Questões de Concurso

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.

Text I

Trust and audit

Trust is what auditors sell. They review the accuracy, adequacy or propriety of other people’s work. Financial statement audits are prepared for the owners of a company and presented publically to provide assurance to the market and the wider public. Public service audits are presented to governing bodies and, in some cases, directly to parliament.

It is the independent scepticism of the auditor that allows shareholders and the public to be confident that they are being given a true and fair account of the organisation in question. The auditor’s signature pledges his or her reputational capital so that the audited body’s public statements can be trusted. […]

Given the fundamental importance of trust, should auditors not then feel immensely valuable in the context of declining trust? Not so. Among our interviewees, a consensus emerged that the audit profession is under-producing trust at a critical time. One aspect of the problem is the quietness of audit: it is a profession that literally goes about its work behind the scenes. The face and processes of the auditor are rarely seen in the organisations they scrutinise, and relatively rarely in the outside world. Yet, if we listen to the mounting evidence of the importance of social capital, we know that frequent and reliable contacts between groups are important to strengthening and expanding trust.

So what can be done? Our research suggests that more frequent dialogue with audit committees and a more ambitious outward facing role for the sector’s leadership would be welcome. But we think more is needed. Audit for the 21st century should be understood and designed as primarily a confidence building process within the audited organisation and across its stakeholders. If the audit is a way of ensuring the client’s accountability, much more needs to be done to make the audit itself exemplary in its openness and inclusiveness.

Instead of an audit report being a trust-producing product, the audit process could become a trust-producing practice in which the auditor uses his or her position as a trusted intermediary to broker rigorous learning across all dimensions of the organisation and its stakeholders. The views of investors, staff, suppliers and customers could routinely be considered, as could questions from the general public; online technologies offer numerous opportunities to inform, involve and invite.

From being a service that consists almost exclusively of external investigation by a warranted professional, auditing needs to become more co-productive, with the auditor’s role expanding to include that of an expert convenor who is willing to share the tools of enquiry. Audit could move from ‘black box’ to ‘glass box’.

But the profession will still struggle to secure trust unless it can stake a stronger claim to supporting improvement. Does it increase the economic, social or environmental value of the organisations it reviews? It is one thing to believe in the accuracy of a financial statement audit, but it is another thing to believe in its utility.

Adapted from: https://auditfutures.net/pdf/AuditFutures-RSA-EnlighteningProfessions.pdf

Read the text to answer.

Dear Madam:

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. Hence, I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Your very sincerely and respectfully,

Abraham Lincoln.

(Lederer, Richard. The miracle of language. Pocket Books, New York, NY.)

Read the text to answer.

Dear Madam:

I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. Hence, I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.

Your very sincerely and respectfully,

Abraham Lincoln.

(Lederer, Richard. The miracle of language. Pocket Books, New York, NY.)