Heritage language speakers in university education in Japan: Perspectives for an inclusive society.

The educational system in Japan has traditionally been focused on the “one nation, one language” ideology. This has led to the marginalization of indigenous and immigrant languages. As a consequence, heritage speakers are dealing with the loss of their heritage languages. However, there are isolated movements addressing the maintenance of the heritage languages, though they haven’t had a long-lasting effect on the educational system. In an attempt to contribute to reversing this language and identity loss, we based our research on two main points: 1) the belief that creating an informed partnership will help heritage language speakers (HLS) to integrate in the mainstream education space (Cummins, 2014) and 2) confidence in the importance of interconnecting the isolated movements for language maintenance. Would it be possible to achieve it in the Japanese educational context? Can we start scaffolding this new structure of informed partnership from the university level? In order to try to prove this point of view successfully, this article describes the creation at the university level of a class about Heritage languages and speakers in Japan, inspired by the Content and Language Integrated Learning model (CLIL). This class was meant to support and interact with another class called “Spanish for heritage students” that was developed at the same university. The student population is 14, almost half of them with a heritage language or culture. The course duration was one semester. The contents that were selected to reach the class goals are mentioned, as well as some points of view regarding what should be done to shift the Japanese educational system from a homogeneous stance to a multicultural inclusive posture. And in such a short time we could evidence an evolution in students’ critical awareness of the current immigrants’ heritage language and cultural situation in Japan. Working with specific vocabulary, reading from authentic sources, discussing contemporary articles among them, they could give shape to their thoughts in Spanish in order to express their opinions and possible solutions to this important matter.

An exploration of EFL teaching practices in light of teachers’ language proficiency.

The influence of target language proficiency on language teaching practices is not a new area of research; nevertheless, there is still lack of knowledge since some research results have yield weak and inconclusive findings in different contexts. This research examines the relationship between EFL teachers' language proficiency and their teaching practices. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was followed and two data collection instruments were used: an English proficiency test, to determine the EFL teachers' proficiency level and a class observation scheme, to record instructional practices of seventeen EFL teachers systematically. The percentage of time spent on the different categories of the first part of the scheme and proportions of each category of the second part of the scheme were calculated to perform a Spearman correlation test. After that, a qualitative analysis of the teaching practices was conducted in order to get a deeper understanding of the quantitative data. The results indicate that higher proficient teachers provide better quality of input and feedback and are better models for learners; however, a direct influence on classroom management was not found. An equal focus on pedagogy and methodology instruction as well as on target language improvement is suggested for EFL teacher education programs.

Speech acts in travel blogs: users’ corpus-driven pragmatic intentions and discursive realisations.

Travel blogs epitomise an informal, digital environment where international users engage in dialogical interactions about their travelling experiences. While doing so, they deploy a range of pragmatic intentions to exchange information and build discussion. Speech acts (Searle, 1975) encapsulate those intentions, and are generally assumed to differ in their illocutionary force depending on users’ communicative needs, and on whether hosted in posts or in comments. This paper explores the frequency and saliency of speech acts in travel blogs, by undertaking a contrastive study as regards generic features in an exploratory corpus of 18 Englishmediated travel blog posts and 367 travel blog comments. The three circles of English (Bolton & Kachru, 2006) are used to balance bloggers’ sociolinguistic background and represent native and nonnative speakers. A corpus-driven typology of speech acts for the travel blog is designed, since aprioristic, traditional classifications may not match users’ intentions in asynchronous, globalised, computer-mediated settings. Connections of particular speech acts with each of the generic instances, whether posts or comments, are revealed, and prototypical discursive realisations of those speech acts are qualitatively provided. The study unveils bloggers’ communicative practices and yields pragmatic and discursive resources users can handle to encode their pragmatic intentions in travel blog posts and comments.

Immigrant learners’ cultural identities in the vocabulary input of EFL textbooks through prototypical associations.

In recent decades, scholars’ attention has been focused on how the target and source cultures can be integrated to EFL materials. Despite significant progress in this respect, the source culture is still considered as the predominant culture in a classroom, even in countries where immigration is reaching unprecedented numbers (Suárez Orozco, 2001; McKay, 2003). This poses some challenges for selecting the vocabulary input for EFL materials and promoting cultural diversity in the classroom. For this reason, since semantic prototypes are anchored in the categorisation of mental lexicon (Taylor, 1989; Aitchison, 2003), they may shed light on what cultural words are being and should be integrated to EFL textbooks to foster the integration and balance of predominant and non-predominant cultures. This study aims to examine whether immigrant learners’ cultures are evidenced in the vocabulary input of two EFL textbooks used in La Rioja, Spain; and to analyse if these cultural identities are represented through prototypical associations by means of two semantic categories: free-time activities and festivities. The results suggest that (i) the target culture is pervasive while immigrant students’ cultures are scarcely included in EFL materials; (ii) there are similarities and differences regarding the cultural aspects drawn through prototypical associations in the two EFL textbooks selected; and (iii) the cultural identity aspects are scarce because most of the vocabulary input of EFL textbooks is focused on the use of words from the target language. The present study has implications for textbooks publishers and multilingual learners as it provides insights into the unbalanced cultural picture that EFL textbooks draw through word associations.

LANGUAGE CONTACT IN THE MEDIA DISCOURSE: ANGLICISMS IN SECTION LEISURE IN THE NEWSPAPER LA PROVINCIA

The presence of English is undeniable in various areas of Spaniards’ daily lives, and the domain of leisure activities is not excluded of such a trend. This paper examines the presence of Anglicisms in sections: “Life and style”; “Culture, leisure and society” and “Sports” of the digital edition of the newspaper La Provincia (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) during the period from 1st March to 31st May 2019. The use of Anglicisms has apparently been increased throughout the last decades, considering a similar previous analysis (LujánGarcía, 1999). The compilation of a corpus of 207 Anglicisms reveals that the section “Life and style”, which compiles news of various fields (fashion, beauty, people, pets, gastronomy) presents the highest percentage of Anglicisms (65.2%). In the second position, “Culture, leisure and society” contains a percentage of 21.7% of the compiled corpus, and this is followed by “Sports”, with 12.9% Anglicisms of the sample. In qualitative terms, some examples of particular uses of the examined Anglicisms are studied in context, considering the whole sentence where they occur, in addition to the analysis of the orthographic markers employed, which tend to be quite inconsistent. Eventually, the pragmatic functions of these Anglicisms are discussed: specialized language, referential, expressive and textual functions, which will be illustrated with examples excerpted from the corpus. Keywords: Anglicisms, digital newspaper, life and style, leisure and sports neologisms.

THE USE OF EVALUATIVE LANGUAGE IN EFL TEACHERS’ REFLECTIVE JOURNAL WRITING: A CORPUS BASED STUDY

This article presents a computer-assisted discourse analysis of the main topics and evaluative parameters used by student teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in their reflective journals. By applying Bednarek’s parameter-based approach to the study of evaluation, 329 reflective journals (aprox. 90,000 words) were analyzed by using the UAM Corpus Tool. The correlation of three sources of data – topic analysis, evaluative parameters and keywords – allowed to uncover the most typical evaluative language choices made by EFL student teachers in their reflective journals and their overall evaluation of their training process during their practicum studies. Results show that most journal entries pivot around the figure of the secondary student of EFL and that student teachers feel confident enough as to explicitly assess products, performances, and human behavior along the emotivity and the expectedness parameters. Findings are discussed in relation to the development of the EFL student teachers’ professional teaching identity and on the contextual factors that promote it or hinder it.

THE DYNAMICS OF TYPOGRAPHICAL ERROR REPRODUCTION: OPTIMISING FORMAL CORRECTNESS IN THREE SPECIALISED BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES

It is only through an extreme concern for accuracy and the understanding of typographical errors that authors can turn specialised dictionaries into high quality reference works. This paper describes patterns of typographical error reproduction in three specialised English-Spanish dictionaries. We approach intratextual error reproduction (within a particular dictionary), either through related subentries or through non-related subentries. In addition, we compare the frequency of errors between dictionaries written by institutional lexicographers and works written by freelance professionals. The purpose is to provide a model for typographical error detection and analysis that may contribute to formal correctness in reference works. The reason is twofold: a) dictionaries are expected to be high-standard primary tools for language professionals; b) data quality is essential for a wide variety of utilities, ranging from dictionary writing systems and writing assistants to corpus tools. Keywords: data quality, data reusability, specialised bilingual lexicography, typographical error reproduction.