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Inglês.com.textos para Informática
de Décio Torres Cruz, Alba Valéria Silva e Marta Rosas
Disal Editora, 2001, 147 pgs.
Reviewed by John Robert Schmitz

Compre na Disal.

Not all textbooks in the field of foreign language teaching methodology are a pleasure to review. Many books, particularly those published abroad, are not appropriate to the Brazilian teaching context, a state of affairs that makes it difficult for the reviewer to find positive things to say about them. This book is an exception.

Inglês.com.textos para Informática, with its clever title, is written by a group of Brazilian specialists in applied linguistics who are familiar with the reality of teaching English as foreign language in the country. There is a dearth of teaching material in the field of instrumental English. Teachers of English in Brazilian Universities in many cases have to forage about in libraries to find suitable reading selections and also have to construct their own exercises, often under pressure to meet deadlines which leaves them little or no time for pretesting and revision of their work.

The book under review indeed fills a gap in the area of Instrumental English and Computer Science. Those teachers who decide to adopt this textbook will no doubt enjoy their semester’s work. Students who go through the book will indeed improve their reading skills in English. Most Brazilian university-level students nowadays are computer literate in Portuguese and also quite familiar with the technical vocabulary in the field. This prior knowledge will motivate learning computer language in English as well as stimulate the learning of function words, morphology and basic grammatical structures necessary to read academic English.

The reading selections are lively: “How intelligent should artificial intelligence get?” (p. 116), “Love bites: The greater the hunger for affection the easier it is to spread a virus” (p. 131). The twenty-four lucidly written chapters are pedagogically sound with a variety of approaches: a motivating warm-up, important strategy training, copious readings and interpretation of texts, ample coverage of grammatical constructions, interesting exercises, a dash of humor and some language games for a bit of fun.

Inglês.com.textos para Informática is a valuable pedagogical contribution to the field of instrumental or specific purpose teaching in the field of foreign language teaching.

Compre na Disal.

The reviewer
John Robert Schmitz, Department of Applied Linguistics, Institute for the Study of Language, State University of Campinas, Campinas, SP. E-mail: [email protected].