Digging up the frequency of phrasal verbs in English for the Police: the case of "up"

The present study focuses on the frequency of phrasal verbs with the particle up in the context of crime and police investigative work. This research emerges from the need to enlarge McCarthy and O’Dell’s (2004) scope from purely criminal behavior to police investigative actions. To do so, we relied on a corpus of 504,124 running words made up of spoken dialogues extracted from the script of the American TV series Castle shown on ABC since 2009. Based on Rudzka-Ostyn’s (2003) cognitive motivations for the particle up, we have identified five different meaning extensions for our phrasal verbs. Drawing from these findings, we have designed pedagogical activities for those L2 learners that study English at the Police Academy.

Motivation and Vocabulary Breadth in CLIL and EFL Contexts. Different age, Same Time of Exposure

Numerous studies have found a positive connection between learners’ motivation towards foreign language and foreign language achievement. The present study examines the role of motivation in receptive vocabulary breadth (size) of two groups of Spanish learners of different ages, but all with 734 hours of instruction in English as a Foreign Language (EFL): a CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) group in primary education and a non-CLIL (or EFL) group in secondary education. Most students in both groups were found to be highly motivated. The primary CLIL group slightly overcame the secondary non-CLIL group with respect to the mean general motivation but this is a non-significant difference. The secondary group surpass significantly the primary group in receptive vocabulary size. No relationship between the receptive vocabulary knowledge and general motivation is found in the primary CLIL group. On the other hand, a positive significant connection, although a very small one, is identified for the secondary non-CLIL group. We will discuss on the type of test, the age of students and the type of instruction as variables that could be influencing the results.

The origins of the foreign language press in Málaga

The settlement of foreign residents in Spain has led since the mid- nineteenth century the creation of a foreign language press in order to inform and serve as a vehicle for social cohesion in these communities. This article studies Málaga because it is one of the provinces with the highest current number of foreign language press in Spain. This research has focused on analyzing two of the first newspapers written in English at the beginning of XX century: British Colony Gazette and the English section of La Union Mercantil, Weekly English News.

Teaching morphology trough communicative approach and cooperative learning in Secondary Education: practical proposal

We will be presenting the following practical proposal that will consist of two sessions implemented with different courses of Secondary Education (ESO) of the Colegio Círculo Católico (Catholic School Group), located in the city of Burgos. Each session lasts 55 minutes. These sessions focus on the morphology of the Spanish language. Its design has been carried out by keeping in mind the theoretical basis of the communicative approach and cooperative learning.

Legal Translation from English to Spanish in the Classroom: Problems when Translating Standard Formulas of Expression

The purpose of this paper is to identify problems when translating standard formulas of expression in English to Spanish legal translation. To achieve the goal, a total of 250 Spanish translations were analyzed of 10 sentences from legal texts in English. The degree of difficulty posed by the translation of these formulas is confirmed by the results obtained, which is related not so much to the intrinsic meaning of the words that compose them, but to their contextual meaning. An eclectic approach that combines discourse analysis with contrastive linguistics is proposed, and some specific didactic guidelines are indicated to facilitate the translation teaching of these standard formulas of expression. Lexical interpretation and contextual recreation allow the apprentice translator to make progress with the translation of these phrases and to improve his/her attitude when facing them to achieve a successful semantic and contextual interpretation, that is to say, getting the closest natural equivalent while respecting the genius of the language.