This article aims to analyze whether formal instruction influences Brazilian speakers' perception of the English high back vowels contrast. There have been a few L2 pieces of research that focused on the instruction of specific vowel contrasts. Previous studies indicate that a single L1 category seems to be a source of difficulty to L2 vowel discrimination. However, some of these investigations did not focus on the role of instruction to such discrimination. The participants of the present study were 17 Brazilian speakers of Portuguese as L1, beginning learners of English, divided into experimental and control groups. The study included a perception pretest, a pronunciation instruction class, taught only to the experimental group, and a perception posttest. Results showed that experimental and control groups obtained similar results. Based on that, some factors were pointed to possibly explain this outcome, such as the duration of the pronunciation instruction, the possibility of participants learning with the pretest itself, the duration of the data collection, the participants' possible assimilation of the target contrast into a single category, and the interference of the mid central vowel /?/ used as a distractor in the data collection. On the other hand, a qualitative analysis revealed that all participants in the experimental group found the pronunciation instruction helpful. Such findings seem to agree entirely or in part with other similar studies' results.
In the last twenty years researchers have been concerned with the development of higher education students writing literacy (CRISTOVÃO; VIEIRA, 2016; BAZERMAN; MORITZ, 2016). Approaches based on the new literacy studies (LEA; STREET, 1998) recognize the need to learn specific forms of acting in the academic context to successfully participate in such sphere. Considering the importance of academic writing in higher education, this research aims at investigating how academic writing literacy is approached in sixteen graduate programs at a public Brazilian university. One quarter of the university graduate programs were explored as a manner to find courses dealing with academic writing and the content organization of their course plans. Results showed that only fifty percent of the programs investigated offer courses on academic writing and each graduate program approaches academic writing literacy differently. It seems that writing practices in the academic context investigated are still not considered a major issue.
Successful reading comprehension in L2 involves both lower and higher level processes, being dependant on both strategies and skills. These two components are often treated interchangeably or inconsistently in the literature and such inconsistency may affect the teaching of reading. In light of the above, this paper aims at analysing how strategies and skills are developed in a series of ESL textbooks. In order to do so, a framework was developed to classify the activities as sustaining reading strategies or reading skills. A quantitative analysis was also carried out in order to better understand the frequency each construct occurred in the textbooks. The results showed that strategies and skills are used interchangeably in the series. Furthermore, strategies outnumbered skills, no linearity was found between them, that is, there seemed to be no longitudinal process of working with strategies in a way to enable them to become skills in order to foster independent readers.
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