Dialogical-reflective meetings on reading practices and literacy (s) in a public school: report of research

This article is part of a research that investigated the practices of reading and literacy of students from a public school in Rondonópolis, Mato Grosso, and promote reflective meetings with teachers to know their views and practices regarding the teaching and learning of reading, searching contribute to the critical reflection on these practices. Thus, the proposed work was guided by reading theories and critical literacy, combined with the Bakhtin’s language theory and Vygotsky’s learning theory and human development. The data revealed that students participate in a variety of literacy practices  out of school contexts, however the context of school literacy uncovers centralization of activities in traditional tasks in school, especially copy of texts and activities of the blackboard. In the first meetings with the teachers, their perceptions about these practices were marked by uncertainty, not understanding what to do with some school problems. As the meetings were going on, the discourses could reveal critical reflection moments.

DICT IN THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: CHALLENGES IN ITS APPROPRIATION BY BEGINNER-LEVEL TEACHERS IN TRAINING

Our work is primarily concerned with the challenges involved in the appropriation of DICT by beginner-level participants of the Institutional Program for Scholarships for Initiation in Teaching in Brazil. Although the current generation of beginner-level undergraduate students may be seen as “digital natives”, their use of digital technologies, however frequent, takes place only outside the school environment. The technology skills which they acquire in their daily lives are not transposed to the classroom when they find themselves in the position of teachers. It is still challenging to understand their difficulties in appropriating technology to educational purposes, since educational agents seem all to agree on how important digital technologies are in school, while failing to put it to actual classroom use, and while simply providing access to digital technology is far from sufficient. These skills should be understood and applied in schools by meaningful teaching practice, which should go beyond the mere instrumental use of technology. Therefore, we here focus on the process of elaboration of digital technologies assisted teaching practices in the foreign language classroom. Our corpus is composed of classroom activities and classroom interventions, elaborated and staged by beginner-level teachers in training, who are the project participants, during the course of a school year. These activities comprise the development of an intervention project, which consists of an activity plan, its critical discussion, its application and further reflection.

Experiences with an Object-Oriented, Multi-Stage Language

Metaphor is a multi-stage programming language extension to an imperative, object-oriented language in the style of C# or Java. This paper discusses some issues we faced when applying multi-stage language design concepts to an imperative base language and run-time environment. The issues range from dealing with pervasive references and open code to garbage collection and implementing cross-stage persistence.