 2001. Adaptado)

The true potential of technology to change behavior

    Technology could successfully change behaviours where decades of campaigns and legislation have failed. With the quantified self already walking among us and the internet of things within easy reach, digital technology is creating unprecedented opportunities to encourage, enable and empower more sustainable behaviours.

     If we are to unlock the power of technology we must be more ambitious than simply digitising analogue strategies or creating another communications channel.

    The true potential of technology lies in its ability to do things that nothing else can do. In behaviour change terms, the potential to succeed where decades of education programmes, awareness campaigns and product innovation have failed; to make a difference where government policy and legislation has had limited impact.

    Using behavioural insights, it is possible to highlight the bottlenecks, drop out points and achilles heels of traditional behaviour change efforts — the reasons why we have failed in the past — and apply the unique possibilities of technology to these specific challenges.

    Overcoming our limitations

    Luckily, the history of the human race is almost defined by its ability to invent stuff that bolsters its feeble capabilities. That stuff is, of course, what we generically refer to as 'technology'. And in the same way that the internal combustion engine and the light bulb allow us to overcome our relatively feeble powers of motion and perception, so digital technology can be directed to overcoming our relatively feeble powers of reasoning, selfcontrol, motivation, self-awareness and agency—the factors that make behaviour change so difficult.

    Herein lies the true potential of technology: not in the laboratory or the workshop, but in an understanding of the behavioural dynamics that define the human condition, both generally and within the context of a specific user-group, market segment or community.

Fonte: JOHNSON, Steven. Recognising the true potential of technology to change behaviour. Disponível em:<https://www.theguardian.com/sustainablebusiness/behavioural-insights/true-potential-technology-change-behaviour>