Qual é a idade ideal para ensinar o segundo idioma?
É essencial a interação entre bebês e adultos para que o aprendizado seja significativo;
A melhor fase da vida para aprender um segundo idioma é durante a infância, segundo pesquisas. E isso é possível, pois nesse período o cérebro humano está em pleno desenvolvimento, ou seja, apto para absorver novas informações.Participe:» Opine sobre o assunto Veja também:» As primeiras palavras das crianças "Estudos têm mostrado que os bebês nascem prontos para aprenderem qualquer língua do mundo, e é o condicionamento a uma única língua que cria barreiras, ao longo do tempo, para a aquisição natural de outro idioma", alerta Rodrigo Collino, mestrando do Instituto de Neurociências da USP.E ele completa: "a melhor idade para que uma criança inicie sua exposição ao segundo idioma é ainda na infância, simultaneamente com a exposição à língua mãe. Na verdade, dessa forma, a criança tende a adquirir as duas línguas como 'primeiras'".Mas segundo Rodrigo, é necessário tomar alguns cuidados, a fim de não sobrecarregar a criança nem criar dificuldades desnecessárias. "Na tenra infância, de 1 a 4 anos, não devem ser apresentadas letras nem palavras escritas, mas apenas sons, músicas, diálogos, etc."Há ainda que se considerar possíveis problemas de aprendizado. "Algumas crianças têm dificuldades, por questões genéticas, na aquisição de uma língua. Nestes casos, é altamente recomendável que sejam alfabetizadas apenas naquele idioma, e que futuramente tenham instruções em um ou mais idiomas estrangeiros".Rodrigo diz que não existe uma fórmula mágica no que diz respeito ao método de ensino ou material a ser utilizado. "O que se sabe é que durante os primeiros anos de vida, qualquer contato com sons de uma língua estrangeira é significativo. Mas não basta colocar a criança na frente da TV e esperar que daqui a algum tempo ela saia falando outro idioma. É essencial haver alguma forma de interação entre bebês e adultos para que possa ocorrer um aprendizado significativo."Caso o contato com um segundo idioma não ocorra ainda na infância, o ideal é começar por uma língua parecida como o idioma materno. "Para uma criança ou jovem brasileiro que fale somente português, aprender inglês será mais fácil que aprender chinês", exemplifica Rodrigo.Aprendizado bilíngüePara as crianças bilíngües precoces, não existe a distinção entre primeiro e segundo idiomas, pois elas praticam duas línguas diferentes simultaneamente. Isso ocorre, por exemplo, quando os pais são de diferentes nacionalidades ou então quando as crianças freqüentam colégios bilíngües.A escola Pueri Domus oferece o Global Education, que une os currículos educacionais brasileiro e americano, com direito aos certificados dos dois sistemas. O programa foi criado em parceria com a Amcham (Câmara Americana de Comércio de São Paulo) e é direcionado para estudantes desde a Educação Infantil até o Ensino Médio."O programa é ideal tanto para alunos estrangeiros que, a partir da convivência em um ambiente essencialmente brasileiro, desenvolvem habilidades sem abrir mão da língua internacional; quanto para os alunos brasileiros, que desenvolvem fluência e competências acadêmicas em duas línguas em um ambiente multicultural", afirma a diretora-geral do Pueri Domus, Fernanda Zocchio Semeoni.

Folk

January 25, 2007
Long-Lost Trove of Music Connects Brazil to Its Roots
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil, Jan. 24 — From the mid-1930s onward, the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax led expeditions into the Deep South, searching for authentic blues and folk singers. Thanks to those efforts, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie made their first recordings and a template for American popular music was set.
Early in 1938, Mário de Andrade, the municipal secretary of culture here, dispatched a four-member Folklore Research Mission to the northeastern hinterlands of Brazil on a similar mission. His intention was to record as much music as possible as quickly as possible, before encroaching influences like radio and cinema began transforming the region’s distinctive culture.
Traveling by truck, horse and donkey, they recorded whoever and whatever seemed to be interesting: piano carriers, cowboys, beggars, voodoo priests, quarry workers, fishermen, dance troupes and even children at play.
But the Brazilian mission’s collection ended up languishing in vaults here. Only now, after nearly 70 years, is the registry of what Mr. de Andrade called a “prodigious treasure doomed to disappear” finally available, in the form of a six-CD boxed set that documents the roots of virtually every important style of modern Brazilian popular music, from samba to mangue beat.
“This is an important event because all of the main tendencies, whether European, African or Indian in origin, are represented and are detectable,” said Marcos Branda Lacerda, the director of the CD project, organized by the government here in Brazil’s largest and most prosperous city. “Everything is encompassed, and when you listen, you can hear the influences that would radiate outward” and make Brazilian music the global force that it is today.
The CD set, called “Musica Tradicional do Norte e Nordeste 1938,” consists of more than seven hours of music, drawn from the 1,299 tracks by 80 performers, totaling nearly 34 hours, that the folklore team recorded in five states in northern and northeastern Brazil during the first half of 1938.
Many of the styles documented on the records proved to be a major influence on the Tropicalismo movement, which emerged here in the 1960s and today has international admirers who include David Byrne, Beck and Devendra Banhart. The founders of that movement, mainly Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé and Gilberto Gil, currently Brazil’s minister of culture, come from the interior of the northeastern state of Bahia and openly acknowledge their debt.
“This is the music I heard as a kid in my father’s store, and it’s where all the richness and strength of Brazilian popular music comes from,” Mr. Zé said in an interview. “As sons of the Portuguese, Caetano and Gil and all the rest of us tropicalistas absorbed this folk influence, transmuted it and then took it to the world.”
Mr. Zé also noted that the music of the Brazilian northeast that came from Portugal was itself a result of cultural mixing, especially from the Arab domination there during the medieval era. The lyrics of some songs in the compilation date back to troubadours’ tales from that era, but the Arab presence manifested itself mainly in a vocal style characterized by a fondness for bent notes.
“That influence is still there in Brazilian popular music today,” he said. “I hear it most clearly and beautifully when Caetano sings. He has developed a sophisticated, inventive way to use these modulations that were quite common in the singers we heard there in the backlands of the northeast.”
Though the expedition’s main focus seemed to be on rhythms, guitarists are likely to be especially interested in the third and fourth discs, which include field recordings of duos known as repentistas. Like the blues, this guitar-based genre emphasizes call and response and often employs the mixture of braggadocio and insults that Americans know as “the dozens.”
Thirty years ago, after a visit here, a reporter played some recordings of repentistas for the American primitivist guitarist John Fahey. As someone interested in folk music around the world, Mr. Fahey expressed curiosity about the tunings and scales they used and pointed out that some of the gruff, raspy, somewhat nasal vocals reminded him of Son House and Bukka White.
“It gives me chills just to think of the similarities” between American blues and the music of the northeast, Mr. Zé said. “It’s like Mother Africa ended up with grandsons in Alabama and Pernambuco,” the state where the folklore team began its mission.
Of the three main cultural streams that have blended to make Brazil what it is, the Amerindian element is less represented on the discs than the European and African components, Mr. Lacerda said. But the collection contains songs performed by bandas de pífano, the fife and drum groups that are Indian in origin, as well as recordings of praiás, a largely Indian musical ritual that has all but vanished from modern Brazil.
The original project was the idea of Mr. de Andrade, one of Brazil’s most prominent intellectuals in the 20th century. A poet, novelist, critic, art historian, musicologist and public official, Mr. de Andrade had studied to be a pianist but in 1923 became one of the founders of the modernist literary movement, which dominated Brazil’s cultural scene for decades to come.
“By the 1930s, Mário de Andrade and others felt an urgency to register popular manifestations of culture before it was too late,” said Flavia Camargo Toni, a musicologist who wrote part of the liner notes for the set. “Most of the northeast had not received electrification yet, so life was completely isolated, and few people had traveled. So he felt he had to take advantage of the moment.”
During World War II, copies of the recordings were sent to the Library of Congress in Washington. A decade ago, Rykodisc released a single disc sampler, co-produced by Mickey Hart, drummer of the Grateful Dead, and called “The Discoteca Collection,” as part of the Library of Congress’s Endangered Music Project, but it was not until 2000 that restoration efforts began here.
“When I first saw the material back in the 1980s, the roof was falling down, water was leaking in, and I thought we were going to lose it all,” Mr. Lacerda said. “But I was greatly surprised when I found most of the 78s to be in good condition, and when they weren’t, we were lucky enough to find duplicates that we could copy straight to CD and then eliminate a lot of the hisses.”
During its travels, the Andrade expedition also collected musical instruments and other objects and filmed and photographed dances and festivals. The result of those undertakings have been put on display at the municipal cultural center here, including the team’s notebooks from the field, the Presto Recording Corporation equipment it used and transcriptions of interviews with performers.
At the time the recordings were made, Brazil was ruled by a dictatorship that had outlawed Afro-Brazilian religious practices. As a result, the folklore team required a letter of authorization from the police in order to do its work, and “a goodly portion of the objects they collected, especially the drums, came from confiscated material at police stations,” said Vera Lucia Cardim de Cerqueira, a curator at the center.
For all of Brazil’s musical sophistication and exposure to international styles of music in recent years, that heritage continues to be relevant. Mr. Zé referred specifically to “What’s Happening in Pernambuco: New Sounds of the Brazilian Northeast,” which will be released on Mr. Byrne’s Luaka Bop label on Feb. 7 and which he said was saturated with rhythms derived from those the folklore expedition documented.
In the past, Brazil “has not had a culture of preservation,” Ms. Camargo Toni said, complicating efforts to place the country’s musical evolution in its proper context. But with the mission’s recordings available at last, she said, Brazilians now have “the possibility of listening to the past thinking of the future.”
“We can show what we were, what we are today and how that came to be,” she said.

Amazon

January 14, 2007
Brazil Gambles on Monitoring of Amazon Loggers
By LARRY ROHTER
REALIDADE, Brazil — A Brazilian government plan set to go into effect this year will bring large-scale logging deep into the heart of the Amazon rain forest for the first time, in a calculated gamble that new monitoring efforts can offset any danger of increased devastation.
The government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in an attempt to create Brazil’s first coherent, effective forest policy, is to begin auctioning off timber rights to large tracts of the rain forest. The winning bidders will not have title to the land or the right to exploit resources other than timber, and the government says they will be closely monitored and will pay a royalty on their activities.
The architects of the plan say it will also help reduce tensions over land ownership in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical forest, which loses an area the size of New Jersey every year to clear-cutting and timbering.
In theory, 70 percent of the jungle is public land, but miners, ranchers and especially loggers have felt free to establish themselves in unpoliced areas, strip the land of valuable resources and then move on, mostly in the so-called arc of destruction on the eastern and southern fringes of the jungle.
But the called-for monitoring of the loggers allowed into the rain forest’s largely untouched center will come from a new, untested Forest Service with only 150 employees and from state and municipal governments. That concerns environmental and civic groups because local officials are more vulnerable to the pressures of powerful economic interests and to corruption.
Further, the new system assumes that the world community will also play a part and buy timber only from merchants who are properly licensed and will avoid unscrupulous dealers.
The plan “can be a good idea in places where the situation is already chaotic,” said Philip Fearnside, a researcher at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus who recently visited this remote area. “But it’s a different story in areas where hardly any logging or deforestation has taken place, where you are actually going to be encouraging the introduction of predatory forces that don’t exist there now.”
On paper and in principle, said Stephan Schwartzman, an Amazon specialist at Environmental Defense in Washington, “I think everyone agrees that this system is an improvement over the current situation, which is totally out of control.”
But in the end, he added, “everything is going to depend on how it is done and whether the financial and human resources are there to make it work.”
Here in this small settlement called Reality, along the rutted Highway BR-319, those resources do not yet exist, as residents have discovered. When outsiders recently appeared to fish out of season, wiping out protected species and killing three manatees, the peasants here went to the authorities looking for help, only to be turned away.
“They told us that we had to be the monitors ourselves, but we don’t have the ability to do that,” said Antonio Marfoni, a settler. “There’s no working phone here, and we don’t have the money or the time to be able to take the bus into town to denounce violations.”
Last October, during the final debate of the presidential campaign, the opposition candidate, Geraldo Alckmin, called the plan “irresponsible,” accused Mr. da Silva of wanting to “privatize the Amazon” and added, “If today there is no supervision, imagine what will happen if you hand it over to the private sector.”
Though the environmental movement was one of the founding constituencies of Mr. da Silva’s Workers’ Party, he made it clear after being re-elected to another four year term that his main goal was to get the Brazilian economy growing at 5 percent a year.
In November, he complained of “all the obstacles I have with the environment” and with “the Indian question,” which he said were hindering Brazil’s development.
But the proposal’s supporters dismiss criticisms as unfounded. Jorge Viana, who is a member of Mr. da Silva’s party and was governor of the Amazon state of Acre until Jan. 1, contends that “this is one of the most important initiatives that Brazil has ever adopted in the Amazon precisely because you are bringing the forest under state control, not privatizing it.”
“This is a battle Brazil has to win,” he added. “There’s only one way to save the forest, and that is by using it, responsibly and rationally.”
Claudio Langone, executive secretary of the Environment Ministry, said in a telephone interview from Brasília: “Brazil today is losing money due to the illegal exploitation of timber. With this new dynamic of management, legal deforestation and sustainable development, we want to create barriers to predatory advancement and increase the value of the forest.”
But some here fear that increased value will bring with it the kind of violence that has struck other more-developed areas of the Amazon.

A Review

January 2, 2007
Pirates, Penguins and Potboilers Rule the Box Office
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 1 — A year after Hollywood rediscovered weighty political and social issues in movies like “Syriana,” “Crash” and “Brokeback Mountain,” the box office story of 2006 was that moviegoers finally said, “Enough.”
They showed no appetite for a critique of their eating habits in “Fast Food Nation.” They weren’t ready to fly along on “United 93,” no matter how skilled its exposé of homeland insecurity. They didn’t care to see combat or suffer its after-effects in “Flags of Our Fathers.” And even Leonardo DiCaprio couldn’t interest them in touring the ravaged Africa of “Blood Diamond.”
While Al Gore’s prophecies in “An Inconvenient Truth” produced a respectable $24 million for Paramount, it was the message-movie exception that proved the rule. The big money was to be made making people laugh, cry and squeeze their dates’ arms — not think.
“What worked was classic, get-away-from-it-all entertainment,” said Rob Moore, Paramount’s marketing and distribution chief. “What didn’t was things that were more challenging and esoteric.”
Comedy, animation and adventure, all with a PG-13 rating or tamer — and for young adults, R-rated horror flicks — were the escapist recipe for success.
Reminding moviegoers of what was on the news, and in an election year at that, only turned them off. (Unless it was on the news nine years ago, as in “The Queen.”)
While Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” set a new opening-weekend record and topped the box office tables with $423 million, the winner among studios was Sony Pictures, which said it would end the year with nearly $1.7 billion domestically — besting its own industry record — and $3.3 billion overseas.
In an off year for its Spider-Man franchise, Sony managed to win a record 13 weekends, led by Adam Sandler (“Click”); Will Ferrell (“Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”); an animated hit (“Open Season”); James Bond (“Casino Royale,” which has grossed $155 million, a franchise record); and Will Smith (“The Pursuit of Happyness”).
Mr. Smith’s film broke $100 million, and he appears to have bolstered his stature as Hollywood’s man who can do no wrong, a bankable star in dramatic, romantic, comedic or action roles.
(When actors play against type, however, it can be deadly, as Russell Crowe showed in Ridley Scott’s film “A Good Year,” for 20th Century Fox. Coming after his nose dive in “Cinderella Man,” Mr. Crowe’s belly-flop raised questions about his status as a top box office draw.)
Then there was what Jeff Blake, Sony’s marketing and distribution czar, called “that rare adult blockbuster,” Ron Howard’s “Da Vinci Code.” Fans of the book ignored the film’s reviews, and it grossed $218 million.
“Really, we brought the adults back to the movies this year, which is part of the reason why we’re doing so much better,” Mr. Blake said of the industry, tipping his hat to Warner Brothers’ “Departed” and 20th Century Fox’s “Devil Wears Prada.”
Sony also got a boost from its Screen Gems unit; four of its horror films opened at No. 1. Typical was “When a Stranger Calls,” made for just $15 million, which grossed $48 million domestically.
Over all, the top tier of the box office held its usual contours: 5 blockbusters exceeded $200 million, and 12 fell in the $100 million to $200 million zone. In addition, 39 exceeded $50 million, 7 more than in 2005. Total domestic box office reached $9.4 billion, a shade shy of the 2004 record but 5 percent more than in 2005, said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Media by Numbers, which tracks box office results. Attendance was up 3.3 percent.
No. 2 Disney had its second-best year ever worldwide, with more than $3.27 billion internationally, and exceeded $1 billion domestically for the 10th time, thanks largely to “Pirates” and the year’s No. 2 movie, Pixar’s “Cars,” with $244 million.
Mark Zoradi, who runs marketing and distribution for Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group, said basic entertainment had proved to be the cure for the industry’s woes. “People love to go to the movies to laugh, to feel emotion and cry,” he said. “That’s why ‘Cars’ is so big. It wasn’t a straight-out slapstick comedy. At its core, it was an emotional movie with comedy in it.”
The slate of movies at year’s end was much stronger than on the same weekend a year earlier: up 10 percent in the aggregate, and 12 percent when comparing just the top 12 grosses. Fox’s “Night at the Museum,” the Ben Stiller comedy, led the field, raking in $38 million for a total so far of $117 million.
Among animated films, Fox’s “Ice Age: The Meltdown” came in at No. 2, nearly hitting $200 million. Bruce Snyder, president for domestic distribution, said Fox had been wise to get its movie into theaters well before the deluge of more than a dozen other computer-animated movies about animals.
One that suffered was Warner’s “Ant Bully,” which was sandwiched between Sony’s “Monster House” and Paramount’s “Barnyard” and came away with just $28 million in sales. Paramount, too, might have regretted the title of its “Flushed Away,” which cost $150 million but grossed only $62 million. “Happy Feet” was a much-needed big hit for Warner, which had been less than overjoyed by the $200 million gross of “Superman Returns.”
Despite the animation glut, the potential payoffs — Paramount’s “Over the Hedge” grossed $155 million, and “Happy Feet” reached $176 million on Sunday — are huge enough to make this a recurring phenomenon.