In this paper, we propose a pedagogical approach for teaching and learning multimodal literacy, specifically, the application of multimodal discourse analysis for genre awareness. The mastery of specific oral genres is seen as desirable to help students become competent professionals. This is the case of Product Pitches (PPs) in the business field and Research Pitches (RPs) in the academic field. The

The last teaching-learning stage in the education system is the doctoral programmes, which turn graduatestudents into researchers. This evolution involves writing a dissertation, but also being able to discuss research.However, training on spoken genres has not received much attention, and the interest has been mainly onmonologic prepared speeches. This paper focuses on a genre of interactive speech

Taking Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” as emblematic of a text historically enjoyed by both children and adults, this article seeks to place the text in the area of what Kristeva defines as the borderline of language and subjectivity in order to theorize a site by which ambivalent texts emerge as such. The fact that children’s literature remains largely trapped in the literary didactic split in which these

This paper explores the narrative process identified in the Whitehorn Letters, written by Doris Lessing from 1944 to 1949, as historical documents that form a single, coherent whole. Their significance is assessed by means of an epistemological reflection that sheds light on the path by which the young Lessing established her identity as an author (Bieder, 1993). In the letter-writing process, Lessing

Complex nominal groups are common in technical English (i.e. English for Specific Purposes, ESP) as they allow lexical items to be tightly packed into a clause. This leads to increased lexical density and syntactic ambiguity. In this paper we analyze (complex) nominal groups in technical English, assuming that it is not only the context and extralinguistic knowledge (i.e. shared technical background

This article explores the prominence of the body in Janice Galloway’s short fiction. Drawing mainly on Kristeva’s notions of the semiotic and the abject, the argument initially establishes the central place of physicality in Galloway’s poetics. Her creative project is inspired by a desire to transmit in writing the experience of being alive, of how being is intrinsically fragile, inexorably bound to

The digital age has facilitated the creation of fluid, open stories that are subject to change as they unfold across different media platforms, each contributing to the story as a whole. Transmedia storytelling is also linked to transhumanism, a philosophy based on the idea that human limitations can be overcome through reason, science and technology to finally free us from the limitations of our bodies

J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973) allows a reading in the terms of Heidegger’s concept of Ge-stell or enframing, according to which in modernity everything, humans included, is seen as a mere means to often questionable ends. Prompted by violent sexual fantasies and an unleashed death drive, its main characters, a wild bunch of symphorophiliac drivers, live a life of existential nihilism, treating

espanolLa biografia de la prostituta, un genero muy popular en el siglo XVIII, presentaba la vida de las cortesanas para un publico avido de las tales historias. Estas sacaban partido del cuerpo de la prostituta, al exponer su atractivo y degradacion, y al dirigir su censura bien hacia la mujer caida, bien hacia la sociedad que cruelmente la condenaba. Al mismo tiempo, revelaban las complejas realidades

This essay challenges the myth of Hannibal Lecter, in Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, as an enigmatic and unclassifiable character. Lecter’s enigma is generated through a largely unexplored process of de-characterization, i.e. by recurrently presenting him through the speech of other characters who describe him as unknowable. After considering Lecter’s case against the background of well-known literary

This article analyzes the alleged Dickensian echo of the highly-acclaimed HBO TV series The Wire. Charles Dickens is probably the literary author to whom the series has most frequently been likened. This correspondence is scrutinized here, as it seems to have been built upon impressionistic references, rather than on methodical intertextual analyses of both the series and the Victorian author. The

This study explores the different uses of the word little, its equivalents in Spanish and its teaching to young Spanish learners. First, it aims at analyzing the lexico-grammatical behavior of little in a corpus of children’s short stories, where its prevailing use, preceding countable nouns, has been found to be much more frequent than in other domains and registers. A contrastive study follows, which

The present article describes a didactic proposal based on the use of an audiovisual translation and accessibility mode as a pedagogical tool: subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing (SDH). When students create SDH for a pre-selected clip within a well-structured task, they are enhancing integrated skills, especially in the form of written production (of the subtitles), listening comprehension (of

This classroom-based study examined the effect of collective peer scaffolding activity on narrative and descriptive self-revised drafts and new paragraphs developed by 32 EFL university students in a paragraph writing course in Iran. Each genre was discussed and practiced every other week and was followed by a collective peer scaffolding session. For each genre, learners were required to develop a

The current study explored two levels of lexical bundles, core (i.e. general) and peripheral (i.e. domain specific), in a corpus of 200 applied linguistics research articles and examined the functions they serve. Using Antconc software, in total, 2563 lexical bundles were identified including 593 core bundles and 1370 peripheral bundles. These numbers account for 30% and 70% of the full list of bundles

The work at hand is part of a wider study the aim of which was to determine what kind of factors influence pragmatic failure in an online adaptive placement test taken by Spanish students in their first year at university. A preceding analysis (Carrio and Martin, 2016) showed the type of personal factors that caused the exam takers pragmatic failure according to their own perception. In this paper

This study aims at exploring the degree of Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) towards the learning of English that English for Specific Purposes students report experiencing. The participants in this study were 67 undergraduates at the University of the Balearic Islands enrolled in two university degree programs. The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) (Horwitz et al., 1986) was used to collect

Task-based language teaching research has expanded substantially in foreign language (FL) contexts but most research studies have been carried out with young adults in university settings, despite the fact that FL programs for children are on the increase worldwide. However, there is a clear lack of research-based evidence of what children actually do while performing tasks, which is crucial in order

This article examines seventeen children poems by Sylvia Plath written in the years 1960-63, in relation to the poetics of romantic love. Drawing on motherhood studies (Klein, 1975; O’Reilly, 2010; Rich, 1976; Winnicott, 1956, 1965, 1967), the maternal shift in psychoanalysis (see Bueskens, 2014: 3-6), and attachment theory (Bowlby, 1950, 1969, 1988), it reads love as a continuous human disposition

Traditionally, the speech act of requesting has been regarded as a face-threatening act (Brown & Levinson, 1987) due to the impositive nature on the addressee’s negative face. Yet, in specific service encounters, requests can no longer be seen as threatening (Antonopoulou, 2001). This is the case of tourist information offices, where mitigators may not be present due to the task-oriented nature of

This study explores voice from an APPRAISAL theory perspective. It aims to investigate how published research writers deploy ATTITUDE and GRADUATION resources to review existing literature in the field. The study is based on a corpus of literature reviews (LRs) from 204 research articles (RAs) in computer networks and communications (CNC) and second language writing (SLW). Findings show that 1) writers

Although critical attention has focused on Ariel, Sylvia Plath’s earlier poems are also worth examining since they reveal significant details concerning the writer’s evolution towards that final achievement. After getting married in June 1956, Plath and Hughes travelled to Spain and settled in Benidorm for their honeymoon. It is the poems derived from that period and Plath’s response to the alien setting

David Mamet’s Faustus presents a complex amalgam of various ideas, traditions and cultures. After a preliminary discussion, in this essay, on the adaptive status of Mamet’s Faustus and on the myth of Faustus throughout history, I approach the notion of periodicity and time in the play, in its religious and anthropological contexts. I further investigate the same theme in tandem with the Nietzschean

This article explores the representation of family and individuals in Anne Enright's novel The Green Road (2015) by engaging with Zygmunt Bauman's sociological category of “liquid modernity” (2000). In The Green Road, Enright uses a recurrent topic, a family gathering, to observe the multiple forms in which particular experiences seem to have suffered a process of fragmentation during the Celtic Tiger

The years of the Second World War (1939-1945), a period known as The Emergency in Ireland, were pivotal for the development of the nation. Immediately after the outburst of the war in the continent, the Fianna Fail cabinet led by Eamon de Valera declared the state of emergency and adopted a neutrality policy. To ensure this, the government imposed strict censorship control, especially on journalism

American Political Fictions is one of a couple of Americanist studies by Peter Swirski in recent years. In this book, he studies five cases of American political fiction, all published or released during the last few decades, including Heller’s Picture This (1998), LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind (1995), Beaton’s A Planet for the President (2004), the rap by various artists and The West Wing by co-authors

Marketization in all public spheres including academic discourse has led to the increased importance of promotion. One of the promotional tools usually used in Research Articles Introductions (RAIs) is claiming centrality which can be realized through different linguistic and textual resources. In this study, our aim was to explore differences between native and non-native writers in the use of strategies

The present study seeks to compare the writing products of EFL undergraduates using as measures accuracy and grammatical complexity. It also intends to describe the evolution of the morphological and syntactic errors as English is used by learners. A total of 100 learners of English as a foreign language participated in the study. They were divided into two groups according to their Oxford Placement

The study offers a glimpse of the current situation of foreign language education in the Costa Rican context from the perspective of vocabulary knowledge, particularly passive vocabulary size. Students from two institutions participated: one school implements Content Based Teaching while the other follows traditional, Foreign Language Teaching instruction. This research aims to describe the receptive

This paper explores how women stereotypes are discursively evaluated in the TV sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun by paying attention to the societal, cultural and ideological values they convey. Following recent trends for the study of television series (Bednarek, 2010), the analysis is both qualitative and quantitative, adopting a Corpus - Assisted Discourse Analysis approach (Baker, 2006; Partington,

This paper explores whether language typology plays any role in lexical availability and spelling accuracy in L2 English. Two groups of adult speakers were compared: a group of native speakers of a language typologically distant from English with a logographic writing system (Chinese; n=13) vs. a group of native speakers of a language typologically closer to English with an alphabetic system (Spanish;

Given the importance of disciplinary specificity in terms of the potential differences in the functionality of nominalizations in scientific textbooks and the dearth of studies of this type, the current study explores the extent to which nominalization is realized across two disciplines. To this aim, eight academic textbooks from Physics and Applied Linguistics are analyzed to identify the nominal

This paper presents an analysis of the gender of the authors and the main characters of the set texts for English examinations taken at age 16 in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It presents an argument for why representation within the canon is important and places this within the context of recent educational reform in England and Scotland. The analysis demonstrates that texts by female

The present study investigates whether learner set up in interaction, namely in pairs or small groups, influences the frequency and outcome of lexical language-related episodes (LREs) and L2 vocabulary learning. Thirty Spanish English as a foreign language (EFL) university learners took part in the study. They worked in four groups and seven pairs on the same collaborative writing task. Research was

All German original manuscripts of Arthur Koestler’s first two novels (The Gladiators and Darkness at noon) were lost during World War II. A MS of each was recently recovered, allowing for the first time a comparison with their initial English translations, for almost 80 years the basis of all other translations. Both novels will be published in German and in a new English translation that allows comparison

This essay suggests that literary production post-postmodernism has not progressed to something new, but rather has returned to quintessentially modernist anxieties and modes of expression––especially renewed faith in grand narratives. The argument draws upon and coalesces two theoretical texts to help identify what I term ‘revenant modernism’ as a “symbolic space” (Flatley, 2008: 32) where a sort

The plays Harlem duet (1997) by African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears and Desdemona (2012) by Toni Morrison signify upon European texts aiming to carve out a new definition of what it means to be black in North America. Therefore both texts make for interesting reading in the study of (black) identity construction within US and Canadian contexts for, by revising Shakespeare’s Othello , they rethink

Review of Fuchs, Robert. 2016. Speech rhythm in varieties of English: Evidence from educated Indian English and British English. Singapore: Springer Science+Business Media Singapore. 226 pages. ISBN: 978-3-662-47818-9.Fuchs (2016) is the monograph version of Robert Fuchs's PhD thesis (University of Munster, Germany, 2013). It details research carried out on the production and perception of speech rhythm

Review of Wood, David. 2015. Fundamentals of formulaic language: An introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 198 pages. ISBN: 978-0-5672-7898-2.The book Fundamentals of formulaic language: An introduction by David Wood is considered an insightful, essential and comprehensive account of formulaic language. Formulaic language has been an interesting topic in applied linguistics, corpus linguistics

Given the importance of the phonological and lexical components of the language in L2 learning, this article discusses an innovative, holistic approach to learning these two components of the language based on the existence of “sound symbolism”—the interrelation between sound and meaning—in English. In particular, it describes how and why the study of sound symbolism can be advantageous to EFL learners

Edgar Allan Poe’s bicentenary triggered new translations and research on his life and works. Studies have been conducted by several noteworthy scholars such as Silverman (1991) and Peeples (1998 and 2004) indicating that the selected tales in this essay are Poe’s political message to the society of his time. The presence of Latin and Hellenic phrases and names in Poe’s critique has been indicated in

Anarcho-primitivism contends that modern civilization deprives people of their happiness, which is why it seeks to reconstruct civilization on a primitive basis, one that holds concrete promises of happiness. It argues that a harmonious relation with human nature and external nature needs to be established by translating technological societies into societies that are free of hierarchy, domination

This paper discusses the complexity of female and Arab characters in Arthur Koestler’s Thieves in the Night. Through an analysis of three main characters (Dina, Ellen and the Mukhtar of Kfar Tabiyeh) and several minor ones, it shows that the allegation of contemporary reviews, and some works on Arthur Koestler ever since, that the novel is excessively built on stock characters is untenable. In fact

Nominalizations are well-known features of scientific writing. Scholars have been intrigued by their form and by their functions. While these features have been widely studied, the cognitive side of nominalizations in scientific texts still needs further attention. Nominalizations contribute to the advancement of discourse and at the same time add abstraction to the processes they convey and make them

The aim of this paper is to provide new evidence on the effectiveness of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in the acquisition of English language competences (reading, writing, listening and spoken production and interaction) compared to traditional learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) in primary school settings. To do so, results of CLIL and non-CLIL learners enrolled in the

Review of Quiring, Bjorn. 2014. Shakespeare's Curse. The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama. London / New York, NY: Routledge. 266 pages. ISBN: 978-0- 415-51756-0.The book by Bjorn Quiring, Shakespeare's Curse. The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, sets itself within the by-now flourishing critical production on Shakespeare and the law. It starts by trying

This article considers the influence that assessment exerts on poetry education. By means of research conducted in a post-16 educational context in Malta, it shows that teachers’ and students’ practices in the poetry lesson are determined by the kind of examinations that candidates sit for. When the mode of assessment is constituted solely by the traditional essay test that excludes students’ personal

The border between the United States and Mexico, since it was first conceived in 1848, has marked the lives of those who live on both of its sides, as well as of those who want to cross it. It has also become the source of a vast array of theoretical and artistic work. Chicano writers have written about it, and so have theorists dealt with its meaning and conceptual implications. The aim of this essay

Review of Monroy-Casas, Rafael & Arboleda-Guirao, Inmaculada. 2014. Readings in English Phonetics and Phonology. Valencia: Universitat de Valencia. 409 pages. ISBN: 978- 84-370-9455-7.Aimed at more advanced students, the book intends to bridge the gap between basic content and the wide world of research. The book's goal is to facilitate moving on from the dogmatic views formed at undergraduate level

The present study aimed at finding whether L1 Turkish caused interference errors on Turkish EFL learners’ spoken English discourse. Whether English proficiency level had any effect on the number of errors learners made was further investigated. The participants were given the chance to choose one of the two alternative topics to speak about. The entire videotaped speaking session was further transcribed

The present paper compares the vocabulary development of a group of CLIL and of traditional EFL learners along three years. The observation that a CLIL approach might provide with larger benefits in the long run vocabulary is the starting point of this study. We had learners in the two groups complete a letter writing task. These writings were then scrutinized for L1 influence in the form of borrowings

The geographical proximity and socioeconomic dependence on the United States brought about a deep rooted anglicization of the Cuban Spanish lexis and social strata, especially throughout the Neocolonial period (1902–1959). This study is based on the revision of a renowned newspaper of that time, Diario de la Marina, and the corresponding elaboration of a corpus of English-induced loanwords. Diario