The “Currículo Mínimo – Língua Estrangeira” (2012) has the purpose of developing the following competence in basic school education:

According to the “Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais”, communicative competence is composed of the following three types of knowledge:

The “Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais" claim that learning a foreign language contributes to the learning of the first language. According to this document, that can be explained by the fact that learning a foreign language:

Modal verbs can be classified into two major categories of me- aning: epistemic and deontic. Epistemic modals refer to the logical status of events or states. The following alternatives are examples of epistemic modals. The only exception is:

One mechanism of grammatical cohesion is the use of substituting pro-forms. The only example of a pro-form is:

According to the Longman Grammar (Biber et al., 1999, p. 988), “collocations are associations between lexical words, so that the words co-occur more frequently than expected by chance”. This text presents several examples of collocations. The only exception is:

Adverbs present a range of semantic categories. In this text, we can ?nd some of them: time, manner, degree etc. The only pair that includes adverbs of different semantic categories is:

This text shows several examples of multiple parallel clausal structures. One example particularly shows the repetition of subordinate clauses to describe the preceding noun phrase, producing a certain dramatic effect. The example is:

According to the Longman Grammar (Biber et al., 1999), it is dificult to identify the intended time reference for the past perfect, because the reference depends on the context. In “All of them were loved, but most had missed many of the experiences we expect children to have in their first five years." (l. 12), the time reference for the past perfect verb phrase is:

Lexical choices vary according to the different types of language: written or spoken. An example of a word in the text that is typical of American conversational English is: