Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya

The objective of this article is twofold: firstly, to provide a critical review of an assortment of articles and web pages that report on the use of literary audio books, their contribution towards language learning, the way in which they promote children’s creativity and imagination and their role in contemporary children’s literature. Secondly, to bring in two innovative educational projects related to solidarity and civic and intercultural competences, which use audio books as a tool for language learning. The conclusions indicate that using audio books in primary education may have a positive impact on the learners, and help students improve their language competence and their literary skills.

The main purpose of this article is to describe the experience achieved when implementing the practical classes of English for Tourism so as to bridge the gap between the professional world of the tourism industry and what students learn at the university. In this article we will first introduce the concept of Digital Storytelling (Lambert (1997), Gregori-Signes (2007-2010), Alcantud-Díaz (2008-2011) and briefly describe some of the projects that have already been developed at the University of Valencia as well as the use of digital stories in the promotion of touristic products. We will then argue that Digital Storytelling can be considered as a productive type of activity which fits the demand of the CEFL with regard to implementing the use of ICTs within the curriculum. Additionally, it helps to improve traditional skills development, mainly speaking and writing along with researching, collaborative tasks and working with computers. Thirdly, we will depict and discuss authentic examples of digital stories produced by undergraduate students registered in the subject of ¿Communication in English Language in Tourism I¿. The students were asked to develop an original product related to the industry of tourism and to promote it by means of a digital story.

One of the foremost goals of the European Framework of Reference for Language Teaching is the development of professional competences, which requires substantial modifications in the teaching and learning process, even as early as primary and secondary school. The motivation for the conception of this article is to display a report of strategies derived from an innovative use of Digital Storytelling. Namely, it is suggested here a new use of children¿s classic tales in combination with Digital Storytelling as a tool for learning both about language and about life. I will show how Digital Storytelling can help children to be aware of the old values included in the tales and how to bring them up to date. Moreover, this activity could help them to deal with NICTs concerning the five basic competences: listening, writing, reading, speaking and communicating. These are directly involved with the professional world, among other competences related to integrative social traits, for instance, gender equalities and inequalities, and new family structures including the modern role of step-mothers. After some tentative pilot experiences with Digital Storytelling with primary children, I may draw the following conclusions: firstly, that digital storytelling can help and motivate students to carry out their group tasks in primary and secondary education since children are allowed to use a computer and thus achieving positive appraisal in professional competences. Additionally, this activity, which has merged Digital Storytelling, critical thinking and literature, has proved to be a good reason to be given to parents as to why computers could be used for something more constructive than simply playing computer games. In other words, students have learnt by doing.

Code-Switching is a phenomenon in which “speakers rely on juxtaposition of grammatically distinct subsystems to generate conversational inferences” according to Gumperz (1982:97). The broad use of code-switching in diverse contexts and with at least two languages in contact has made this linguistic device be one of the most studied behavioural features of bilinguals’ speech (Gregori and Alcantud.2011). Additionally, code-switching, seems to have an important communicative function, that is why it is a very interesting aspect of sociolinguistics to be researched.Nowadays, the development of educational provision is reaching more and more social strata. This fact, together with a wider use of new technologies and globalization, has “served to accentuate our sense of a visibly and audibly multilingual modern world” (Milroy and Muysken 1995:1). One of the consequences of this modernization has been the incorporation of second languages in the subject syllabus at earlier and earlier ages and, as a result, some new ways of communication are being created from this contact between two or more languages; this is the case of second languages acquisition. When children are in contact with second language teachers, code switching is one of the natural devices they use in order to communicate. In fact, the “equivalence constraint on code-switching may be used to measure degree of bilingual ability” (Poplack 1980:581). It is thus the objective of this article to analyze in which situations code-switching is exactly used inside a second language acquisition language beginners¿ classroom. To achieve this objective, I selected, recorded and analyzed a class composed of four-year-old Spanish monolingual children in their first days of English classes in order to study the use that both the teacher and the students made of code-switching. The most remarkable conclusion drawn from the present study is that code-switching is used, on depart of both, the teacher and the students in a very high percentage to call beginners attention and to make communication and language learning easier.

The possible harmful effects of advertising in magazines aimed at teenagers have not lost relevance. Thus the aim of this article is to explore the linguistic characteristics used as foregrounding devices in a corpus of English advertisements aimed at teenagers. My underlying premise is that some linguistic messages or images convey information which is picked up by teenagers creating in them the desire to obtain certain products. In my analysis I attempt to ascertain, if any, what kind of linguistic control and what linguistic devices advertisers use to achieve their goal. Additionally, I try to find out to what extent the power of advertising has something to do with social problems related to compulsive consumerism, health disorders and behavior which affect teenagers. Hence, in my research, I gathered linguistic data from four magazine advertisements and identified the strategies used by prestigious brands to create in teenagers artificially constructed necessities on the basis of Donald Gunn's classification of manipulative techniques in advertising.

The purpose of this article is to carry out a corpus-based study on the presence of violence in a selection of eight tales by the Grimm's Brothers by looking at the terms which can be said to relate to the semantic field of violence. More specifically, this study will analyse a selection of eight tales in which the frequency of the words cut, dead and blood will be studied in detail. These words have been chosen due to their possible connection to violence after carrying out a quantitative analysis of the frequency of the whole main corpus. My initial hypothesis is that the corpus-based study of those eight tales would support my intuition regarding the high percentage of violence in the Brothers Grimm collection as opposed to the content of violence in a wider variety of texts. The study initially involved the analysis of frequencies of the lexical units in the Brothers' Grimm corpus and, secondly, a comparison of the results obtained in the frequency test to two reference corpora: the British National Corpus and the Cobuild Concordancer. The comparison and its results seem to indicate that there was a higher than average percentage of the use of words related directly or indirectly to violence.

The main aim of this article is to discuss the results achieved after investigating the presence of violence in the Grimm brothers¿ Cinderella with the intention of finding out what kind of processes predominate in this tale and whether they can be related to violent actions. The analysis involved firstly, a study of the frequency and concordances of some words belonging to the semantic field ¿violence¿, surveying in detail the context in which they appear and secondly, the analysis of transitivity processes. The method proved to be a good strategy to check whether each character¿s identity and social position (power) were somehow related to the infliction of violence within this context. As a general conclu sion drawn from the analysis of the results, a tentative proposal could be formulated: a corpus-based analysis in conjunction with both, a transitivity analysis and a Critical Discourse Analysis could empirically detect the presence of controversial topics such as violence in different types of texts.

La enseñanza de la gramática va más allá de unas simples normas, según Halliday (1987: 101) es un medio de representar estructuras basadas en la experiencia puesto que facilita la representación mental de algún aspecto de la realidad para así conseguir darle sentido. El presente artículo propone el uso de las imágenes incluidas en colección de cuentos de los hermanos Grimm, siguiendo el enfoque de la "gramática de diseño visual" de Kress y Van Leewen (1996, 2001, 2006), para la enseñanza de la gramática en el aula. Para ser más precisos, se proponen una serie de actividades de aula basadas en los tipos de procesos y los participantes en las ilustraciones incluidas en las distintas versiones de la colección de cuentos de los Grimm.
El objetivo sería no solo la identificación de estos procesos, sino también que el resultado de esta identificación sirva como base para la segunda etapa de la actividad propuesta: el pensamiento crítico como guía hacia un cambio en el panorama semiótico en cuanto a, por ejemplo, los nuevos modelos de estructuras familiares o las figuras de personajes como las madrastras.

One of the foremost goals of the European Framework of Reference for Language Teaching is the development of professional competences, which requires substantial modifications in the teaching and learning process, even as early as primary and secondary school. The motivation for the conception of this article is to display a report of strategies derived from an innovative use of Digital Storytelling. Namely, it is suggested here a new use of children's classic tales in combination with Digital Storytelling as a tool for learning both about language and about life. I will show how Digital Storytelling can help children to be aware of the old values included in the tales and how to bring them up to date. Moreover, this activity could help them to deal with NICTs concerning the five basic competences: listening, writing, reading, speaking and communicating. These are directly involved with the professional world, among other competences related to integrative social traits, for ins...

The possible harmful effects of advertising in magazines aimed at teenagers have not lost relevance. Thus the aim of this article is to explore the linguistic characteristics used as foregrounding devices in a corpus of English advertisements aimed at teenagers. My underlying premise is that some linguistic messages or images convey information which is picked up by teenagers creating in them the desire to obtain certain products. In my analysis I attempt to ascertain, if any, what kind of linguistic control and what linguistic devices advertisers use to achieve their goal. Additionally, I try to find out to what extent the power of advertising has something to do with social problems related to compulsive consumerism, health disorders and behavior which affect teenagers. Hence, in my research, I gathered linguistic data from four magazine advertisements and identified the strategies used by prestigious brands to create in teenagers artificially constructed necessities on the basis of Donald Gunn's classification of manipulative techniques in advertising.

The objective of this article is twofold: firstly, to provide a critical review of an assortment of articles and web pages that report on the use of literary audio books, their contribution towards language learning, the way in which they promote children’s creativity and imagination and their role in contemporary children’s literature. Secondly, to bring in two innovative educational projects related to solidarity and civic and intercultural competences, which use audio books as a tool for language learning. The conclusions indicate that using audio books in primary education may have a positive impact on the learners, and help students improve their language competence and their literary skills.

La enseñanza de la gramática va más allá de unas simples normas, según Halliday (1987: 101) es un medio de representar estructuras basadas en la experiencia puesto que facilita la representación mental de algún aspecto de la realidad para así conseguir darle sentido. El presente artículo propone el uso de las imágenes incluidas en colección de cuentos de los hermanos Grimm, siguiendo el enfoque de la "gramática de diseño visual" de Kress y Van Leewen (1996, 2001, 2006), para la enseñanza de la gramática en el aula. Para ser más precisos, se proponen una serie de actividades de aula basadas en los tipos de procesos y los participantes en las ilustraciones incluidas en las distintas versiones de la colección de cuentos de los Grimm. El objetivo sería no solo la identificación de estos procesos, sino también que el resultado de esta identificación sirva como base para la segunda etapa de la actividad propuesta: el pensamiento crítico como guía hacia un cambio en el panorama s...

We obtain some of our first organized accounts of human action through folk and fairy tales,through their participants. It is by means of these stories that we make ourselves acquainted with the social world that surround us. This paper analyses the role of the main participants and the processes they carry out ina selected corpus of 22 tales of the Grimm’s tales collection. The intention is twofold: firstly, to show how violent actions, power and social status are intrinsically related in them and that this narrative might be embedded within a visible social construction of the self. In addition, I intend to prove that the degree of violence in the tales does not suit publishers’ readings criteria in terms of age which are being applied nowadays to readers for childrenThe analytical framework used for the analysis draws on the principles of CDA, CL, SFL and the social identity theory. The results confirm that the verbal processes performed by some of the characters who use the powe...

Code-Switching is a phenomenon in which “speakers rely on juxtaposition of grammatically distinct subsystems to generate conversational inferences” according to Gumperz (1982:97). The broad use of code-switching in diverse contexts and with at least two languages in contact has made this linguistic device be one of the most studied behavioural features of bilinguals’ speech (Gregori and Alcantud.2011). Additionally, code-switching, seems to have an important communicative function, that is why it is a very interesting aspect of sociolinguistics to be researched.Nowadays, the development of educational provision is reaching more and more social strata. This fact, together with a wider use of new technologies and globalization, has “served to accentuate our sense of a visibly and audibly multilingual modern world” (Milroy and Muysken 1995:1). One of the consequences of this modernization has been the incorporation of second languages in the subject syllabus at earlier and earlier ages...

Este artículo describe una propuesta de innovación docente basada en la corriente educativa de la Educación para el Desarrollo, así como la mejora de Competencia Comunicativa en L2 y de las Competencias Literarias e Interculturales por medio de un taller diseñado para tal fin. El propósito de este artículo es doble: por un lado mostrar las posibilidades que ofrece el Taller de Escritura e Ilustración Creativa para el desarrollo de las Competencias Literaria, Intercultural y Comunicativa en L2. Se muestra cómo el taller cumple con las directrices marcadas por la Educación para el Desarrollo que se describe en el marco teórico. El segundo objetivo es narrar cómo se han organizado, coordinado e implementado el Taller de Escritura e Ilustración Creativa en la Universidade Federal do Amazonas en Manaos (Brasil), basándose en la metodología del aprendizaje basado en tareas, y cómo se ha conseguido (i) promover la creación de puentes para la consolidación de las relaciones bilaterales entr...