I tu, què penses d'adoptar l'anglès com a llengua franca?

Què volem dir amb multilingüisme? És beneficiós? Ens convé? Hauríem tots d'aprendre anglès? Aquestes són algunes de les preguntes que, com a estudiants, professors i futurs treballadors ens fem quan parlem d'adoptar l'anglès com a lingua franca, cosa que suposadament facilitarà la comunicació i fomentarà la mobilitat i ens acostarà al concepte tant repetit de la globalització. La Universitat de València, com la resta d'universitats europees, ha decidit oferir als estudiants la possibilitat de cursar una part d'alguns estudis en anglès, però a l'hora d'escollir és convenient tenir clars certs conceptes que són fonamentals per poder prendre-hi una decisió.

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…

Discourse markers and interactional competence

Communicating with people from different countries implies not only choosing the appropriate words but also using appropriate verbal and non-verbal resources in order to enhance communicative effectiveness and thus be perceived as being interactionally competent. This paper focuses on discourse markers. Discourse markers are often classified as belonging to the realm of spoken grammar (cf. McCarthy and Carter 2001), a field which still receives considerable attention in textbooks. First, the concept of grammatical interactional competence (Young 2011, Walsh 2012) is defined; second, we illustrate how discourse markers help maintain and enhance specific interpersonal and textual functions co…

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…

Analysing Lexical Density and Lexical Diversity in University Students’ Written Discourse

Abstract This study analyses both lexical density and lexical diversity in the written production of two groups of first year students at the Universitat de Valencia at the beginning and end of one-semester teaching period. These results were compared with those obtained by a third group of students aiming at level C2. Lexical density was tested using Textalyser ( http://textalyser.net ) and lexical frequency used the software RANGE (Nation and Heatly, 1994). Our results prove that the students from both groups at level B1 show the same progression between writing tasks 1 and 3. Furthermore, we can claim that it is possible to obtain a reliable measure of lexical richness which is stable ac…

'Share your experience'. Digital Storytelling in English for Tourism

The main purpose of this article is to describe the experience achieved when implementing the practical classes of English for Tourism so as to bridge the gap between the professional world of the tourism industry and what students learn at the university. In this article we will first introduce the concept of Digital Storytelling (Lambert (1997), Gregori-Signes (2007-2010), Alcantud-Díaz (2008-2011) and briefly describe some of the projects that have already been developed at the University of Valencia as well as the use of digital stories in the promotion of touristic products. We will then argue that Digital Storytelling can be considered as a productive type of activity which fits the d…

Telling it all : a genre-based approach to the analysis of the american Tabloid Talkshow

Discourse markers and interactional competence marcadores del discurso y competencia interaccional

Communicating with people from different countries implies not only choosing the appropriate words but also using appropriate verbal and non-verbal resources in order to enhance communicative effectiveness and thus be perceived as being interactionally competent. This paper focuses on discourse markers. Discourse markers are often classified as belonging to the realm of spoken grammar (cf. McCarthy and Carter 2001), a field which still receives considerable attention in textbooks. First, the concept of grammatical interactional competence (Young 2011, Walsh 2012) is defined; second, we illustrate how discourse markers help maintain and enhance specific interpersonal and textual functions 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…

Cuadernia, una eina multimèdia per a elaborar materials didàctics

Cuadernia es la herramienta con licencia Creative Commons que la Consejería de Educación y Ciencia de Castilla-La Mancha pone a disposición de toda la comunidad educativa para la creación y difusión de materiales educativos digitales con una interfaz y presentación final muy intuitiva y fácil de utilizar. Esta herramienta permite crear cuadernos digitales para utilizar en red o en tu propio ordenador. Los autores son miembros de un proyecto de investigación Authia que colabora con los creadores de Cuadernia http://www.entornosinnovadores.com para adaptar la herramienta y utilizarla en Educación Especial .

Bueno, hasta luego: el uso de bueno en conversaciones

En las páginas que siguen presentamos un posible análisis de bueno en su función de marcador del discurso. Este análisis es parte (y a la vez resultado) de un trabajo contrastivo en torno a well/bueno y de otros marcadores del discurso en inglés y en castellano, dado su frecuente uso en la conversación cotidiana. La razón por la que se comparan estos dos marcadores es porque se pensó que podían coincidir en su función en ambos idiomas, y se procedió al análisis para comprobar esta hipótesis. El corpus utilizado no es muy amplio: incluye quince conversaciones relativamente breves1 en las que se han clasificado cincuenta ejemplos del uso de bueno como marcador del discurso; si bien el corpus …

Digital Storytelling as a genre of mediatized self-representations: an introduction

Este artículo ofrece una revisión crítica de algunos de los estudios más relevantes sobre relato digital y propone una tipología de género que permite una clasificación inicial en dos grandes tipos: educativo y social. El argumento principal es que la diferenciación entre lo social y educativo, aunque uno no excluye al otro, ofrece la posibilidad de clasificar la producción masiva de relatos digitales disponibles hoy en día en Internet. Los artículos incluidos en este número son, en su mayoría, educativos (Ramírez-Verdugo y Grande Sotomayor, y Reyes, Pich & García, Londoño-Godoy), aunque en todos ellos todos ellos incluyen algunos rasgo de lo social. Bou-Franch nos habla de las estrategias …

Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites

Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly o…

“Apparently, women don't know how to operate doors": A corpus-based analysis of women stereotypes in the TV series <i>3rd Rock from the Sun</i>

This paper explores how women stereotypes are discursively evaluated in the TV sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun by paying attention to the societal, cultural and ideological values they convey. Following recent trends for the study of television series (Bednarek, 2010), the analysis is both qualitative and quantitative, adopting a Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis approach (Baker, 2006; Partington, 2004). The contextualised analysis of words that refer to women confirms that the sitcom writers of 3rd Rock from the Sun purposefully resort to stereotyping as a verbal strategy to create humour while conveying negative attitudes towards women.

Digital Storytelling and Multimodal Literacy in Education

This article argues in favour of using digital storytelling to encourage a critical socio-educational focus in education and include multimodal explicit teaching in the curriculum. The analysis of fifty digital stories indicates that the students developed a certain awareness of the issue chosen for their story (e.g. violence, racism, war) since the final product transmits a critical perspective on the topic itself. Further work, however, needs to be invested in the development of the digital story content itself and on the issue of multimodal learning, with especial emphasis on the interface between multimodal elements and more traditional modes of transmitting ideas.

Learning from learners: a non-standard direct approach to the teaching of writing skills in EFL in a university context

Corpora have been used in English as a foreign language materials for decades, and native corpora have been present in the classroom by means of direct approaches such as Data-Driven Learning (Johns, T., and P. King 1991. 'Should you be Persuaded'- Two Samples of Data-Driven Learning Materials. In Classroom Concordancing,1-16. Birmingham University. English Language Research Journal 4.). However, the suitability of using learners' output in classroom tasks remains controversial. This paper describes a pilot study in the application of a non-standard direct approach where Spanish university students are invited to reflect on their production. In the experiment, carried out in several sessions…

Facework strategies and the achievement of multiple goals in a court martial cross-examination in the film A Few Good Men

Following recent trends of research into television and film language that is being undertaken in various sub-disciplines of linguistics (Piazza et al. 2011), this article describes the nature of the interaction that takes place in the cross-examination of Colonel Jessep in the film ‘A Few Good Men’. The dialogue is from the last scene of the film and it exemplifies how the attorney manages to get the truth out of an uncooperative witness. It is not, however, only the outcome of the interaction itself that is of interest, but the process through which this is reached. By analyzing in detail the facework strategies enacted by the participants in the interaction towards themselves and others …

A Genre Based Approach to Daytime Talk on Television

Análisis de talk shows televisivos Conversation analysis and power relationhips in American TV talk shows

'Apparently, women don't know how to operate doors': a corpus-based analysis of women stereotypes in the tv series 3rd Rock from the Sun

This paper explores how women stereotypes are discursively evaluated in the TV sitcom 3 rd Rock from the Sun by paying attention to the societal, cultural and ideological values they convey. Following recent trends for the study of television series (Bednarek, 2010), the analysis is both qualitative and quantitative, adopting a Corpus- Assisted Discourse Analysis approach (Baker, 2006; Partington, 2004). The contextualised analysis of words that refer to women confirms that the sitcom writers of 3 rd Rock from the Sun purposefully resort to stereotyping as a verbal strategy to create humour while conveying negative attitudes towards women.

Magnifying the ordinary: genre mixture and humour in the TV series 'Chuck'

Chuck is an American television series about a "normal" guy who works at the Buy More. His life changes dramatically when he becomes the most important person for the USA intelligence. This gives rise to a conflict between civilian and spy life. The analysis involves a multimodal account (cf. Lorenzo-Dus 2009) of the aesthetics (Cardwell 2005) of the second season that illustrates how the series establishes a parallelism between Chuck's life as a spy and that of his colleagues at the Buy More. By combining elements from different genres (Altman 1988) it portrays a rather "different from what may be the expected-representation" (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001:10) of the routine at the workplace …