The present paper describes the main results of an on-going research aiming to develop standard flood damage data in the form of generic flood-damage curves. This type of curve allows estimating flood damages from the depth of inundation. Although the research project encompasses flood damages on different urban land use activities (residential, commercial, services and industrial land uses), the paper focus on residential flood damage information. The empirical data used on this research was obtained from systematic surveys performed in the city of Itajubá, a town with 85.000 inhabitants located in the Sapucaí river valley in the South-eastern region of Brazil, during the year of 2002. The survey consisted in interviewing residents in the Itajubá flood prone urban area in order to develop a data base characterizing the social class, the building fabric, the contents (inventory items) and the damages caused to dwellings by a reference flood event, the 2000 flood event. During this event, the town had more than 70% of its urban area flooded for three days and, in some densely urbanised areas, the depth of water was superior to three meters. The FDC curves obtained show relatively high damage according to the submersion depth considering the Brazilian context. This issue suggests that inhabitants can rarely recover, in the short time, from all the harm caused by flooding.

This paper focuses on the procedures of an action-research (STRINGER, 2007) that was conducted with undergraduates enrolled in an ESP course at Faculdade de Letras (UFMG). The impelling drive was the creation of a means to solve an educational problem, namely, the enhancement of students' reading comprehension of texts in English for academic purposes. The problem-solving process involved the use of concept maps (NOVAK; CAÑAS, 2008) powered by the CMap Tools software (CAÑAS et al., 2004) to meet the educational needs of a localized teaching situation. Data indicate that concept mapping, facilitated by computer software, can be a useful strategy to improve comprehension. Support for the investigation comes from the theories underlying the ESP approach, meaningful learning, learning as a social enterprise, and collaborative learning.

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O objetivo principal deste artigo é discutir o papel das tecnologias digitais nas mudanças sociais, econômicas e comunicacionais da era contemporânea. Tais mudanças influenciam diretamente a formação do professor de inglês. Imperativo se torna, então, o desenvolvimento de seus multiletramentos para que se possa construir e produzir significados de textos digitais multimodais de forma crítica. A investigação empírica do estudo revela que as WebQuests constituem ambientes adequados a esse fim, isto é, ao desenvolvimento profissional do professor em relação aos multiletramentos. Parece possível afirmar que um professor multiletrado pode provocar mudanças em seu fazer pedagógico e um realinhamento às necessidades de seus alunos para os desafios da era do ciberespaço.

Speech is the data frora which the linguist deduces the systeo of the language he is describing.From the point of view of language teaching, Structural! Linguisties represented a major theoretical landmark: despite its limitations, it supplied the language teacher with more precise and objective descriptions of languages than had previously been available to him.As pointed out before, the combination of the assumption of behaviorist thoories, on the one hand, and of Structuralis Linguisties, on the other hand, gave rise to the so-ealled audio-visual method and its variants. In other words, this teaching method is an amalgam of the principies of StructuraIist Linguisties and Behaviorist Psyehology in relation to the nature of language and the nature of the learning process.The acceptance of the systematic and objective nature of language in the structuralist view led language teaching to cmphasize the sentence patterns of the language rather than isolated words as had been done before. The language teaching content is also defined in terms of formal items rclying on He proposes a transformational grammar which is a device consisting of a set of ruies that will account for both the produetivity and regularity of a natural language and also for the linguistic intuitions of speakers of a language.The ultimate goal of this grammar is to generate all the acceptable sentenees of a language and no unaccoptablc ones.As Bell points out "a transformational grammar is a logical specification of the syntactie knowledge which the learner 8 needs in order to produce grammatical sentenees."Two types of ruies are present in a transformational grammar: phrase strueture ruies and transformation ruies.