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The present study aimed to investigate if the white-eared opossum under natural conditions is capable of spontaneously solving the parallel string task. The experimental study with this primitive mammal was carried out on fifteen naïve animals of both sexes in northeastern Brazil. The parallel strings task was arranged in apparatuses with a vertical and a horizontal arrangement. A food reward (a slice of banana) was connected at the extremity of one string. A total of 505 videos were recorded using trap cameras. Despite the observed interest in obtaining the bait, the number of attempts to reach it and the use of the strings as support (trying to directly reach the bait in the vertical apparatus), the individuals were unable to pull any of the strings, suggesting that they could not understand the problem. The present study points to the relevance of using the species Didelphis albiventris and other species from this family (e.g., D. virginiana) to broaden our knowledge about the cognitive capacity of mammalian species. In addition, the opossums might represent an advisable path to better understand the evolution of cognition in this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated Brazilian learners of English perceptions about their production in a digital storytelling task cycle. Participants were 14 learners of English from an undergraduate program in Brazil. Data from the present study were obtained from participants' answers to the four questionnaires presented to them along the digital storytelling task cycle. After that, their answers were grouped and analyzed in order to have a broad view on their perceptions regarding oral production in the digital storytelling task cycle. The present study found that participants were concerned about their oral production as a whole, that they became more engaged and critical regarding the language learning process and aware of it with the use of digital storytelling. It also found that the teacher should be prepared to use technology and tasks in class and stimulate their students to use them so that language learning may be improved from its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three textbooks from Brazil and three textbooks from the United States were analysed with a focus on similarity and context-based tasks. Students’ opportunities to learn similarity were examined by considering whether students were provided context-based tasks of high cognitive demand and whether those tasks included missing or superfluous information. Although books in the United States included more tasks, the proportion of tasks focused on similarity were about the same. Context-based similarity tasks accounted for 9%–29% of the similarity tasks, and many of these contextual tasks were of low cognitive demand. In addition, the types of contexts that were included in the textbooks were critiqued and examples provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The study reported here forms part of a program of qualitative research focusing on the use of collaborative tasks in learning English as a foreign language in Brazil. The research examines the concept of collaborative dialogue (SWAIN, 2000), understood as dialogue that constructs linguistic knowledge within a sociocultural view of language learning. The results indicated that the learners reflected upon the target language, tested hypotheses and reformulated their production in order to promote mutual comprehension in the learning process. The results also revealed that the interaction established during the production of the collaborative dialogue stimulated foreign language learning as the students noticed linguistic gaps in the target language, and sought solutions together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study evaluates social, individual and linguistic factors in the performance of a single- word reading aloud task. A group of 1st to 4th grade school children from Belo Horizonte-MG (N = 333) read aloud 323 single words presented in a computer screen. Measures of reaction time (RT) and error scores were collected. The Generalized Estimating Equations method exhibited the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme- grapheme regularity effect in reading and also showed an impact on the number of categories of regularity in this effect. No social factor was important to explain the results, but their mothers' education was correlated to the error scores (in opposite direction). There was no gender effect. Other factors rather than the traditional ones were also relevant, such as the age of reading acquisition and the verbal comprehension. The work brings important theoretical issues to cognitive reading assessment in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]