Creencias de los estudiantes en torno a los Espacios Virtuales de Aprendizaje en el desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa oral. Un estudio de caso

Oral communicative competence is traditionally neglected in the development of competence of students in compulsory education. In a highly demanding social and professional context, we must contribute to communication skills in general and to oral skills in particular. Together with this, given the digital and changing context in which we find ourselves, we need to know and master new means of production and reception of messages mediated by technology. Virtual Learning Environments open up an updated field of work that allows for feedback and the extension of the spatial-temporal limits of the classroom for the development of orality

All that Glitters is not Gold when Translating Phraseological Units

Invited talk delivered at Machine Translation Summit XIV 2-6 September 2013, Nice, France.Phraseological unit is an umbrella term which covers a wide range of multi-word units (collocations, idioms, proverbs, routine formulae, etc.). Phraseological units (PUs) are pervasive in all languages and exhibit a peculiar combinatorial nature. PUs are usually frequent, cognitively salient, syntactically frozen and/or semantically opaque. Besides, their creative manipulations in discourse can be anything but predictable, straightforward or easy to process. And when it comes to translating, problems multiply exponentially. It goes without saying that cultural differences and linguistic anisomorphisms go hand in hand with issues arising from varying degrees of equivalence at the levels of system and text. No wonder PUs have been considered a pain in the neck within the NLP community. This presentation will focus on contrastive and translational features of phraseological units. It will consist of three parts. As a convenient background, the first part will contrast two similar concepts: multi-word unit (the preferred term within the NLP community) versus phraseological unit (the preferred term in phraseology). The second part will deal with phraseological systems in general, their structure and functioning. Finally, the third part will adopt a contrastive approach, with especial reference to translators’ strategies, procedures and choices. For good or for bad, when it comes to rendering phraseological units, human translation and computer-assisted translation appear to share the same garden path

Evaluación de la comprensión oral en inglés al final del primer ciclo de la educación secundaria obligatoria conforme a los objetivos del diseño curricular base andaluz

Esta investigación tiene como objetivo conocer el nivel de comprensión oral en inglés que alcanza el alumnado de segundo de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (ESO) al término del primer ciclo de la misma. Para llevar esto a cabo, hemos partido de los objetivos expuestos en el Diseño Curricular Base andaluz (decreto 148/2002 de mayo, BOJA nº 75). Según los resultados del alumnado, ofrecemos su ubicación conforme al Marco Común Europeo. Concluimos diciendo que nuestro alumnado consigue poco más de la mitad de los objetivos evaluados. A tenor de los resultados, afi rmamos que su nivel se sitúa en el nivel A2 inicial según el Marco Común Europeo. This research aims to know the English comprehension level that the students have in the Second year3 of Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE) when they fi nish its fi rst stage. In order to carry this out, we have taken the objectives in the Andalusian Core Curricular Design (decree 148/2002, May, BOJA n. 75). According to our students’ results, we want to classify them taking into account the Common European Framework. We conclude stating that our students get little more than half of the evaluated objectives. Bearing these results in mind, we admit that our students’ English level is A2 initial in the Common European Framework classification

Diferencias de género en los resultados de la comprensión lectora en inglés como lengua extranjera en Educación Secundaria Obligatoria

Este artículo presenta una investigación empírica sobre las diferencias de resultados entre chicas y chicos en comprensión lectora en inglés como lengua extranjera al final de su Educación Secundaria Obligatoria (4º de ESO). Nos proponemos analizar tanto los objetivos globales como específicos del desarrollo de la comprensión lectora en esta asignatura en relación con el género del alumnado. Finalmente, describimos el perfil medio en comprensión lectora de las alumnas y los alumnos. Los resultados nos permiten concluir que las alumnas obtienen mejores resultados globales que sus compañeros. También consiguen mejores calificaciones en los objetivos específicos: extraer información específica, extraer información global, comprender la estructura del texto y deducir el significado del contexto.The present article is an empirical research on the differences of girls’ and boys´achievement in reading comprehension in English as a foreign language at the end of their Spanish Compulsory Secondary Education (4th year of CSE). It aims to analyse both the global and the specific objetives of reading comprehension development in this subject in relation to the students’ gender. Finally, we describe the average females and males students’ level in reading comprehension in English. The results allow us to conclude that females students obtain better global results than their males partners. They also get better marks in the specific objectives: getting specific information, getting general information, understanding textual structure and deducing meaning from the contexpeerReviewe

Nuevos entornos formativos para la comunicación médico-paciente

El proyecto Tell-me tiene como meta la mejora del acceso a la sanidad en Europa. Para ello propone eliminar barreras multiculturales, como el idioma, con planes de formación lingüística para médicos que trabajen en el extranjero y pacientes que no hablen la lengua del país en el que son atendidos

Translating English verbal collocations into Spanish: On distribution and other relevant differences related to diatopic variation

Language varieties should be taken into account in order to enhance fluency and naturalness of translated texts. In this paper we will examine the collocational verbal range for prima-facie translation equivalents of words like decision and dilemma, which in both languages denote the act or process of reaching a resolution after consideration, resolving a question or deciding something. We will be mainly concerned with diatopic variation in Spanish. To this end, we set out to develop a giga-token corpus-based protocol which includes a detailed and reproducible methodology sufficient to detect collocational peculiarities of transnational languages. To our knowledge, this is one of the first observational studies of this kind. The paper is organised as follows. Section 1 introduces some basic issues about the translation of collocations against the background of languages’ anisomorphism. Section 2 provides a feature characterisation of collocations. Section 3 deals with the choice of corpora, corpus tools, nodes and patterns. Section 4 covers the automatic retrieval of the selected verb + noun (object) collocations in general Spanish and the co-existing national varieties. Special attention is paid to comparative results in terms of similarities and mismatches. Section 5 presents conclusions and outlines avenues of further research.Published versio

Un añadido al tratado de la obesidad

Premis Pharmanews-Fedefarma 2016Cada uno de nosotros está compuesto alrededor de 40 billones de células humanas y unos 22.000 genes1. Los microorganismos intestinales contienen aproximadamente 100 billones de células y 100 veces más genes que el genoma humano2. Si tantísimos micro-seres residen en nuestro interior, nos hace pensar en que pueden tener algunas implicaciones para nuestro organism

Register-Specific Collocational Constructions in English and Spanish: A Usage-Based Approach

Constructions are usage-based, conventionalised pairings of form and function within a cline of complexity and schematisation. Most research within Construction Grammar has focused on the monolingual description of schematic constructions: Mainly in English, but to a lesser extent in other languages as well. By contrast, very little constructional analyses have been carried out across languages. In this study we will focus on a type of partially substantive construction from the point of view of contrastive analysis and translation which, to the best of our knowledge, is one of the first studies of this kind. The first half of the article lays down the theoretical foundations of the study and introduces Construction Grammar as well as other formalisms used in literature in order to provide a construal account of collocations, a pervasive phenomenon in language. The experimental part describes the case study of V NP collocations with disease/enfermedad in comparable corpora in English and Spanish, both in the general domain and in the specialised medical domain. It is provided a comparative analysis of these constructions across domains and languages in terms of token-type ratio (constructional restriction-rate), lexical function, type of determiner, frequency ranking of the verbal collocate and domain specificity of collocates, among others. New measures to assess construal bondness will be put forward (lexical filledness rate and individual productivity rate) and special attention will be paid to register-dependent equivalent semantic-functional counterparts in English and Spanish and mismatches.Published versio

Aproximación a la variabilidad fraseológica de las lenguas alemana, inglesa y española

Phraseological units, traditionally described by means of different properties, such as idiomaticity, fixedness and non-compositionality, are also subject to variation. Far from coming into conflict with the key phraseological characteristic (fixedness), variation reinforces its identity through various categories consistent across different phraseological types, different registers and different languages. This paper sets out to find a definition of phraseological variation and to establish a general framework of this phenomenon. We distinguish two main categories: variants and modifications and Ilustrate them with German, English and Spanish examples