Manipulation of teenagers through advertising: a critical discourse approach

[EN] The possible harmful effects of advertising in magazines aimed at teenagers have not lost relevance.Thus the aim of this article is to explore the linguistic characteristics used as foregrounding devices in a corpus of English advertisements aimed at teenagers. My underlying premise is that some linguistic messages or images convey information which is picked up by teenagers creating in them the desire to obtain certain products. In my analysis I attempt to ascertain, if any, what kind of linguistic control and what linguistic devices advertisers use to achieve their goal. Additionally, I try to find out to what extent the power of advertising has something to do with social problems r…

Tejuelo. Didáctica de la lengua y la literatura. Educación

Resumen basado en el de la publicación. Resumen en español Se ofrece una revisión crítica de artículos y páginas web en las que se hace referencia al uso de audio libros, su contribución al aprendizaje de lenguas, la manera en que promueven la creatividad y la imaginación del alumnado y su papel en la literatura infantil contemporánea. Se presentan dos proyectos de innovación educativa relacionados con la solidaridad y las competencias cívicas e interculturales y que usan audiolibros como herramienta para el aprendizaje de lenguas. Se concluye que el uso de audiolibros en educación primaria tiene un impacto positivo en el alumnado, que mejora su competencia en lenguas y sus habilidades lite…

Deconstructing Stereotypes Through Reading Children’s Literature as Intergenerational Play: The Case of the Stepmother

One of the key roles within stepfamilies, the role of stepmother has been and still is stigmatized with an aura of wickedness, produced by folk and fairy tales as well as by the media. As a review of theoretical frameworks of children’s literature indicates, there is a shortage of methodological proposals for handling such controversial topics in literary education. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to present and test a methodology for analyzing the capacity of children’s literature to shape social understanding of such intergenerational topics. This study was based on the exploration of the picture book by Gonzalez and Alberdi entitled La novia de papa tambien me quiere (My Dad’s Gir…

Digital Community Storytelling as a Sociopolitical Critical Device

Este artículo analiza 40 historias digitales comunitarias basadas en los principios de estudios de discurso crítico basados ​​en corpus (Baker et al., 2008). Las historias se analizan con la intención de probar si pueden clasificarse como ejemplos de historias sociopolíticas digitales. Las historias digitales socio-políticas se describen aquí como una herramienta que los individuos pueden usar para hacer llegar al público opiniones sobre temas que puedan afectar a la democracia (Couldry, 2008), el bienestar social y la estabilidad; y puede servir para facilitar la comunicación, interacción e intercambio de información sobre prácticas sociales conflictivas. Las historias analizadas pueden co…

Handy Manny, or the Pragmatics in the Interaction of Cartoon Characters

This article presents the results obtained from the analysis of 20 episodes of the series with the intention of critically assessing the impact that it may have on teaching and learning English as a foreign language in a context where Spanish is the main language (L1). Handy Manny, similar to other series that follow this same format (e.g. Dora the explorer, Go Diego go) is broadcast predominantly in L1 (English in the U.S., and Spanish in Spain) with occasional inclusion of some expressions in L2. The terms from L2 are either single words or more complex lexical units naturally used by the fictional characters in the series. The purpose of this article is to explore when and how L2 is intr…

Fighting the Myths and Misconceptions on Evil Stepmothers: Long Life Learning by Means of Digital Storytelling

One of the foremost goals of the European Framework of Reference for Language Teaching is the development of professional competences, which requires substantial modifications in the teaching and learning process, even as early as primary and secondary school. The motivation for the conception of this article is to display a report of strategies derived from an innovative use of Digital Storytelling. Namely, it is suggested here a new use of children¿s classic tales in combination with Digital Storytelling as a tool for learning both about language and about life. I will show how Digital Storytelling can help children to be aware of the old values included in the tales and how to bring them…

English as a Tool to Prevent Bullying and Encourage Equalities: The KiVa Project

Through the combination of the KiVa project and the English language beyond its formal academic aspects, this work aims to achieve an efficient antibullying program that fits the students’ needs. The main objective of this research is to prevent bullying, to encourage equalities and to ensure that bullying victims can count on the support of the class group to feel more confident about themselves and to not be afraid. To carry out all this, we suggest using English as students’ L2 in order that it serves as a tool to prevent bullying. Moreover, English is chosen as the subject since it is a neutral common language for all the students, and leads to an environment of equality in the classroo…

Languages and New Technologies: Learning Digital Portfolio in the Stylistics of English

The new perspective of the European Higher Education Area involves new methodologies which foster the information and communication technologies (ICTs). Educating (i.e. teaching and learning) by means of the European Credits Transfer System (ECTS) produced some very significant changes in issues such as “permanent learning and active learning” (Barragan 2009: 2) and ‘learning by means of (professional) competences’ which entail new learning methodologies and new evaluation processes.

Service-Learning and Project TALIS. Pedagogy and Teaching destined to mutual understanding

This article makes explicit the importance of the relationship between multilingual, literary and intercultural education, Education for Development and Service-Learning. It is focused on the case of the project TALIS in Spain and its efforts to implement Task Based Learning and cooperative methodologies. As a result, we can bring forward that it should definitely be given a new pedagogical sense to “be destined to perpetual understanding among professionals related to the educational field” to emerge intercultural competences. The aim was to implement a social intervention program in order to foster intercultural ethos building to become socially responsible citizens.

A corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis of violence in the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales collection

'The sisters did her every imaginable injury': Power and violence in Cinderella

The main aim of this article is to discuss the results achieved after investigating the presence of violence in the Grimm brothers’ <em>Cinderella</em> with the intention of finding out what kind of processes predominate in this tale and whether they can be related to violent actions. The analysis involved firstly, a study of the frequency and concordances of some words belonging to the semantic field ‘violence’, surveying in detail the context in which they appear and secondly, the analysis of transitivity processes. The method proved to be a good strategy to check whether each character’s identity and social position (power) were somehow related to the infliction of violence w…

Violence in the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales: a corpus-based approach

The purpose of this article is to carry out a corpus-based study on the presence of violence in a selection of eight tales by the Grimm's Brothers by looking at the terms which can be said to relate to the semantic field of violence. More specifically, this study will analyse a selection of eight tales in which the frequency of the words cut, dead and blood will be studied in detail. These words have been chosen due to their possible connection to violence after carrying out a quantitative analysis of the frequency of the whole main corpus. My initial hypothesis is that the corpus-based study of those eight tales would support my intuition regarding the high percentage of violence in the Br…

Uses of Code-Switching in Four-Year-Old Monolingual Children's Second Language Acquisition

Code-Switching is a phenomenon in which ¿speakers rely on juxtaposition of grammatically distinct subsystems to generate conversational inferences¿ according to Gumperz (1982:97). The broad use of code-switching in diverse contexts and with at least two languages in contact has made this linguistic device be one of the most studied behavioural features of bilinguals¿ speech (Gregori and Alcantud.2011). Additionally, code-switching, seems to have an important communicative function, that is why it is a very interesting aspect of sociolinguistics to be researched.Nowadays, the development of educational provision is reaching more and more social strata. This fact, together with a wider use of…

Taller de Escritura Creativa para el desarrollo de la Competencia Literaria en Brasil

RESUMEN Este artículo describe una propuesta de innovación docente basada en la corriente educativa de la Educación para el Desarrollo, así como la mejora de Competencia Comunicativa en L2 y de las Competencias Literarias e Interculturales por medio de un taller diseñado para tal fin. El propósito de este artículo es doble: por un lado mostrar las posibilidades que ofrece el Taller de Escritura e Ilustración Creativa para el desarrollo de las Competencias Literaria, Intercultural y Comunicativa en L2. Se muestra cómo el taller cumple con las directrices marcadas por la Educación para el Desarrollo que se describe en el marco teórico. El segundo objetivo es narrar cómo se han organizado, coo…

Los hermanos Grimm y la gramática de diseño visual: participantes, procesos y pensamiento crítico

La enseñanza de la gramática va más allá de unas simples normas, según Halliday (1987: 101) es un medio de representar estructuras basadas en la experiencia puesto que facilita la representación mental de algún aspecto de la realidad para así conseguir darle sentido. El presente artículo propone el uso de las imágenes incluidas en colección de cuentos de los hermanos Grimm, siguiendo el enfoque de la 'gramática de diseño visual' de Kress y Van Leewen (1996, 2001, 2006), para la enseñanza de la gramática en el aula. Para ser más precisos, se proponen una serie de actividades de aula basadas en los tipos de procesos y los participantes en las ilustraciones incluidas en las distintas versiones…

Communicative English Language Skills Improvement Programme (CELSIP)

This is a programme under the supervision of the coordinators for the subjects Foreign Language I (English) & Foreign Language II (English) from the Teaching Unit of English - Department of Didactics of Languages and Literature. It is designed as an additional English language training programme to get our students achieved a higher communicative level of English. With CELSIP we seek to help students increase the cognitive, literacy, practical strategies, tools and abilities they need to become successful teachers of English with brilliant communication abilities. Our philosophy is further based on our shared experiences working with a variety of students, ranging from Primary, Secondary, H…