Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
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Autor/s Natalia Norte Fernández-PachecoCESA Alicante, Spain   ABSTRACT The emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has helped in the development and application of new language teaching materials that promote a multimodal approach (Jewitt, 2009, 2013; Kress and Leeuwen, 2001). Multimodal digital tools, such as vodcasts, bring together diverse modes of communication, which may enhance students’ foreign language audio-visual comprehension. This paper discusses a study on the attitudes of 40 Spanish students at a B2 level, aged between 14 and 19, towards the use of vodcasts, in comparison with audio tracks. Questionnaires were employed to gather data on student attitudes towards two British Council vodcasts. The results showed positive attitudes towards the use of multimodal digital tools (e.g., vodcasts) rather than traditional listening activities (e.g., audio tracks). We suggest these findings point to the potential of vodcasts not only as influential multimodal tools to improve EFL students’ audio-visual comprehension but also to increase students’ enjoyment and engagement when learning English as a foreign language.

Autor/s María Ángeles Martín del PozoUniversidad de Valladolid, Spain   ABSTRACT Listening comprehension of lectures in L2 contexts is a widely researched topic. Findings have been applied to both materials and course design. This paper focuses on findings about the facilitative role in comprehension of those discourse markers (DM) which signal lecture structure. These markers can also be of assistance in L2 contexts such as new English Medium Instruction (EMI) scenarios, where the lecturer is not a native speaker of English. A small-scale investigation about the presence of these markers in EMI lecturer discourse is presented. Findings indicate that lecturers need a more overt signalling of lecture phases and a wider stylistic variety enabling them to do so. The paper concludes by suggesting that EAP materials for training students in listening comprehension could be a good resource to provide the lecturer with a repertoire of linguistic tools to structure their lecturers and in consequence facilitate comprehension for students.

Autor/s Pilar González-VeraAna Hornero CoriscoUniversidad de Zaragoza, Spain   ABSTRACT This paper aims to show the effective use of audiovisual materials in the teaching of EFL to primary school teachers. For that purpose a representative sample of undergraduate students of the Degree in Primary Education with a pre-intermediate B1 level was selected. The students, whose ages ranged from 18 to 22, belonged to the so-called E-generation (Prensky 2001). In the first stage of the study a questionnaire was distributed in order to shed light on our students’ level of English as well as on the ways and resources they have used to learn English. It revealed that oral communication skills (listening, speaking and pronunciation) were usually underestimated. Bearing in mind these results, the present study proposed two main activities, one focused on listening comprehension and another on the improvement of pronunciation through audiovisual materials.

Reviewed by Mary Frances LitzlerUniversidad de Alcalá, Spain   This book is a study of nine picture books for children ranging in age from 0 to 9 years old. The conceptual framework follows Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (2004) (henceforth, SFG) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Social Semiotics (2006) (henceforth, VSS). The main objective is to “identify the verbal and visual strategies used by writers and illustrators… to convey a representation of reality, to create interaction with child-readers and to form coherent wholes of communication” (257).

From the Editors TEACHING AND ASSESSING LISTENING SKILLS EFFECTIVELY IN THE LANGUAGE CLASSROOM: RESEARCH-BASED APPROACHERS As stated in the last volume of the International Journal of Listening, “Compared with the other L2 skills of reading, writing and speaking, the field of listening is the youngest in terms of research” (Goh and Aryadoust, 2016: 6). This youth of listening skills development in the field of language teaching is partly due to availability of technological advances (audio recordings and videos) and (computer-based) teaching materials which were introduced at a later date in the classroom than paper-based materials. But a slower development of listening skills research is also determined by the fact that listening is a complex skill: it requires attention and concentration, it demands an instant recognition of an event and its related keywords, since vocabulary control and schemata knowledge (situation, topic knowledge and background knowledge) under which the listening input takes place are key factors in determining effective listening. Not only that, speaker factors (accent, intonation) and individual listener factors such as the listening strategies employed by an individual, gender or anxiety levels, are part of the listening skills construct. When we talk about assessing listening skills, together with these issues there is the question of task format in relation to both input and output requirements, the types of questions used in assessing listening skills or the number of times students are allowed to listen to a (video/audio) recording. All these aspects of listening make research in listening an intellectually and academically challenging work.

Table of Contents From the editors Mari Carmen Campoy-CubilloNuria Edo Marzá Articles  Audiovisual materials: A way to reinforce listening skills in primary school teacher education. Pilar González-VeraAna Hornero Corisco Discourse markers and lecture structure: their role in listening Comprehension and EMI lecturer training. María Ángeles Martín del Pozo Multimodal digital tools and EFL audio-visual comprehension: Students’ attitudes towards vodcasts. Natalia Norte Fernández-Pacheco Book and Multimedia Reviews  Arsenio Jesús Moya Guijarro. A Multimodal Analysis of Picture Books for Children: A Systemic Functional Approach. Frances Litzler

Autor/s Rafael Alejo-GonzálezUniversidad de Extremadura, Spain   ABSTRACT In this paper, the acquisition of phrasal verbs (PVs) by L2 learners is explored from the perspective provided by a usage-based approach to language. This involves looking at low scope or item-specific schemas, which in this article are identified as the actual particles, prepositions and PVs used by the learners, together with the more abstract syntactic or semantic schemas that emerge from their use. Given the labour intensive work required by this type of analysis, the focus is placed on the use of verb-out constructions made by L2 learners of the PVs as reflected in a corpus of learner language, i.e. the Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Russian and Bulgarian subsections of the ICLE (1,287,517 words). More concretely, I analyse L2 use of out-PVs at different grain levels and provide an account of the factors influencing the acquisition of these linguistic units. The results obtained from the analysis show 1) that out is underused by learners, at the lowest level of constituency, the level of the word and its collocates and that this may be due its low cue answer contingency (it is a short form with many meanings); 2) that out-PVs, as other formulaic sequences, shows a pattern of overuse of a small number of frequent verbs and underuse of the rest; 3) that, at a morpho-syntactic level, out-PVs used by L2 learners are typically frozen with little variability in both the tenses and the syntactic patterns chosen; and 4) that at the semantic level, more prototypical and frequent meanings in the text type analysed, not necessarily literal uses, are used with greater frequency by NNS. All in all, the usage-based approach adopted has allowed us to reveal the complexity of factors involved in explaining the difficulty L2 learners have in acquiring phrasal verbs.

Autor/s Agustín Reyes TorresUniversitat de València, Spain   ABSTRACT The Other Side (2001) is a children’s story with multicultural characters and themes that can be regarded as an aesthetic exploration of the human experience in the process of the acquisition of knowledge. Following the Black Arts Movement, Jacqueline Woodson’s work portrays many of the issues that are present in the real world but seldom appear in children’s literature, such as racial division or interracial relationships. Using the metaphor of a fence, this African American author reveals issues of loneliness and friendship, inclusion and exclusion, and the overcoming of prejudice and segregation through the wisdom of Clover and Annie, an African American and a white girl, who become friends. The story is told from the point of view of Clover who is both the protagonist and the first person narrator. The reader, thus, gets to see and understand the world through her eyes.

Autor/s Abdeljalil Naoui KhirVirginia Military Institute, USA   ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to discuss a special type of verb particle construction in English; namely, phrasal verbs used in cartoons and puns. Granted that the meaning of phrasal verbs may range from literal to idiomatic, their use in cartoons is artistically and linguistically exploited through a combination of verbal and non-verbal cues to convey humor, satire and fun. Our assumption is that this combination rests on the premise that a double reading of phrasal verbs in certain cartoons and puns is possible. To illustrate this, a sample of cartoons using phrasal verbs and puns (taken from www.ecenglish.com, English Teacher Online LLC) will be analyzed showing how the correspondence between the cartoon as a visual mode and the phrasal verb as a linguistic form can yield both literal interpretations and idiomatic ones. Phrasal verbs are also shown to violate Gricean maxims and to depend largely, in their interpretation, on extra linguistic factors.

Autor/s Klaus-Uwe PantherNanjing Normal University, China, and University of Hamburg, GermanyLinda L. ThornburgNanjing Normal University, China   ABSTRACT Verb particle constructions with animal names used as verbs (‘VPrt critter constructions’), such as horse around, clam up, and rat out, are interesting because of their (i) grammatical structure, (ii) pragmatic function, (iii) conceptual content, and (iv) the cultural knowledge they reflect. This chapter focuses on the latter two aspects of critter constructions. More specifically, we assume that an adequate analysis of critter constructions requires folk or cultural models of the animals in question, spatial schemas for the particle, metaphorical mappings and metonymic inferences, and aspectual categories in the sense of Vendler (1957). We place our findings in the larger context of the status of cultural and cognitive models in general. Such models (including animal folk models) are often outdated and reflect centuries-old beliefs that have left their traces in lexico-grammatical structure, in this case, critter constructions.