Questão 998395

Read text 3 and answer questions 48 to 55:

Text 3

In the following extract, the authors discuss some of the tenets of the Brazilian National Curricular Parameters:

Changes in Brazilian Education

[…] the publication of the National Curricular Parameters

issued by the Brazilian Ministry of Education and Culture in

1998 (Secretaria de Educação Fundamental, 1998) have

replaced previous educational guidelines that emphasized skills

5 development and focused on standardized content. The

current policies comprise an interventionist agenda, and

propose the development of critical thinking through a

curriculum that:

• Helps students understand that knowledge is socially

10 constructed, reflecting knowledge makers'

experiences, beliefs and values;

• Shows how assumptions about hegemonic identities

are the effect of situated practices, varying according

to socio‐cultural specifics of diverse historical contexts;

15 • Questions stereotyping that construct dichotomous

views of identities; and,

• Highlights the diversity and plurality of life that

constitutes social experience.

The Brazilian Curricular Parameters suggest that the

20 learning of foreign languages should provide students with

opportunities for acting in the world through discourses

besides the ones offered by their mother tongue. From this

perspective, TEFL should approach the way people act in

society through language, constructing the social world,

25 themselves, and others around them. The quote below

summarizes the document's approach to language in society:

“Language use (both verbal and visual) is essentially

determined by its sociointeractional nature because whoever

uses language considers either an audience or an addressee.

30 This approach implies that meaning is dialogic, i.e., it is

constructed by all participants in discourse. Besides that,

interactional encounters do not occur in a social vacuum. They

involve institutional, cultural and historical contexts”.

(Secretaria de Educação Fundamental, 1998, p. 27, our

35 translation)

According to this view texts are purposefully constructed

by identifiable participants (e.g., author and audience) in

response to exigencies of time, place, and subject matter.

Therefore, in the foreign language classroom, students should

40 be encouraged to recognize and reconstruct these contexts

which influence the way texts are organized as well as the

lexical‐grammatical components they contain ‐‐ procedures

involved in the notion of critical thinking. This is to be

underpinned by the discussion of socially relevant topics, such

45 as gender‐related issues, cultural pluralism, ethics, and

citizenship. The idea is that students can compare how these

topics are constructed in their mother tongue and in the

foreign language.

(adapted from Santos, D. & Fabricio, B.F Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, in http://www.tesl‐ej.org/ej38/a1.html)

In the first paragraph, the authors explain that the Brazilian National Curricular Parameters “replaced previous educational guidelines that emphasized skills development and focused on standardized content” (lines 4 and 5).

Choose the alternative that refers to the main skill supported by these Parameters as presented in Text 3.