Search results for "Reading"
showing 10 items of 1521 documents
Effects of summarization tasks on comprehension monitoring of science texts in university students with elementary or intermediate English proficiency
2012
Two studies were conducted to improve Spanish university students" comprehension monitoring of macro-ideas when reading expository Science texts in English (L2). The first one evaluated the effects of using summarization tasks on comprehension monitoring compared to other reading-for-understanding tasks. A significant improvement of comprehension monitoring was obtained from the summarization tasks. Results in study 1 suggested study 2 aimed at instructing students on summarizing texts in L2. The instructional work had a single significant contribution to students" comprehension monitoring on the macro-structural level. English proficiency also explained a significant proportion of the vari…
Listening to Voices and Judging People
2010
The impact of vocal cues on personality judgments is investigated in an experimental study that used technically manipulated levels of pitch (low and high frequency), sex of the speaker, and content area (e.g., fixing a bike, baking, reading directory information) as independent and the entailing personality judgments as dependent variables. Subjects (48 male and 48 female) were presented with voice probes and ratings of physical (age, sex, height, stature), and psychological characteristics (bipolar adjectives representing the “Big Five” dimensions of personality) were collected. Results confirm that voice characteristics have an impact on interpersonal perception and that vocal cues are p…
Identical constituent compounds in German
2014
The status of identical constituent compounds (ICCs) (e.g. Künstler-Künstler, ‘artist-artist’) is discussed controversially in the morphological literature on German. In this paper, it is claimed that ICC formation is a productive word formation pattern in German. In the first part of the paper, I investigate the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of ICCs in German. Based on this description, I discuss in more detail two conflicting claims about their meaning constitution: the ‘prototype reading claim’ and the ‘context-dependency claim’. I argue that ICCs do not behave differently, in principle, from canonical N+N compounds with respect to context-dependency. Based on a discussion o…
Double intercultural dialogue in the Hispanic press in the United States: the case of New York newspapers
2015
Taking as a starting point research carried out in 2000 into the concept of Hispanic identity in Spanish-language newspapers in the city of New York, this article provides a diachronic analysis of these media over the period 2000–2012. In the first study, it was established that Spanish-language newspapers reflected an intercultural dialogue among different Latino groups, thus creating a pan-Hispanic identity. In this article we wish to go a step further and explore whether the Spanish-language newspapers may also reflect, and foster, a second level of intercultural dialogue between the Hispanic and the non-Hispanic communities. In order to carry out this research, a qualitative content ana…
Speed in cognitive tasks as an indicator of second/foreign language reading and writing skills
2013
In a cross-sectional study 823 Finnish school children were tested to examine the relation between speed of performance in cognitive and linguistic tasks and second/foreign language reading and writing. Participants were Finnish-speakers with English as foreign language and Russian-speakers with Finnish as second language which made it possible to compare the results across these two language groups. The Finnish group was furthermore divided into three groups by age to see how speed develops with age and education. Groups were tested with a number of cognitive instruments that included measures of speed of performance. Overall, performance on the speed measures improved with age; often, the…
Current approaches to orthography instruction for spanish heritage learners: an analysis of intermediate and advanced textbooks
2015
As it is well known, heritage learners of Spanish have an advantage on oral production and aural comprehension over L2 learners. However, due to their lack of formal instruction in Spanish, their linguistic weaknesses lie on their literacy skills (reading and writing). In terms of writing skills, students mainly struggle with orthography issues (accentuation and spelling) and larger literacy skills (e.g. developing a thesis or organizing ideas). However, there is an important gap in the literature regarding orthographic acquisition since most of the research in the field on focus on form instruction has predominantly been on grammar acquisition (Anderson, 2008; Montrul and Bowles, 2008; Pot…
Images of higher education: developing and administering translation studies programmes in Germany
2014
This paper will draw on Gareth Morgan’s management classic, Images of Organization, to explore how translation studies programmes are developed and administered at Mainz University in Germany. Morgan identifies various metaphors that can be used to interpret the ways in which organisations are structured and managed. In accordance with his suggestions for reading organisational life, I shall first provide a survey of how his entire range of metaphors can be applied to the management of translation studies programmes, and then proceed to integrate the insights gained by building two detailed storylines. Since there can be no single ‘correct’ interpretive frame, I shall create two alternative…
The Earliest Reference to Israel and Its Possible Archaeological and Historical Background
2017
Manfred Görg proposed to read the name Israel on a broken Egyptian inscriptionäm21687, which is now kept in the storage facilities of the New Museum in Berlin. New research during the last number of years has confirmed this reading, although the writing of the name is different from that of the Merenptah inscription. Some characteristics appear to demonstrate that this inscription is older than the Israel stela of Merenptah and may likely date to the 14th or earlier 13th centurybce. The paper will present some ideas about an earlier beginning of the formation of what is generally called Israel and about the way, how this early Israel came about.
A dialectal reading of the History of Translation
2013
La traducción de variedades dialectales es uno de los retos más difíciles y a la vez interesantes que enfrentan los traductores literarios. Si bien los aportes teóricos acerca de la traducción dialectal surgen principalmente a partir de 1960, el presente artículo propone una lectura histórica de la traductología desde la antigüedad hasta la primera mitad del siglo XX indagando acerca de las “implicaciones” que los grandes hitos traductológicos hubieran podido tener para la traducción de dialectos. Ya que los textos dialectales se conciben dentro de una jerarquización política de la lengua, se propone un paralelismo entre ‘dialecto-estándar’ y ‘lengua vernácula-lengua dominante’. Se rastrea …
Computerized training of the correspondences between phonological and orthographic units
2005
The outcomes of computerized training in the correspondences between phonological and orthographic units are reported. Forty-four Finnish-speaking first-graders with poor pre-reading skills were assigned to one of two groups, intervention or control. The children in the intervention group received computerized training over a 6-week period (mean 170 minutes in total) while the children in the control group received regular reading instruction only. Although the short intervention program produced accelerated growth in letter naming, no differential outcomes emerged between the groups in terms of reading acquisition. The outcomes for the poorest performers on six cognitive-linguistic disadva…