Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

In this article we describe the experience of a group of English teachers in charge of the curriculum renewal of an English program for adults. With the purpose of creating a relevant curriculum, the designers drew on principles for, a practical curriculum, the critical curriculum, and the participatory curriculum. Results from this experience suggest that in order for a language program to be effective, its curriculum should be relevant; that is, the curriculum should take into account the needs and interests of adult students. Second, the curriculum proposal should have a clear theoretical and methodological conceptualization that supports the processes that take place within the program. Third, the curriculum proposal should put forth tasks that resemble activities that adults carry out in their daily lives. Fourth, the implementation of the curriculum proposal should be supported by a teacher development and mentoring program. Lastly, we argue that in order to achieve a relevant curriculum, it is necessary to have the financial and logistics support from the program administration, as well as the teachers’ commitment and positive attitude towards change.

  Contemporary societies are grappling with the social changes caused by the current communication landscape and complex textual habitats. To account for this complexity in meaning-making practices, some scholars have proposed the multimodal approach. This paper intends to introduce the core concepts of multimodality including semiotic resources, modes of communication, and intersemiotic relationships. It provides practical applications of multimodal analyses by examining printed and digital pages of educational materials. The final section proposes a set of recommendations to integrate the multimodal perspective in language classes, highlighting the need to make students aware of the new dynamics of meaning making, meaning negotiation, and meaning distribution.

This article presents the development of research and innovative teaching projects that include the publication of five books for English teaching at elementary and secondary school level with themes of the regional culture in northern Chile. It addresses and attempts to fill a deficit regarding the limited number of topics related to regional culture in books being used in Chile to teach English. The theoretical foundation and methodological work that supports this line of research and educational innovation are presented. This has allowed the publication of five books between the years 2009 and 2014. Finally, it is explained how the books have been distributed in schools, the teacher training stage in the region, and projections of the whole process.

Discourse genres can vary from one culture to another (Connor, 2003) and studies suggest that second language users tend to transfer patterns from one language to the other (Upton and Connor, 2001; Woolever, 2001). However, we know relatively little about how the highly valued genre of the academic essay is learned. In order to identify generic models used by Mexican university students in argumentative essays, we analyzed 36 exemplar texts produced by 18 students in Spanish and English as a second language. We analyzed the essay thesis and reiteration using appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005; Martin and Rose, 2007) to classify these segments into the categories open and closed with reference to the language of appraisal used in these textual segments. In appraisal theory, argumentation patterns in which monoglossic language choices predominate close down the possibilities for argument, whereas heteroglossic patterns open up the opportunity for disagreement and, hence, argumentation. This resulted in us being able to assign the category of closed or open to the thesis and reiteration. We used these categories to characterize five generic structures: 1) closed thesis, reiteration in conclusion; 2) open thesis, closed reiteration; 3) closed thesis, open reiteration; 4) open thesis, no position assumed; 5) closed thesis in conclusion. We found a preference for the generic structure 2, ‘open thesis, closed reiteration’, which occurred in seven of the essays in Spanish and six in English. Notably, we observed a high degree of variability in the patterns used indicating a lack of agreement in this community with regard to the norm for generic structure.

This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a project entitled “It’s the same world through different eyes,” which was based on the principles of the Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) approach and was piloted with 4th grade primary school students (between 9 and 10 years of age). More specifically, we employed a dual-focused approach, focusing equally on EFL (English as a foreign language) and content development. For the purpose of the project, we designed a mini-syllabus with the stories being at the core of the design. The objectives of the project were to a) develop the students’ receptive and productive skills in EFL), b) develop their sensitivity towards diversity, and c) enhance their citizenship awareness. Students were provided with opportunities to express themselves verbally and nonverbally, and participate in a variety of creative activities in a multimodal teaching context. The findings of project indicated students’ improvement regarding both their receptive and productive skills in the target language, and the development of children’s citizenship awareness, and their sensitivity towards diversity.

Vocabulary learning strategies constitute a subclass of language learning strategies which can be applied to the four language skills. The aim of the present study is to explore the vocabulary strategies adopted by adult learners of Greek as a second/foreign language when dealing with unknown words in L2 reading. To this end, the learners answered a questionnaire and so did their teachers. The results indicated that context and the general knowledge the learner of a second or foreign language brings with him/her about the topic—which is mainly supported by the other words in the sentence—play the most important role in understanding vocabulary. This conclusion probably confirms the power of the syntagmatic axis in the sentence, reinforcing mainly the holistic approach to be adopted in the classroom for the teaching of vocabulary. The process of triangulation has partially supported the research results.

Rooted in the need to confront the pervasive and harmful effect of the myth of the native speaker and affiliated language ideologies, this article shares the findings of a research study conducted in two public Colombian universities. The study examined participants’ self-perceived (non) nativeness as speakers of Spanish and English. Using surveys and interviews within a qualitative approach, the study found that participants perceived themselves as over-empowered in their being native Spanish speakers. Conversely, as speakers of English, most prospective teachers feared the disadvantages of not achieving native-like abilities, but they were confident in their university programs and their previous experience as English users’ to achieve their language learning education goals.

With the growth of EFL instruction worldwide, there has been increasing interest in how English teachers are prepared, yet little research has addressed these programs in foreign contexts. As part of pedagogical formation, methodology courses are considered key in developing both ‘received’ and ‘experiential’ teacher knowledge. Inspired by previous research, the current descriptive study analyzes the pedagogical content of methodology courses in EFL teacher programs in 16 Chilean universities and addresses the perceptions of methodology instructors by means of a questionnaire and an interview. Results highlight similarities and differences among programs, some considerations in designing methodology courses, and the challenges in articulating the connection between theory and practice.

This article sets out to assess the impact of the descriptive trend in the field of cognitive and metacognitive strategies and L2 reading comprehension. It does so with the intention of determining what the descriptive trend has contributed and what aspects of the field remain underserved. This assessment is carried out by tracing the roots of cognitive approaches in this field, identifying the components of descriptive research, and looking at representative samples and their contributions. The results of this analysis show that the kind of descriptive research that is most prevalent in the field has perhaps reached a saturation point, that it now offers only limited utility to teachers of reading comprehension, and that some excesses in the field may in fact be detrimental to the population that it looks to serve. The possible impact of these findings and suggestions for alternative avenues of future research that can complement the advances that have been made are discussed.

This paper presents the first results of a study on the relationship between literacy practices and identity in the social network Facebook. In this study the role of literacy practices in the social network Facebook and how they affect the construction of individual and collective identities of the informants are analyzed. The author highlights the profound changes in modes of reading and writing as a result of digital technologies and social networks. The study also evidences how through multimodal discourses people construct their individual and collective identities. The corpus consists of in-depth interviews with two informants that were recorded and transcribed following the model of discourse analysis. The preliminary results of this qualitative-ethnographic study indicate that users of Facebook as a social network deploy an intense literacy activity with a strong identity component.