Esta dissertação tem como objetivo discutir as características das avaliações de conhecimentos em língua francesa presentes nos processos seletivos para a mobilidade de estudantes de graduação da Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Com base nas pesquisas e estudos na área de avaliação (PERRENOUD, 1999; GATTI, 2003; CHUEIRI, 2008; LUCKESI, 2011) e certificação em língua francesa (PORCHER, 1995, 2004; CUQ; GRUCA, 2003; TAGLIANTE, 2005; NOEL-JOTHY; SAMSONIS, 2006; CHARDENET, 1999, 2011 HUVER; SPRINGER, 2011; RIBA; MEGRE, 2014), realizamos uma pesquisa documental referente à identificação dos requisitos exigidos em língua francesa quando da publicação dos editais que definem os critérios das seleções para a candidatura a mobilidade internacional para a França. Além disso, investigamos do ponto de vista dos responsáveis diretos e indiretos pelos processos seletivos, qual o lugar da certificação em francês língua estrangeira na política de internacionalização da USP. O corpus desta pesquisa consiste em editais publicados pela USP no período de 2008 a 2012, nos editais do programa Ciência sem Fronteiras entre 2011 e 2014 e, por último, em entrevistas com representantes institucionais implicados na seleção direta de candidatos e também nas políticas oficiais do governo francês no que se refere à certificação na língua. Para as análises, além do referencial teórico mencionado sobre avaliação, consideramos os trabalhos na área do francês para objetivos universitários (MANGIANTE; PARPETTE, 2004). Os resultados de nossas análises indicam que há uma diversidade de entendimentos sobre o nível exigido em relação à língua francesa para a seleção do estudante que integrará o sistema universitário francês, assim como o valor social atribuído ao documento que atesta os conhecimentos na língua, com o objetivo de validar a candidatura. Além disso, constatamos a ausência de uma política linguística adequada ao contexto de internacionalização da USP, que se expressa na falta de clareza de dispositivos de formação e de avaliação para a preparação dos estudantes que vão realizar estudos em meio universitário na França. Esta pesquisa nos ajudou a compreender a complexidade das relações entre formação, avaliação e certificação em contexto específico de mobilidade internacional. Nosso trabalho contribui com uma visão crítica que pode vir a colaborar no desenvolvimento de ações concretas para a reformulação de critérios de avaliação de competências linguísticas em francês língua estrangeira que sejam mais condizentes com as necessidades especificas às quais um estudante de graduação da USP será confrontado. / This dissertation aims to discuss the characteristics of knowledge evaluation in the French language that is current on selective processes for the mobility of undergraduate students in the University of São Paulo (USP). Based on the researches and studies in the area of evaluation (PERRENOUD, 1999; GATTI, 2003; CHUEIRI, 2008; LUCKESI, 2011) and French language certification (PORCHER, 1995, 2004; CUQ; GRUCA, 2003; TAGLIANTE, 2005; NOEL-JOTHY; SAMSONIS, 2006; CHARDENET, 1999, 2011 HUVER; SPRINGER, 2011; RIBA; MEGRE, 2014), weve performed a documentary research for the identification of the requirements of the French language when the publication of the notices the define the criteria of selection for applying for international mobility to France. Furthermore weve delved the point of view of those directly and indirectly responsible for selective processes which is the place of French certification, an international language, on the internationalization policy of USP. The corpus of this research consists on notices published by USP between 2008 and 2012, in the notices of the Science Without Frontiers between 2011 and 2014 and, at last, on interviews with institutional representatives involved on the direct selection of the candidates and also on the official policy of the French government with regard in certification in language. For the analysis, beyond the theoretical framework mentioned about evaluation, weve regarded the work in the area of French for college goals (MANGIANTE; PARPETTE, 2004). Our analysis results indicate that there is diversity of understanding about the level required in relation to French language for the selection of the students that will integrate the French college system, as well as the social value assigned to the document attesting knowledge in the language, in order to validate the candidacy. Moreover, weve noticed the lack of a linguistic policy that adequate to the context of internationalization of USP, which is expressed in the lack of clarity of training and evaluation devices for the preparation of students who will conduct studies in the French Academy. This research helped us to understand the complexity of the relations between training, assessment and certification in the specific context of international mobility. Our work contributes with a more critical vision that might cooperate with the development of concrete actions to reformulate the evaluation criteria of linguistic proficiency in French, foreign language, that are more consistent with the specific needs to which an USP undergraduate shall be confronted.

Submitted by Renata Lopes (renatasil82@gmail.com) on 2017-05-18T18:11:31Z No. of bitstreams: 1 jonifersonvieiradasilva.pdf: 3094902 bytes, checksum: 444282a1a947f1fba3c0dfcfe1a246ad (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Adriana Oliveira (adriana.oliveira@ufjf.edu.br) on 2017-05-19T14:34:31Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 jonifersonvieiradasilva.pdf: 3094902 bytes, checksum: 444282a1a947f1fba3c0dfcfe1a246ad (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-19T14:34:31Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 jonifersonvieiradasilva.pdf: 3094902 bytes, checksum: 444282a1a947f1fba3c0dfcfe1a246ad (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-12-16 / A presente dissertação, desenvolvida no âmbito do Programa de Pós-graduação Profissional em Gestão e Avaliação da Educação Pública do Centro de Políticas Públicas e Avaliação da Educação da Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, aborda o caso da gestão de uma Escola do Estado do Amazonas, com o objetivo de compreender as causas que levaram a escola a obter bons resultados na proficiência em Língua Portuguesa nos resultados do SADEAM de 2012 a 2014. A referida escola apresenta uma sequência de resultados acima da média da rede na qual está inserida. A partir do crescimento ocorrido surgiu a necessidade de compreender o que aconteceu para que a escola conseguisse tais resultados. Para tal, buscamos teóricos que abordam a Gestão Escolar como Marcelo Burgos (2013), Rodrigo Rosistolato (2014) e Guilherme Viana (2014), sobre o Clima Escolar a partir de Juliana Candian e Wagner Rezende (2013), além de Ruben Klein (2009) e Nilma Santos Fontanive (2009) que abordam a apropriação dos resultados das avaliações externas. Em seguida, realizamos entrevistas com a gestora e com 03 (três) professores de Língua Portuguesa que atuaram no período estudado. Em minha observação de campo, percebi que não houve boas práticas no período estudado (2012 a 2014) e através das entrevistas com os professores de Língua Portuguesa e com a gestora, deparei-me com um cenário não condizente com os resultados obtidos pela escola, pois o clima escolar não é propício, assim como os projetos relacionados à Língua Portuguesa, não são plenamente realizados e, além disso, a concepção de língua e linguagem dos professores diverge da concepção proposta pelas avaliações externas. Diante desse cenário, buscamos identificar o que aconteceu com a escola neste período para que ela, mesmo com todos os impasses verificados, alcançasse osresultados obtidos, eposteriormente, propusemos estruturar essas ações, registrando-as para que elas sejam documentadas, sistematizadas e possam se tornar parte do planejamento das ações pedagógicas da escola em busca da manutenção dos resultados e melhoria da proficiência em Língua Portuguesa. / This thesis, developed in the Professional Postgraduate Program in Management and Evaluation of the Public Education Assessment context from the Public Policy and Education Evaluation Center of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, approaches an Amazon State School management case, aiming to understand the causes that led the school to obtain good results in Portuguese Language proficiency concerning SADEAM results 2012 to 2014. This school presents a sequence of above average results from the Public Education Agency in which it operates. From the remarkable progress occurred on, there was a need to understand the actions of school management, pedagogical practices, besides studying language concepts, school management, school climate and their relations with external evaluations and appropriation of the results. Therefore, we searched for theorists that approach on School management as Marcelo Burgos (2013), Rodrigo Rosistolato (2014) and Guilherme Viana (2014), about the School Climate from Juliana Candian and Wagner Rezende (2013), in addition to that, Klein (2009) and Fontanive (2009) that address the appropriation of the results of external evaluations. Then we conducted interviews with the school principal, with the pedagogical advisors and with three (3) Portuguese Language teachers who worked during the studied period. In my field observation, I noticed that there were no good practices during the studied period (2012 to 2014) and through the interviews with the Portuguese Language teachers and theprincipal, I came across a scenario that was not in accordance with the results obtained by the school, once that the school climate is not conducive, as the projects related to discipline are not fully realized and, in addition, the conception of language among the teachers diverges from the conception of external evaluations. Considering this scenario, we tried to identify what happened to the school in this period so that it reached the results obtained, and subsequently to structure these actions, registering them so that they are documented, systematized and can become part of the planning of the pedagogical actions of the School in order to maintain results and improve Portuguese Language proficiency.

English spelling is without a doubt a complicated matter, and learners around the world have trouble getting the letters right. My aim in this paper is to investigate what words are particularly difficult to spell for Swedish students in the ninth grade, what they think about spelling and English as a subject in general, and how important they consider correct spelling to be. In order to find this out, I distributed a questionnaire in two classes at secondary school. According to my study, a large number of the students find it important to spell correctly, and they also believe that their teacher would agree. A high percentage of the participants are positive towards studying English. Their most common way of getting in contact with English on a regular basis is via TV and movies. 97% of the students wrote that TV was their biggest source of contact with English. The results show no differences in spelling skills between the sexes and neither did the origin of the parents have any effect. The respondents find both Swedish and English spelling easy, but a number of frequently misspelled words have been identified.

This study investigates how a group of English teachers in Sweden teach and assess pronunciation to ninth graders as a part of oral skills. The method applied in the study is qualitative semi-structured interviews with six teachers from different cities and schools in Sweden. The results show that teaching English pronunciation is included in different speaking and listening contexts and is not taught separately. However, the teachers do formative pronunciation assessments in almost every lesson, but summative assessment is rarely given in each semester. This case study views how the participants teach English pronunciation to ninth graders and concludes that communicative language teaching methods have an overwhelming role in the teaching of pronunciation, as pronunciation is included in other language skills and happens mostly without direct focus, which is typical in a communicative approach.

Playing video games is an activity that takes up an increasing amount of children’s and adolescent’s spare time. While some previous studies have highlighted the negative aspects of video games, little research has been carried out on the linguistic learning opportunities that video games present. This study primarily investigates if Swedish second language learners of English can increase their vocabulary proficiency in English with the use of video games. In order to answer the research questions, two quantitative data elicitation methods are used: a questionnaire which aims to gather attitudinal and behavioral data, and a Vocabulary Levels Test which elicits data about the participants’ receptive vocabulary proficiency. The participants consist of 25 students at an upper secondary school in Stockholm. The results show that participants who played video games scored higher on the Vocabulary Levels Test, indicating a higher receptive vocabulary proficiency. Furthermore, the results show that participants who played moderate to frequent amounts of time performed better in the Vocabulary Levels Test than infrequent players. The results also show that video games emphasizing co-operation and communication are preferable to use for vocabulary acquisition. Additionally, the study discusses if video games could be integrated into the Swedish upper secondary school system.

Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the United States and have higher dropout rates compared to other groups. Moreover, problem behaviors are common in preschool classrooms, and the incidence of these problems is higher for children from low-income families. The purpose of this study was to understand Latino children's problem behaviors in the context of peer play interactions and identify those variables that influence such behavior. 265 five and six-year-old Spanish-speaking children (53.6% female) attending Head Start or kindergarten participated in the study. Additionally, 198 mothers and 78 pre-kindergarten and kindergarten lead teachers participated in the study. Child level data were gathered through the Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale, Teacher (PIPPS-T), the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Fourth Edition (PPVT-4), and the Test de Vocabulario en Imágenes Peabody (TVIP). Maternal data were obtained from the Demographic Parent Interview, the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI), and the Breve Inventario de Síntomas (BIS). Both correlations and the multilevel models showed play disconnection related negatively to the child’s English proficiency and positively to maternal depression. Results suggest that children with lower English proficiency tend to be more disconnected from their peers as compared to children with higher English proficiency. Similarly, mothers with higher levels of depression symptoms had children with higher levels of play disconnection (internalizing behaviors). The current findings are consistent with previous studies and relevant to both researchers and practitioners.

This comparative study aims to discover and demonstrate the potential relationship between foreign language speaking anxiety and course level among 183 students from three consecutive courses of English as a foreign language, i.e. English 5, 6, and 7, at three upper secondary schools in the South of Sweden. Accordingly, a survey was distributed in order to account for demographic information about the students, such as course level, age, and sex, to determine the students’ oral proficiency levels, and to assess the students’ anxiety levels in relation to 33 anxiety-provoking classroom situations. The results showed that Swedish upper secondary students are not particularly anxious regardless of course level, save that the students in English 5 would feel less comfortable around native speakers of English, although not to an extent which would indicate anxiety, and that the students in English 7 would, in contrast to the other course levels, experience high levels of anxiety when volunteering answers and being called on in class. However, the most notable differences were found between the genders and between the students with high and low oral proficiency levels. Female students generally showed higher levels of anxiety than male students did. Yet, in most cases, the difference did not suggest that one of the genders was anxious while the other one was not. In terms of oral proficiency levels, the students with low oral proficiency showed higher levels of anxiety, often to the extent that they would be anxious while the ones with high proficiency would not. Thus, the levels of anxiety seem to depend on gender and oral proficiency more than the students’ course levels.

Magister Artium (Psychology) - MA(Psych) / South Africa's Language-in-Education Policy is one of additive multilingualism, but in reality this policy is not adhered to, in that most black children are being educated through the medium of English from Grade 4. This type of instruction affects the development of academic language proficiency in their primary language, as these children are not engaging in cognitively demanding tasks in their primary or first language. The Woodcock Muñoz Language Survey (WMLS) is a test to assess academic language proficiency in Additive Bilingual Education, and is extensively used in the United States of America (USA) for this purpose. It is important to note that the proposed study is a sub-study of a larger study, in which the original WMLS (American-English version) was adapted into English and Xhosa, to be used in South Africa to assess additive bilingual programmes. For this sub-study, the researcher was interested in examining the overall equivalence of the adapted English version of the WMLS. Owing to insufficient tests evaluating academic language proficiency in the South African context, the significance, as well as the overall aim, of the study is to ensure that the issues of group difference and item bias have been assessed to ensure that the adapted English version of the WMLS is suitable to be used across English first-language and Xhosa first-language speakers. Because this is a sub-study, the researcher (of the sub-study) has conducted an exploratory quantitative study with the use of Secondary Data. The researcher has used the framework of equivalence as a theoretical framework in order to examine the research question. Given the use of existing data, the procedures of the collection of the data by the researcher of the larger study have been outlined in the Methodology section of the present study. The sample consisted of 198 English and 197 Xhosa first-language speakers. / South Africa

Today we live in a global world, where English has become easily accessible through the internet. Pupils encounter English in an out-of-school context and playing digital games is a common activity. This literature study aims to examine if there are effects on pupils ’ vocabulary and oral proficiency due to playing digital games. Through compiling prior research, findings suggest that motivation, interaction and repetition over time are positive factors for enhancing vocabulary and oral proficiency. Research also illuminates that there are gender differences among young L2 learners. Frequent gamers are mostly boys and there is also a difference in game preferences. Normally girls tend to outshine boys within most subjects, however, in English the difference is less distinct and boys are somewhat stronger in English proficiency. Research about young L2 learners is scarce and there is definitely a need for further research about the effect of digital gaming on vocabulary and oral proficiency as well as regarding gender differences.

Research on task-based language teaching (TBLT) offers a large body of evidence suggesting that cognitive task complexity influences learners’ language production and development. Studies that investigate task complexity, however, provide contradictory results on the way different linguistic aspects of performance are affected by the manipulation of cognitive task complexity. The empirical study presented in this degree project aimed to investigate the effect of task complexity on the accuracy, complexity and fluency in learners ́ written performance. An additional goal of the study was to examine whether proficiency level would mediate the effects of cognitive task complexity. In order to explain the influence of cognitive task complexity on linguistic performance two theoretical models are used and discussed, namely Skehan’s Limited Attention Capacity Hypothesis (Skehan 2015) and Robinson’s Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson 2001, 2011, 2015). In order to answer the research questions guiding the study, 71 Swedish high school students of Spanish performed a simple or a more cognitively complex version of a written task. Results showed that increasing task complexity had a positive effect on the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of the participants ́ written performance, and that these effects were greater among the high proficiency participants’ productions. These results offer valuable implications for syllabus and task designers, language teachers and examiners, as well as second and foreign language researchers.