The River And The Sea: Fieldwork In Human Ecology And Ethnobiology.

This article is a commentary on the experiences that motivated my decision to become a human ecologist and ethnobiologist. These experiences include the pleasure of studying and of having the sense of being within nature, as well as the curiosity towards understanding the world and minds of local people. In particular, such understanding could be driven by addressing the challenging questions that originate in the interactions of such individuals with their natural surroundings. I have been particularly interested in the sea and the riverine forests that are inhabited by coastal or riverine small-scale fishers. Sharing the distinctive world of these fishers enjoyably incited my curiosity and challenged me to understand why fishers and their families 'do as they do' for their livelihoods including their beliefs. This challenge involved understanding the rationality (or the arguments or views) that underlies the decisions these individuals make in their interaction with nature. This curiosity was fundamental to my career choice, as were a number of reading interests. These reading interests included political economy and philosophy; evolution and sociobiology; evolutionary, human, and cultural ecology; cultural transmission; fisheries; local knowledge; ecological economics; and, naturally, ethnobiology.

A COMPETÊNCIA LEXICAL DE ALUNOS UNIVERSITÁRIOS APRENDENDO A LER EM INGLÊS COMO LÍNGUA ESTRANGEIRA

This article presents a characterization of the lexical competence (vocabulary knowledge and use) of students learning to read in EFL in a public university in São Paulo state. Although vocabulary has been consistently cited as one of the EFL reader´s main source of difficulty, there is no data in the literature which shows the extent of the difficulties. The data for this study is part of a previous research, which investigates, from the perspective of an interactive model of reading, the relationship between lexical competence and EFL reading comprehension. Quantitative as well as qualitative data was considered. For this study, the quantitative data is the product of vocabulary tests of 49 subjects while the qualitative data comprises pause protocols of three subjects, with levels of reading ability ranging from good to poor, selected upon their performance in the quantitative study. A rich concept of vocabulary knowledge was adapted and used for the development of vocabulary tests and analysis of protocols. The results on both studies show, with a few exceptions, the lexical competence of the group to be vague and imprecise in two dimensions: quantitative (number of known words or vocabulary size) and qualitative (depth or width of this knowledge). Implications for the teaching of reading in a foreign context are discussed.

Resonancias discursivas y cortesía en prácticas de lecto-escritura

In this paper we present a study of reading comprehension based on a contrastive argumentative-discursive approach. We examine the relationship between linguistic materiality and discursive processes, observing the connection between reading in a foreign language, writing production and textual memories in the mother tongue. In addition to an interest in practical language teaching and learning processes (in this case of Spanish and Portuguese), we investigate the question of politeness and the theoretical relationship between subjectivity, language, and textuality. The latter, being understood as the result of discourse regularities, is unique for each and every production, yet is also conditioned by plural discursive memories resulting from contradictory social relationships in a specific historical context (Foucault, 1986; Pêcheux, 1990). In the experiment presented here, we follow some of the procedures of the methodology applied in the European Galatea Project developed for the study of reading strategies in the inter-comprehension between Romance languages (Dabène, 1996). We use the procedure of simulation and the subjective projection of participants as well as the notion of discursive resonance in the analysis. The results, having to do with directness and indirectness in speech and the question of politeness in two typologically close languages, lead to the conclusion that the concept of politeness goes beyond a pragmatic strategy used to avoid conflicts to be approached as a marker of cultural identity constitution. The relevance of discursive awareness and its theoretical and practical consequences are then emphasized.

A motricidade como base para a aprendizagem : o estudo de um caso pela reorganização neurofuncional

Universidade Estadual de Campinas . Faculdade de Educação Física