Antonio Roberto Monteiro Simoes

Evaluating the usefulness and properties of a subjective assessment of Brazilian Portuguese

This is an evaluation of a Brazilian self-assessment test. All questions on the test guide the students to evaluate themselves on their linguistic and socio-cultural skills in Brazilian Portuguese. The main points discussed in this article are (1) an item analysis, (2) the reliability of the test to determine the consistency of the results obtained by the instrument, (3) the construct validity, and (4) the creation of cutscores. Our analysis of the BP self-assessment was supported by the use of descriptive statistics, by a factorial analysis and by a reliability test to determine the psychometrics characteristics of the test. The major claim in this study is that this test is useful, valid and reliable, if used appropriately, especially with an audience of motivated students such as students going abroad, instead of students who take language classes only as a requirement in their school program.

Clitic Attachment in Brazilian Portuguese

Teaching and learning the placement of clitics in Brazilian Portuguese is a challenge, especially in written language, because of the many rules of clitic placement that characterize Portuguese normative grammars. These normative rules are applied more uniformly in Portugal than in Brazil because they were based originally on Peninsular Portuguese prosody. But regardless of how uniform they may be in Portugal, normative rules of clitic placement are a challenge to non-native speakers of Portuguese. The present study proposes a simplified approach to teaching normative rules to non-native students of Brazilian Portuguese, in the written and spoken language alike, based on a single rule of pronoun attachment.