Competência comunicativa e abordagem comunicativa: Dell Hymes fragmentado

In his seminal article On Communicative Competence (1972), Dell Hymes presented arguments to defend that Chomsky’s concept of ‘competence’ (the ideal language speaker in a homogeneous language community) is, in a way, incomplete. For Hymes, more than acquiring the formal rules of a language, the native speakers also acquire other (sociolinguistic) rules that can also be analyzed and described. Although Hymes did not have second language learning on his analytic horizon, his article led others to present new approaches to second language learning in a time when the audio-lingual method was already fading. This paper analyzes how EFL textbooks from the so called communicative approach incorporated the four pillars of Communicative Competence proposed by Hymes, viz., language which is (i) "formally possible", (ii) "feasible in virtue of the means of implementation available”, (iii) "appropriate in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated", and (iv) "actually performed". Analysis of typical classroom behavior, of ESL textbooks, and of general teacher practice – particularly in the search of native- or near-native-like pronunciation – indicates that it is still the model of grammatical/structural competence presented by Chomsky that serves as a model for learners.Em seu seminal On Communicative Competence (1972), Dell Hymes apresentou argumentos para defender que o conceito de ‘competência’ de Chomsky (o falente ideal em uma comunidade de língua homogênea) é, de certo modo, incompleto. Para Hymes, mais do que adquirir as regras formais da língua, os falantes nativos também adquirem outras regras (sociolinguísticas) que podem igualmente ser analisadas e descritas. Embora Hymes não se referisse a aprendizagem de segunda língua, seu artigo influenciou outros que apresentaram novas abordagens para o ensino de segunda língua em uma época na qual o método áudio-lingual já dava mostras claras de enfraquecimento. Este artigo analisa como os manuais didáticos da chamada abordagem comunicativa se apropriaram dos quatro pilares de Competência Comunicativa propostos por Hymes, a saber, língua que é (i) “formalmente possível”, (ii) “viável, considerando-se os meios de implementação possíveis”, (iii) “apropriada em relação ao contexto em que é usada e avaliada” e (iv) “de fato realizada”. Análise de comportamento típico em sala de aula, de conteúdo de manuais didáticos de EFL e da prática dos professores – em particular em relação à cobrança de uma pronúncia igual ou semelhante à do falante nativo – indica que ainda é o modelo de competência gramatical/estrutural apresentado por Chomsky que serve de molde para o aprendiz

Characterizing videos, audience and advertising in Youtube channels for kids

Online video services, messaging systems, games and social media services are tremendously popular among young people and children in many countries. Most of the digital services offered on the internet are advertising funded, which makes advertising ubiquitous in children's everyday life. To understand the impact of advertising-based digital services on children, we study the collective behavior of users of YouTube for kids channels and present the demographics of a large number of users. We collected data from 12,848 videos from 17 channels in US and UK and 24 channels in Brazil. The channels in English have been viewed more than 37 billion times. We also collected more than 14 million comments made by users. Based on a combination of text-analysis and face recognition tools, we show the presence of racial and gender biases in our large sample of users. We also identify children actively using YouTube, although the minimum age for using the service is 13 years in most countries. We provide comparisons of user behavior among the three countries, which represent large user populations in the global North and the global South

Characterizing Vaccination Movements on YouTube in the United States and Brazil

In the context of COVID-19 pandemic, social networks such as Twitter and YouTube stand out as important sources of information. YouTube, as the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform, has a large influence in the spread of information and misinformation, which makes it important to study how it deals with the problems that arise from disinformation, as well as how its users interact with different types of content. Considering that United States (USA) and Brazil (BR) are two countries with the highest COVID-19 death tolls, we asked the following question: What are the nuances of vaccination campaigns in the two countries? With that in mind, we engage in a comparative analysis of pro and anti-vaccine movements on YouTube. We also investigate the role of YouTube in countering online vaccine misinformation in USA and BR. For this means, we monitored the removal of vaccine related content on the platform and also applied various techniques to analyze the differences in discourse and engagement in pro and anti-vaccine "comment sections". We found that American anti-vaccine content tend to lead to considerably more toxic and negative discussion than their pro-vaccine counterparts while also leading to 18% higher user-user engagement, while Brazilian anti-vaccine content was significantly less engaging. We also found that pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine discourses are considerably different as the former is associated with conspiracy theories (e.g. ccp), misinformation and alternative medicine (e.g. hydroxychloroquine), while the latter is associated with protective measures. Finally, it was observed that YouTube content removals are still insufficient, with only approximately 16% of the anti-vaccine content being removed by the end of the studied period, with the USA registering the highest percentage of removed anti-vaccine content(34%) and BR registering the lowest(9.8%).Comment: Accepted at ACM HT 2022, 15 pages, 7 figure