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CANZIANI, T.M. Integrated perspective analysis of the flexible curriculum in Licentiate Degree Course in Sciences of the Universidade Federal do Paraná -Setor Litoral. 2015. 246p. Tese (Doutorado) -Faculdade de Educação, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2015.This thesis verifies, from an analysis of the representation of students and teachers of the Licentiate Degree Course in Sciences of the Universidade Federal do Paraná -Setor Litoral, how it establishes an integrated perspective of the specific curriculum contents of Physics, Chemistry and Biology and teaching contents of generalist teachers training. This referral implies, from a legal and a pedagogical point of view, on the analysis of conditions governing the implementation of a curriculum for areas of knowledge and which pedagogical training is not performed at the Faculty of Education. The discussion on the topic is relevant and pertinent to the current Brazilian scenario since it is legitimized by the Diretrizes Curriculares Nacionais de Ensino Médio (DCNEM), from 2012, and by the Projeto de Lei nº. 6.840/2013, that proposes an alteration on the Artigo nº.36 disposed on LDB, Lei n o . 9.394/96, that establishes the Ensino Médio curriculum by areas of knowledge. In order to rethink this situation, examines the reasons that led to the resumption of supply in the country of generalist degree courses such as in Science, compared to polivant courses of teacher training, of short duration, in the 60's. The study shows that there is a change of perspective, slow and incipient, in the panorama of Brazilian education that proposes the establishment of curriculum in an integrated perspective and assuming the need for reorganization of knowledge in a less fragmented way and through areas knowledge. From the presented assumptions, this thesis takes the central hypothesis that the model of teacher training by areas of knowledge, built from an integrated curriculum perspective between specific content and pedagogical content, establishes an innovative model of licentiate degree course. This hypothesis relies on the principle that breaks with the traditional teacher training model where specific content is more important than pedagogical training, which implies a greater commitment to the teacher formation and the social role assigned to universities. This is a case study of qualitative character on the refered course aimed at teacher training in Natural Sciences to work in the 6º to 9º year of Ensino Fundamental II, but in the process of transformation to also teach in Ensino Médio. The survey was conducted by means of triangulation of data obtained through a literature review, document analysis and field research developed through classroom observation and interviews. From the data analysis, this thesis verifies the contributions and the problems of this initial training model for teachers by areas of knowledge, in an integrated content perspective, which presents itself as a pioneer in the training of generalist teachers, in full licentiate degree.

Clinical case reports or clinical cases (CRs) are, perhaps, the most widely read text type in medicine, since they contain a detailed description of the patient’s medical history and symptoms and thus furnish ample teaching material for physicians-in-training. For non-native speakers of English in medicine, autonomous learning is often restricted because of a lack of medical lexicon, poor academic vocabulary, and weak lexical verb use. Here, we present the results of an investigation of lexical verbs: their distribution, classification, and contextual use in the different sections of the genre CRs. We suggest that lexical verbs with contextual use should be included in medical dictionaries to aid vocabulary development for all levels of English language competence. We found that relational and reportingverbs predominate in CRs and are used to describe and contextualize author observations. Stative verbs are generally found to describe patient data, while change of state verbs generally refers to patient response to therapy. Contextual analysis suggests that lexical verbs categories might be related to the moves of this genre, useful for teaching the structure of medical publications. We give some applications of this investigation to dictionary building and in integrating corpora in teaching and eventually in testing activities.

Medical students often face problems in using and understanding metaphors when communicating with a patient or reading a scientific paper. These figures of speech constitute an interpretative problem and students need key strategies to facilitate metaphor comprehension and disambiguation of meaning. This article examines how medical students’ strategies of metaphor comprehension could be improved by specific teaching on metaphors using a Cognitive Linguistics approach. Medical students’ ability to comprehend mirror neuron metaphors was assessed comparing the performance of students who did not receive any instruction about metaphoric extension strategies after a lesson on mirror neurons with the performance of students who received a special lesson both on mirror neurons and on metaphoric extension strategies. Students who received specific teaching on metaphor comprehension strategies performed better (85 %) and were more likely to use analogical reasoning and contextual clues than those who did not receive any specific teaching (55 %), who tended to adopt a violation strategy. Thus, their ability to give an exhaustive reinterpretation of metaphors seems to be affected by their ability to manage metaphoric extension strategies. These findings suggest that introducing a Cognitive Linguistics approach and using metaphoric extension strategies to aid metaphor comprehension may be an active and productive teaching strategy in a medical education programme.