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Blog criado por Bruno Coriolano de Almeida Costa, professor de Língua Inglesa desde 2002. Esse espaço surgiu em 2007 com o objetivo de unir alguns estudiosos e professores desse idioma. Abordamos, de forma rápida e simples, vários aspectos da Língua Inglesa e suas culturas. Agradeço a sua visita.

"Se tivesse perguntado ao cliente o que ele queria, ele teria dito: 'Um cavalo mais rápido!"

terça-feira, 22 de setembro de 2015

Schlep Blindness



There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task.


No one likes schleps, but hackers especially dislike them. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people's broken code. Maybe that's possible, but I haven't seen it.


One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is teach hackers about the inevitability of schleps. No, you can't start a startup by just writing code. I remember going through this realization myself. There was a point in 1995 when I was still trying to convince myself I could start a company by just writing code. But I soon learned from experience that schleps are not merely inevitable, but pretty much what business consists of. A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if it's on the path to something great.


The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.


The phenomenon isn't limited to startups. Most people don't consciously decide not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example. Their unconscious mind decides for them, shrinking from the work involved.


The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is 
Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.


Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved. You'd have to make deals with banks. How do you do that? Plus you're moving money, so you're going to have to deal with fraud, and people trying to break into your servers. Plus there are probably all sorts of regulations to comply with. It's a lot more intimidating to start a startup like this than a recipe site.


That scariness makes ambitious ideas doubly valuable. In addition to their intrinsic value, they're like undervalued stocks in the sense that there's less demand for them among founders. If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. (This is also true of starting a startup generally.)


How do you overcome schlep blindness? Frankly, the most valuable antidote to schlep blindness is probably ignorance. Most successful founders would probably say that if they'd known when they were starting their company about the obstacles they'd have to overcome, they might never have started it. Maybe that's one reason the most successful startups of all so often have young founders.


In practice the founders grow with the problems. But no one seems able to foresee that, not even older, more experienced founders. So the reason younger founders have an advantage is that they make two mistakes that cancel each other out. They don't know how much they can grow, but they also don't know how much they'll need to. Older founders only make the first mistake.


Ignorance can't solve everything though. Some ideas so obviously entail alarming schleps that anyone can see them. How do you see ideas like that? The trick I recommend is to take yourself out of the picture. Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" If someone who had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the first things they wished for.


It's too late now to be Stripe, but there's plenty still broken in the world, if you know how to see it.

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sábado, 19 de setembro de 2015

Are you human?


Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at?



Have you ever wondered: Am I a human being? Ze Frank suggests a series of simple questions that will determine this. Please relax and follow the prompts. Let's begin …



PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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sexta-feira, 18 de setembro de 2015

22 Delightful Ways to Say Thank You!

I am really busy these days. I am sharing a thing or two with you guys, but I haven’t written any of them.
I saw this post the other day and I found it very interesting so I am sharing it. I hope you like it!
Does the idea of being fun and delightful when expressing gratitude freak you out a little? No need to get stressed. Just imagine you’re writing a note to your BFF. Be funny, grateful, refreshing. If being funny causes stress, there’s always sweet, warm, and sincere. Still overwhelmed? Don’t fret. Here’s a few fun ways to say thanks to get you started.

22 Ways to Say Thank You!

If it wasn’t weird, I would have sent you a picture of myself. Because I look totally grateful.
Great googly gratitude. Thanks so much for your gift!
Thank you (not sent from my iPhone).
Next time, I’m sending you a cape. Thanks for your superhero-sized gift.
Two words: Endless gratitude. Thank you.
You score phenomenally high in the kind-o-meter. Seriously, I checked.
Your version of shine is a search light. Thanks for spreading so much good.
Thanks so much for putting up with our direct mail. But even more, thank you for responding.
You’re kind of a big deal. Don’t believe me? Ask our clients.
You = awesome. Me = grateful.
Move over Gates and Buffett, there’s a new philanthropist in town.
Our clients have started an unofficial fan club. You should start practicing your autograph.
Do you practice being so wonderful? Thank you kindly for your gift.
Amazed. Inspired. Grateful. That’s how your generosity makes me feel.
When it comes to making an impact, you rule. (Note: Draw a ruler. You can do it.)
You’re a spark plug for good. Thanks for igniting something amazing.
A peach b) Bee’s knees c) Cat’s pajamas. You’re d) All of the above. Thanks for your bigheartedness.
You’re what making a difference looks like. (Note: Draw a mirror. Up the fun factor.)
You’re a lifesaver. Literally. And thanks for believing in someone you don’t even know.
Is there no limit to your awesomeness? Thank you!
You can’t see me but I’m totally doing a happy dance.
I’m beginning to think you’re serious about this whole humanitarian thing.
Remember, your job is to delight your donors. That boring, vanilla, and yawner of a thank you note? It doesn’t reinforce the happiness they felt when they made their gift. Rather, it sends a message that you can’t be bothered to send a unique, personal, and engaging message—that you care more about the gift than the person behind it.

Is that really how you want your donors to feel? I didn’t think so, you awesome do-gooder you.

PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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Blow your own trumpet.


Don’t panic… and always know where your towel is!


I am at home. I am sick. I’ve got some terrible flu. It was due to the crazy weather in Florianopolis. Sometimes, it rains and then it gets very cold and suddenly it gets warmer then again, it gets hot and then cold and so on and so forth. Ok… ok…  Don’t panic…
It might be due to El ninõ, La niña, Global Warming or whatever. The fact is that the climate on earth, or at least the weather is messy. I mean crazy! Ok… ok…  Don’t panic…


Some people love holidays, I usually don’t. I mean, I love travelling, for instance, but a bank holiday for me is really painful. I have nothing to do, so I usually grab a book and read it for hours. That’s pretty much the way I have been spending my bank holidays in Santa Catarina. Ok… ok…  Don’t panic…
 As I had nothing more interesting to do right now, I decided to search for crazy or unusual stuff on the internet. I ended up finding this Towel Day. But what is this Towel Day after all?  The Towel Day is
celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams by his fans. On this day, fans carry a towel with them, as described in Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author. The commemoration was first held two weeks after Adams' death on 11 May 2001” (Wikipedia).
Have you guys heard of this “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”? Well, probably in Portuguese (O Guia do Mochileiro das Galáxias), right? Many people mention it when talking about holidays (vacations in American English).

Just like you know that every 25th May fans of Douglas Adams celebrate Towel Day by carrying a towel. 

I don’t have a lot to say today, so I just selected some pictures about the Towel Day.
Ok… ok…  Don’t panic… Ok… ok…  Don’t panic… Ok… ok…  Don’t panic… Ok… ok…  Don’t panic… Ok… ok…  Don’t panic…



Where does this idea come from anyway?
The original quotation that explained the importance of towels can be found in Chapter 3 (see below)
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a brush, but very very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. —Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy


 Don’t panic… and always know where your towel is!


  Don’t panic… and always know where your towel is!
PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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terça-feira, 15 de setembro de 2015

'Dislike' button coming to Facebook


They have finally read my mind. Facebook will add the dislike button.

Facebook is to add a "dislike" button to its social network, founder Mark Zuckerberg has said.

In a Q+A session held at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, the 31-year-old said the button would be a way for people to express empathy.
He said Facebook was "very close" to having it ready for user testing.

A "dislike" button has been constantly requested by some users since the introduction of the now-iconic "like" button in 2009.

"People have asked about the 'dislike' button for many years," Mr Zuckerberg told the audience on Tuesday.

"Probably hundreds of people have asked about this, and today is a special day because today is the day that I actually get to say we are working on it, and are very close to shipping a test of it."

However he went on to say he did not want it to be a mechanism with which people could "down vote" others' posts.

Instead, it will be for times when clicking "like" on "sad" posts felt insensitive.
Prof Andrea Forte, an expert in social and participatory media at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said users will not suddenly turn on each other's posts.

In an email, she wrote: "They may use a dislike button to express some negative emotions (like frustration with ads popping up in their feeds) but I doubt it will cause them to start wantonly disliking pictures of their friends' babies, dogs, cats and cooking experiments.


"I suspect it will mainly be used to express mild disapproval, or to express solidarity when someone posts about a negative event like a death or a loss."




PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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[JOKE] Stolen engine


Stolen engine [listening]

A blonde woman is driving a Porsche. She sees another blonde woman with a Porsche that has broken down on the side of the road. She stops to ask what's wrong.
The owner of the broken Porsche said, 'I just had a look under the hood, well, while I was driving somebody had stolen the engine.'
The other said, 'Oh, don't worry, I have a spare one in the back of my Porsche.

Vocabulary Help

  • steal (steal, stole, stolen) - roubar
  • blonde - loura
  • drive (drive, drove, driven) - dirigir
  • see (see, saw, seen) - ver
  • break down - quebrar
  • side - lado
  • wrong - errado
  • owner - proprietária
  • have a look - dar uma olhada
  • hood - capo
  • engine - motor
  • worry - preocupar
  • spare - reserva
Enviado por: Rubens Queiroz de Almeida


PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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FOOD FOR THOUGHT!





“I’d always been an overachiever. I graduated at the top of my class in high school. I got straight A’s. I got accepted into 14 of the 17 colleges that I applied to. But when I got to Harvard, everyone around me was just as smart or smarter. My grades fell, and suddenly I was no longer exceeding expectations. All that external validation that I’d become accustomed to suddenly stopped. And I crumbled. I felt lost. I learned that I hadn’t formed an identity beyond making people proud of me. So I left school for a while and took a hard look at my life. I learned to cope with failure. I learned that it was OK to rely on other people and ask for help. Eventually I went back and graduated. I’m still not exactly sure who I am. But I’m working on it.”




PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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domingo, 13 de setembro de 2015

Fluency versus complexity

Key characteristics

Learners’ language may be both relatively fluent and accurate but shows little evidence of appropriate grammatical development.

Complexity of learners’ language does not match their proficiency level.
A common distinction in language teaching is between fluency and accuracy. Fluency describes a level of proficiency in communication, which includes:

The ability to produce language with ease.

The ability to speak with a good, but not necessarily perfect command of intonation, vocabulary, syntax, and grammar.

The ability to express ideas coherently.

The ability to produce continuous speech without causing comprehension difficulties, with minimum breakdowns and disruptions.


However, there is an additional important dimension in language development, and that is the degree of complexity of the language learners have acquired. The development of fluency may mean greater ease of use of known language forms, but it does not necessarily imply development in complexity. Skehan (1998) argues that fluency, accuracy, and complexity ideally develop in harmony, but this is not always the case. In order for learners’ language to complexify, new linguistic forms have to be acquired and added to their productive linguistic repertoire. This was referred to in my last post as restructuring.

VanPatten (1993) suggests: “[that restructuring involves processes] . . . that mediate the incorporation of intake into the developing system. Since the internalization of intake is not a mere accumulation of discrete bits of data, data have to “fit in” in some way and sometimes the accommodation of a particular set of data causes changes in the rest of the system. In some cases, the data may not fit in at all and are not accommodated by the system. They simply do not make it into the long-term store” (p. 436).

For example, if learners have mastered the present and past tenses and are comfortable using them, once they encounter the perfect tense, their linguistic system has to be revised to accommodate new distinctions communicated by the perfect. There may be a time when learners overuse the known forms (present and past) until their systems have restructured to incorporate the perfect. But as VanPatten remarks, sometimes this restructuring may not occur, and the newly encountered form will not pass into learners’ linguistic systems. For learners’ linguistic systems to take on new and more complex linguistic items, the restructuring, or reorganization, of mental representations is required, as well as opportunities to practice these new forms (the output hypothesis).
Ways of increasing the opportunities for restructuring to take place can occur at three different stages during an activity: prior to the activity, during the activity, or after completing an activity. In each case, a language focus is provided in an attempt to support the learning of more complex language items.

Addressing language prior to the activity
Here, there are two goals: to provide language support that can be used in completing a task, and to clarify the nature of the task so that students can give less attention to procedural aspects of the task and hence monitor their language use during their performance. Skehan notes (1996), “Pre-task activities can aim to teach or mobilize, or make salient language which will be relevant to task performance” (p. 53). This can be accomplished in several ways:

By pre-teaching certain linguistic forms that can be used while completing a task.
For example, prior to completing a role play task that practices calling an apartment owner to discuss renting an apartment, students can first read advertisements for apartments and learn key vocabulary they will use in the role play. They could also listen to and practice a dialog in which a prospective tenant calls an apartment owner for information. The dialog serves both to display different questioning strategies and to model the kind of task the students will perform.

By reducing the cognitive complexity of the activity.
If an activity is difficult to carry out, learners’ attention may be diverted to the structure and management of the task, leaving little opportunity for them to monitor the language they use on the task. One way of reducing the cognitive complexity of the activity is to provide students with a chance for rehearsal. This is intended to ease the processing load that learners will encounter when actually doing a task. This could be achieved by watching a video or listening to a recording of learners doing a task similar to the target task, or it could be a simplified version of the activity the learners will carry out. Dialog work prior to carrying out the role play serves a similar function.

By giving time to plan the activity.
Time allocated to planning prior to carrying out an activity can likewise provide learners with schemata, vocabulary, and language forms that they can call upon while completing the task. Planning activities include vocabulary-generating activities such as brainstorming, or strategy activities in which learners consider a range of approaches to solving a problem, discuss their pros and cons, and then select which they will apply to the task.
Jack will be back tomorrow with some ideas on how you can address language while the activity is taking place.
Excerpted and edited from Moving Beyond the Plateau: From Intermediate to Advanced Levels in Language Learning by Jack C. Richards
PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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Moving beyond the plateau: from lower-intermediate to upper-intermediate.

To commemorate the 25th anniversary of Interchange, now in its fourth edition, we’re delighted to announce a new series of blog posts by Interchange author and world-renowned linguist Jack C. Richards. Over the next twelve months, Jack will be exploring a range of topics here at Cambridge Conversations, all of them elucidated by of one of the most successful, innovative minds in the history of English language teaching.


Today’s post, the first in the series, outlines the five most difficult challenges faced by teachers as they help students transition from intermediate to advanced language learning. In the coming weeks we will consider how teachers can address each of these challenges, before moving on to topics such as effective lesson creation, and competence and performance in language teaching.

As they move from basic to intermediate to advanced levels in language proficiency, many second-language learners will confirm that language learning does not always follow a smooth progression. There are times when progress seems to be marked and noticeable, as for example with many basic-level language learners. After their first 200 or so hours of instruction, they begin to break through the threshold of learning to become real users of the language, even if at a fairly simple level. Those who have experienced the transition to this level of learning recall the feelings of satisfaction and achievement that came as they found themselves actually capable of real communication in English.

However, once learners have arrived at an intermediate level of language learning, progress does not always appear to be so marked, and making the transition from intermediate to the upper-intermediate/advanced level sometimes proves frustrating. Some may feel they have arrived at a plateau and making further progress seems elusive, despite the amount of time and effort they devote to it.



Inevitably, learners who have reached the upper-intermediate level will have somewhat different language use profiles and learning needs, but the following problems are often encountered:

1. There is a gap between receptive and productive competence. Learners may have made considerable progress in listening comprehension and reading, but still feel inadequate when it comes to speaking skills.

2. Fluency may have progressed at the expense of complexity. Learners may make primary use of lower-level grammar, as well as vocabulary and communication strategies to express their meaning and may not have acquired more sophisticated language patterns and usage characteristics of more advanced second-language users.

3. Learners have a limited vocabulary range. Vocabulary development has not progressed sufficiently. Learners tend to overuse lower-level vocabulary and fail to acquire more advanced vocabulary and usage.

4. Language production may be adequate but often lacks the characteristics of natural speech. Learners’ English may be fluent and grammatical but sounds too formal or too bookish.

5. There are persistent, fossilized language errors. Errors that are typical of lower-level learners reappear in certain circumstances despite the amount of time and effort devoted to correcting them.
So, how we do resolve these five problems? Jack will be back tomorrow, offering advice on tackling the first of these issues: the gap between receptive and productive competence.

Excerpted and edited from Moving Beyond the Plateau: From Intermediate to Advanced Levels in Language Learning by Jack C. Richards

  
PORTAL DA LÍNGUA INGLESA has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-partly internet websites referred to in this post, and does not guarantee that any context on such websites are, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
In some instances, I have been unable to trace the owners of the pictures used here; therefore, I would appreciate any information that would enable me to do so. Thank you very much.
Is something important missing? Report an error or suggest an improvement. Please, I strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact me!
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