'We deliberately set high demands for the gold standard'… Inclusive and exclusive pronouns in two social science cultures

[EN] This study analyses the use of inclusive and exclusive pronominal signals in English and Spanish research articles and investigates whether there are differences between the two languages in terms of pronominal signals frequency and usage.

The third language in English guidebooks and its translation into Spanish

[EN] This article focuses on a specific feature found in tourist guidebooks –the recurrent use of foreign expressions or “third language”. It presents the findings of a comparative analysis of a parallel corpus made up of twenty guidebooks: ten guidebooks originally written in English and their corresponding translated versions in Spanish, describing different countries and cities (all of them published by Lonely Planet), focusing on those chapters in which the writer includes practical information. The purpose of the study is to analyze the use of the third language in the English and Spanish versions and to determine and identify the translation strategies used by the translators to transfer these linguistic elements from one language to the other.

Los refuerzos visuales en la educación bilingüe. Experiencias en una escuela de Texas

[ES]Este trabajo presenta tres actividades didácticas y una propuesta de evaluación para mejorar el aprendizaje del vocabulario científico en contextos de educación bilingüe. El presente estudio se basa en la observación realizada en clase por parte de un profesor de Ciencias Naturales y Biología en un programa especial bilingüe para niños mejicanos en una escuela secundaria pública de Texas. [EN] The purpose of this article is to present three teaching activities and an evaluation proposal, in order to enhance science vocabulary learning in bilingual education contexts.The present study is based on the classroom observation made by a Science and Biology teacher in a special bilingual program for Mexican children in a public school in Texas (7th to 9th grade).

LFE y la necesidad de trabajar destrezas profesionales en Grados técnicos

[ES] Con este artículo nos proponemos dar a conocer la experiencia empírica de carácter docente-investigador que hemos llevado a cabo en el último año (2013-14). Pretendemos enfatizar el papel del inglés con fines específicos, más concretamente de carácter científico-técnico en el ámbito académico y profesional. A partir de nuestra experiencia en el aula, nuestra hipótesis de trabajo ha consistido en explorar hasta qué punto puede un proyecto como éste diagnosticar las dificultades con las que se encuentran los estudiantes al hacer una presentación académica.

Grammatical means of textual cohesion in appellate court

[EN]The submitted paper deals with analysis of grammatical means of textual cohesion in English in a specific genre of legal register, i.e. in appellate court decisions. The theoretical framework of analysis is the theory of textual cohesion introduced by Halliday and Hasan in their work Cohesion in English (1976), which considers only intersentence cohesive ties to be textually cohesive and which distinguishes four categories of grammatical cohesion: reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction. In the analysed texts, all the instances of these four categories of grammatical cohesion are identified and statistically evaluated. The aim of the analysis is twofold.

Corpora in the Social Sciences- How corpus-based appraches can support qualitative interview analyses

[EN]Qualitative and quantitative research approaches are often considered as incompatible, and when they are brought together in a study, the analyses often stay within the realm of the same research field. The study at hand aims at combining the two methods from the perspectives of different disciplines and tries to determine to which degree a corpus-based analysis might support the traditional content-focused approach to qualitative data and render additional results.

¿Cuán gramaticalmente complejos son los títulos de los artículos científicos en las ciencias naturales?

[EN]This paper examines a corpus of 150 titles of research articles published between 2010 and 2013 in Anglo-American natural sciences journals (physics, chemistry and biology) in order to determine their lexical density and grammatical and morphosyntactic features. Towards that end, the frequency of present and past participles, prepositions, coordinating and subordinate conjunctions, and the frequency and length of compound words was recorded in each title. The total number of content and function words was also recorded so as to determine title lexical density. ANOVA tests were applied in order to assess whether statistically significant differences in the frequency of the above mentioned variables were detected within and across disciplines and in the whole corpus.

Author stance in doctoral dissertations of native and non-native speakers of English: a corpus-based study on epistemic adverbs

[EN]Our study concentrates on the epistemic adverbs used in conveying author stance in academic English. The Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (Granger, 1996) was run to three sets of corpora comprising doctoral dissertations written by native and non-native academic authors of English. Epistemic adverbs occurring in the dissertations were identified through a computer programme and their frequencies were separately computed for each corpus. Lastly, a log-likelihood test was administered to see whether there is a statistically significant difference across the groups in concern concerning the use of these adverbs.

The implementation of effective dual-language programs

[EN]This research investigates the ways of implementing dual-language programs and the schools’ internal procedures of evaluating them. Previous studies have examined the effectiveness of bilingual programs (Genovesee et al. 2005; Howard et al. 2005; Krashen 2004). However, there is little still known about schools’ procedures that systematize the organizational aspect of such programs. The Mixed Methods Research (MMR) approach was applied in this study to analyze data collected through questionnaires, interviews, and case studies.

Los objetos de aprendizaje en la enseñanza del vocabulario específico del inglés para la Conservación y Restauración

[ES]En la docencia de inglés del Grado en Conservación y Restauración de la Universidad de La Laguna (España), se ha constatado la inexistencia de recursos didácticos comerciales adecuados para este ámbito concreto, en particular para el aprendizaje del léxico especializado. Ante esta situación, como suele suceder en el campo del inglés para fines específicos, se ha acometido la creación gradual de materiales propios, empleando tecnologías de la información y de la comunicación (TIC). La experiencia acumulada durante los tres primeros años de andadura de la titulación, en los que los materiales TIC sirvieron de apoyo a la docencia presencial de grupos muy heterogéneos, ha conducido al planteamiento de la presente investigación.