Questão de Língua Inglesa

“In today‟s world, the growing global role of English means that students may need to use English not only for communicating with people from English-speaking countries but also for communicating with people from many other nations and cultures. It is therefore impossible for students to adequately prepare themselves for international English use just by studying the culture of one or more English-speaking target countries; knowing a lot about the culture of the United States or United Kingdom does not help much if a student needs to communicate with someone from Jordan, Thailand, Nigeria, or Brazil. So, in addition to studying specific cultures, students should also try to develop basic skills in intercultural communication, that is, general skills and habits that enhance the effectiveness of communication between people who are not very familiar with each other‟s cultures. In particular, they need to learn two basic sets of skills and habits. The first has to do with what is known as the interpretation process, in other words, the process by which people make sense of the words and actions of other people. [...] However, actual communication isn‟t so simple. Both in direct, faceto-face communication and indirect communication (e.g., through letters, books, films), the receiver of a message always actively makes sense of the message, based not only on the words in the message but also on the expression on the sender‟s face, the tone of voice used, the setting in which the message appears, the background information that the receiver has, and so forth. For example, the sentence „Your dress is really beautiful‟ might mean one thing if said by an admiring boyfriend, and something very different if said by a jealous rival, so the receiver of a message must interpret the meaning. Interpretation naturally occurs in all communication, even between people from the same culture, but it tends to be more of a problem in intercultural communication. People from different backgrounds have less in common, so the danger of miscommunication is greater. Students therefore need to learn to interpret messages more slowly and carefully when communicating with people from other cultures. The second set of skills and habits has to do with ethnocentrism and the ability to see things from other perspectives. Human beings tend to be ethnocentric; in other words, they tend to understand and interpret the world from the perspective of their own culture. [...] This tendency to be ethnocentric is natural and even inevitable, and it is a habit that is not easy to break. [...] To avoid the effects of this negative bias, students need to learn the habit of trying to view things from cultural perspectives other than their own. Of course, this is easier said than done, and students can‟t simply will themselves to see things from other cultural perspectives. However, they can develop the habit of pausing to ask how something might appear from another cultural perspective and of using their imaginations to put themselves in other people‟s shoes. These are two of the most important habits of intercultural competence, and you should encourage students to develop them. [...]” (SNOW, Don. From language learner to language teacher: an introduction to teaching English as a foreign language. Maryland – USA:

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