Aulas 1 a 3 Leitura e redação em Ingles

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Leitura e Redação em Língua Inglesa
In the end of lesson, the student should be able to:
1. Define what ´Reading` is; 
2. recognize your role as a reader; 
3. discuss the purposes of reading.
I would like to ask you a very simple, straightforward question:
What is reading?
There is not a simple answer for this question although reading is considered, at a first glance, a concrete observable task which employs certain functions and faculties proper to human beings in general.
In fact, reading is a complex activity, which can  be developed in multiple ways, depending on its  purposes.
Kern (2000) presents a definition of “literacy”, which brings the notions we believe to be essential for the understanding of reading as a social act.
For Richard Kern, "literacy" in a second language means much more than the separate abilities to read and write; rather, it is a complex concept of familiarity with language and its use in context-primarily written language, but by extension also spoken communication. It requires "a broader discourse competence that involves the ability to interpret and critically evaluate a wide variety of written and spoken texts" (p. 2).
It covers cultural pragmatic knowledge and linguistic awareness as well as basic knowledge of lexis and grammatical structure. It is promoted through an interaction of reading and writing activities, and through the discussion of language in use in communicative contexts. And according to Kern, literacy provides a unifying, overarching concept describing what it is that he is trying to achieve in language teaching, and what it is that will enable second language learners to function adequately in a literate foreign society.
Kern states that literacy in a second language involves a competence to interpret and critically evaluate a large variety of written and spoken texts in cultural, pragmatic and interactional contexts.  
I expect that the process of reading may reveal readers who perform an active role and that recognize that they are responsible to build meanings in communicative contexts. They should also have the ability to understand cultural differences and be able to function adequately in a literate foreign society.
But do not forget that, as an efficient reader, you should be able to do that in an autonomous way.
Let´s consider that each reader owns knowledge and previous experiences which are employed to build new meanings when reading new texts.
As a consequence, we can infer that when a group of people read a text, this reading may convey different interpretations.
They have different interpretations from the same text due to their individual knowledge and experiences, but it is crucial that these interpretations have a determined logical inner line found either in the text or in the context.
What about your role as a reader?
You should understand, then, that your role as a reader is determined either by your purposes to read a text or by the previous knowledge of the information you are going to find in it. 
When the author starts writing a text, he/she assumes that the reader may either know very little about what he/she is going to read or that the reader has sufficient information to interact with the text.
> In the first case, authors give a lot of details about what they are writing;
> In the second, they can give implicit information because they expect the reader to be well informed about the subject they are writing about. They expect readers to behave in an active way using the knowledge they have to fill up the gaps in relation to the text.
In the research entitled Reading for understanding: toward a research and development program in reading comprehension (SNOW-p.13), the author states that,
“a reader must have a wide range of capacities and abilities. These qualities include cognitive capacities (e.g., attention, memory, critical analytic ability), motivation (a purpose for reading, an interest in the content being read, self-efficacy as a reader and various types of knowledge – vocabulary, domain and topic knowledge, linguistic and discourse knowledge, knowledge of specific comprehension strategies). Of course, the specific cognitive, motivational, and linguistic capacities as well as the knowledge base called on in any act of reading comprehension depend on the texts in use and the specific activity in which one is engaged”.
In general, readers may have two main purposes to read: Reading for entertainment or… reading to get some information.
Within these two purposes, it is possible to have more specific ones.   
What is important for you to perceive is that when you read something, it does not matter what, you build meaning or you obtain some information.   
Look at the symbols below and think about the meanings you produce while you read them:
It happens when you are reading a magazine  and you just look at the words of an ad, quickly, without paying close attention to it. Doing so you still have an implicit purpose to read. You can read even when you do not want to.
You can read to entertain yourself for some minutes, or as a pastime while you wait for the bus or walk around.
Although, you do not have a predetermined intention to read, and the action of reading is not conscious, when you are standing at the bus stop, looking at a billboard, you will still build meaning or get information.
At school, the purposes of reading are established by teachers. Your purposes will probably be to study for a test, to write an article, to answer questions about a text, to reach conclusions about a specific subject, to find relevant information, to know about the results of a research, to make summaries.
You know that you will be evaluated for your ability of building meanings or getting information. This ability will determine if you can be considered a good reader or not.
To reach your purposes of reading and be considered good readers, next class, you will study about the most common textual genres. You will also analyze the processing of texts during the reading act and finally what you can and cannot do as readers.
 Leitura e Redação em Língua Inglesa
In the end of lesson, the student should be able to:
1. Recognize the most common textual genres; 
2. Study the analysis of text processing; 
3. Discuss the behavior of an efficient reader.
What are text genres?
It is not  an easy task to give a single definition for text genres.
According to Swales (1990) the term ´genre´ is frequently used to make reference to the different categories of discourse. The author himself thinks that the concept ´genre’ is a fuzzy one.
I want to make sure that  we are employing the same concepts, that is why I will discuss the differences between text genre, text structure and text  processing.
Please, be aware that I do not intend to give you conclusive definitions but concepts which will guide our considerations from now on.
Whenever we talk about genres, we will be referring to classifications such as:
Fiction – Alice in Wonderland;
Non-Fiction – Grammar;
Fables –The rabbit and the turtle;
Fairy Tales – The Sleeping Beauty;
Comic Strips – (Tirinhas curtas de jornais);
Plays – Theather;
Whenever we talk about text structure, we will be making references to patterns which are established in the relation between ideas such as:
• Temporal order - Example: In 2007, Rowling described her religious background in an interview with the Dutch newspaper the Volkskrant.
I was officially raised in the Church of England, but I was actually more of a freak in my family. We didn't talk about religion in our home. My father didn't believe in anything, neither did my sister. My mother would incidentally visit the church, but mostly during Christmas. And I was immensely curious. From when I was 13, 14 I went to church alone. I found it very interesting what was being said there, and I believed in it.
When I went to university, I became more critical. I got more annoyed with the smugnessof religious people and I went to church less and less. Now I'm at the point where I started: yes, I believe. And yes, I go to the church. A Protestant church here in Edinburgh. My husband is also raised Protestant, but he comes from a very strict Scottish group. One where they couldn't sing and talk.
Chronological order - Example: Our initial model has two components: (1) a pairwise classifier between events, and (2) a global constraint satisfaction layer that maximizes the confidence scores from the classifier. The first is based on previous work (Mani et al., 2006; Chambers et al., 2007) and the second is a novel contribution to event - classification.
My fellow Americans, the next time you feel a cold coming on, mark your calendar. Unless you start coughing up lots of green sputum or develop unusual symptoms – for example, a fever that does not respond to aspirin, acetaminophen (Tylenol), or ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) – think twice about calling your doctor before two weeks have passed.
What I do instead is, from the moment I feel the infection coming on, I drink lots of hot fluids, take 500 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C four times a day, suck on a zinc lozenge every two waking hours, and mix half a teaspoon of tincture of echinacea, an immune-boosting herb, into juice or tea three times a day.
Reliable studies show that these approaches reduce the severity and duration of colds. If you develop a persistent cough at the tail end of your cold, keep taking vitamin C and try an over-the-counter cough suppressant containing dextromethorphan.
If we hope to preserve antibiotic effectiveness, it's up to us, the public, to convince doctors to prescribe these drugs only when they're necessary. This from-the-bottom-up approach is nothing new. Health consumers have taken the lead in showing doctors the value of fitness, nutrition, and alternative therapies. It's time we get serious about antibiotics.
Whenever we talk about text types, we will refer to:
- Narrative texts – describe real or imaginary happenings which, to a certain extent, are linked to each other;
- Argumentative texts – texts which develop themselves by means of logical resources;
- Descriptive texts – description of reality or fiction which they are based on;
- Expository texts – texts used to give information about something;
- Injunctive texts – express an order given by the author to the reader.
What is text processing?
It is very necessary to consider the following models when we want to discuss text processing:
A bottom-up reading model is a reading model that:
• Emphasizes the written or printed text;
• Points out that reading is driven by a process that results in meaning (or, in other words, reading is driven by text), and proceeds from part to whole.
Here are some characteristics of a bottom-up approach to reading:
Bottom-up models indicate that  the reader needs to:
• Identify letter features;
• Link these features to recognize letters;
• Combine letters to recognize spelling patterns;
•Link spelling patterns to recognize words, and then proceed to sentence, paragraph and text-level processing.
Top-down reading models suggest that processing of a text begins in the mind of the readers with:
• Meaning-driven processes, or an assumption about the meaning of a text;
• From this perspective, readers identify letters and words only to confirm their assumptions about the meaning of the text.
The proponents generally agree that comprehension is the basis for decoding skills, not a singular result, and meaning is brought to print, not derived from print.
Definition
A top-down reading model is a reading model that:
• Emphasizes what the reader brings to the text;
• Points out reading is driven by meaning, and proceeds from whole to part.
An interactive model
An interactive reading model is able  to combine the valid insights of bottom-up and top-down models. It  takes into account the strong points of the bottom-up and top-down models, and tries to avoid the criticisms posed against each, making it one of the most promising approaches to the theory of reading today.
Definition: An interactive reading model is a reading model that proposes the interaction of bottom-up and top-down processes simultaneously throughout the reading process.
The behavior of an efficient reader
We think that an efficient reader should use a think-aloud procedure to identify relations between certain types of reading strategies and successful or unsuccessful second language Reading
The successful reader, for example, keeps the meaning of the passage in mind while reading, read in broad phrases, skips inconsequential or less important words, and has a positive self-concept as a reader.
The unsuccessful reader on the other hand, loses the meaning of the sentences when decoded, read in short phrases, ponders over inconsequential words, seldom skips words as unimportant, and has a negative self-concept.
We can conclude that less effective readers often have misconceptions about the reading process, fail to monitor their comprehension, underutilize effective reading strategies, and employ fewer reading strategies when reading.
Skilled readers, on the other hand, know and use many different strategies in coming to terms with text. They employ both "bottom-up" and "top-down" reading strategies, use a wider range of strategies and apply them more frequently. Thus they employ metacognitive knowledge and identify when and how comprehension and monitoring processes should be applied.
 Leitura e Redação em Língua Inglesa
In the end of lesson, the student should be able to:
1. Organize a paragraph; 
2. know how to use the present simple and adverbs to describe his / her routine.
How to Organize a paragraph?
If you think you do not write well, and that writing compositions or essays is something that only the gifted ones can, let me tell you that you are completely wrong. There are some strategies you can use which will help you to develop your writing skills. Take a look at the paragraph below:
(1) José is a very busy student. (2) He studies History at State University and he also studies English. (3) During the day, he goes to classes. (4) At night, he works in the bookstore. (5) On the weekends, he volunteers at the children´s hospital. (6)  José doesn´t rest!
Sentence (1) is a topic sentence. It covers all the information in the paragraph. Sentences (2), (3), (4), and (5) are supporting sentences. They give facts and descriptions. Supporting sentences are clearly linked to the topic sentence. Sentence (6) is a concluding sentence. This sentence summarizes the paragraph.
Paragraphs should  contain ideas, thoughts and clear purposes. It is important to ask yourself what the main objective of the paragraph is. Is the paragraph expanding previous ideas? Is this stating something again? Is this describing? Is this comparing? Is this contrasting? You have to clarify what your real purpose is.
There are seven basic uses of the simple present tense. We use it for:
In this lesson, if you take a look at the previous functions, you will able to realize that the one  we are  using in the organization of the paragraph about José is the description of habitual actions. 
We can notice that in the paragraph, verbs in the present simple vary in form in the third person singular.
Example: 
> He studies History at State University and he also studies English.
> During the day he goes to classes.
> At night, he works in the bookstore.
> On weekends, he volunteers at the children´s hospitals.
See more examples about the Present Simple 
Present Simple
Adverbs are also of great help to establish routines. In the paragraph about José, adverbial expressions such as during the day, on the weekends or at night come together with verbs in the present simple to highlight the description of habitual actions.
Adverbs of time tell us when something happens: 
...everyday, this week,on Mondays, at 5 o’clock, in the morning, etc.
Ex: On Mondays she goes to school by car.
Adverbs of frequency can also help you describe routines: 
...always, almost always, generally, usually, normally, frequently, often, sometimes, hardly ever, seldom, ever, never, etc.
Ex: The dog seldom sleeps in the house.