Modern Languages Program Research Articles

Linguistic Transfer: Case Study

Introduction: This article is part of a descriptive research developed between 2019 and 2022 with the students of the Modern Languages ​​Program of the University of Caldas, Colombia. It deals with the presence of other languages in a base language (language in use) ​​at the scriptural level. Objective: The main objective of the research is to explain the phenomenon of transfer in light of the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels and to be able to determine whether or not it is an ungrammaticality, as well as the reasons why this phenomenon occurs in language learning. Methodology: We made use of a method based on a series of interviews with foreign language teachers in Colombia and some surveys of language students. Results: Then a linguistic analysis was applied to a series of written texts where transfer was evident. Conclusion: Finally, it was concluded that the phenomena of transfer and interference do not occur due to the hierarchy of acquisition over learning, nor due to the kinship of languages ​​or similarities between them, but because of the affinities derived from the greater use or contact with the linguistic code.

First Traces to Writing Academically: The Crafts of my Third Semester Students

The essays that follow were part of a Reading and Writing Workshop that took place during the first semester of 2021 with students who are enrolled in a Modern Languages Program with emphasis in English at Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. These students were in their third semester, and this was the first time they were asked to start writing following some academic parameters.

Learning Needs of English and French Students from a Modern Languages Program at a Colombian University

This research study aims to analyze the learning needs of modern languages students at Universidad del Cauca and their implications on the bachelor’s program. These needs were analyzed by exploring students’ learning strategies and expectations, standards of competences, and other factors that might be affecting the learning of English and French. Data were gathered through questionnaires and a documentary review, framed by a mixed approach. The population was composed of 108 students, enrolled at the time the research started, who volunteered to take part in the study. The results show that students’ needs are mainly related to developing autonomy and a sense of ownership as to learning, identifying, and using learning strategies, being trained in learning strategies use, being exposed to innovative methodologies, and being exposed to more language practice. Consequently, the modern languages program is expected to take important actions to meet students’ needs in which all parties involved are committed. Finally, since needs analysis is meant to be the starting point in all teaching and learning processes, the methodology developed in this research could be useful for further studies on the same topic.
 

METACOGNITION AS A TOOL TO IMPROVE WRITING IN A SECOND LANGUAGE

This action research was developed with teachers and students from the Modern Languages ​program at the University of Quindio. An intervention strategy was designed to improve the performance of individual participants in regards to their written skills. The strategy aimed at providing a clear explanation of the mistakes found, placing the student into a position to consciously avoid them in future writings. The categories that emerged from the instruments and procedures performed were: utility, content and evaluation, showing that this proposal is an efficient alternative to improve English writing.

Evaluating normalisation: An argument-based approach

Now integral to our daily lives, the use of networked technologies is an expected part of modern language teaching. Grounded in concepts set out by Bax, we set out an argument-based approach to examine the constructive alignment of digital materials and learning outcomes in a blended modern language program. Through participatory action research, document analysis and stakeholder interviews, we focus on the ways that materials are understood and used by language educators and students alike. Analysis of the data points to areas of moderate support for the claim that normalization has been achieved, and mismatches are particularly prominent in the realm of stakeholder expectations. Importantly, the paper contributes to a view that a focus on blended materials provides insights into the processes of normalisation, and may well be predicated on the constructive alignment of materials design and learning outcomes.

Implementing an Instructional Design on Intercultural Communicative Competence (ICC) With Foreign Language Students Aimed at Joining the Corporate World

This study intends the validation of an instructional design on intercultural communicative competence (ICC) in the beginning levels of German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and English in the Modern Languages program at EAN University in Colombia. The design constituents: language integration, oral production, fieldwork activities, and a product/project gravitated around thematic units. The faculty application of the design is evidenced through annotated lesson plans together with the rationale for their classroom decision-making. The results indicate that an instructional design on intercultural communicative competence offers teachers and students a framework whose components acknowledge the participants’ diverse views and promote an intercultural learning environment in both relational and interpersonal terms.

Representaciones sociales de estudiantes universitarios sobre el plagio en la escritura académica

Learning what students think about academic writing becomes a valuable source of information that may significantly contribute to didactic proposals more suitable to educational needs. This study aims to inquire on notion about aca-demic writing among students; whether they are being trained on this subject, and which training they are getting ; and how they perceive themselves as writers since their beginning university studies until now. The target population was made up of 96 students in the Modern Languages program at the University of Deusto. They produced some narratives for the purposes of this cross-sectional qualitative study about students’ social representations. Findings suggest that gaining access to a whole new discursive community poses new challenges for students, face to which academic training is insufficient and inadequate. Moreover, while they may perceive some improvement in their writing performance throughout their career, they do not always attribute it to the education received.

Representaciones sociales de los estudiantes universitarios de grado sobre la escritura académica

Learning what students think about academic writing becomes a valuable source of information that may significantly contribute to didactic proposals more suitable to educational needs. This study aims to inquire on notion about aca-demic writing among students; whether they are being trained on this subject, and which training they are getting ; and how they perceive themselves as writers since their beginning university studies until now. The target population was made up of 96 students in the Modern Languages program at the University of Deusto. They produced some narratives for the purposes of this cross-sectional qualitative study about students’ social representations. Findings suggest that gaining access to a whole new discursive community poses new challenges for students, face to which academic training is insufficient and inadequate. Moreover, while they may perceive some improvement in their writing performance throughout their career, they do not always attribute it to the education received.

Diversities and motivations of Chinese L2 learners

AbstractIn the face of significant growth in student enrolments in Modern Chinese language programs at tertiary educational institutions in Australia, the ongoing Chinese language curriculum is facing challenges as to how to cater best for a corpus of students with various language backgrounds and motivations. This study aims to make contribution to the field of Chinese language education by examining how the students’ linguistic/cultural backgrounds and motivations have impacted on their learning of this language in Australian universities. This study examines the interrelationship between language background, motivation, language learning practice and academic achievement of newly-enrolled students in a modern Chinese language program with a view to creating a well-informed curriculum so as to further improve the students’ Chinese language proficiency. The primary data of this study consist of a questionnaire survey of 168 newly enrolled students and observation of first year classes in a modern Chinese language program at a leading university in Australia. While reaffirming that students’ linguistic backgrounds can make a significant impact on their language learning experience, motivations and academic results, this study finds that the closer the relation between the students’ cultural and linguistic background and the Chinese language, the easier it is for the students to learn the language. On the other hand, this situation can also lead to students’ high self-efficacy belief, which can be detrimental to their actual learning experience. Further, the study indicates that the students’ interest in Chinese language and culture as an intrinsic motivation greatly enhances their learning experience.

Students’ use of power in Foreign Language classroom interaction

AbstractThis paper reports the findings of a study which targeted to explore the way as undergraduate students express and use power in classrooms. It also aimed at finding out the sources of students’ power and their viewpoints about the issue. The population was two groups of prospective English teachers from the Modern Languages Program, at Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. Direct classroom observation, a teacher’s journal, and semi-structured interviews were the main sources for gathering information. The findings were grouped into four categoriesdealing with leadership, sources of students’ power, the ideal type of power in classrooms, and some wrong assumptions about power.Key words: classroom-interaction, collaborative learning, power sources, students’ power relations, and types of power. ResumenEste escrito relata los resultados de un estudio que tuvo por objeto explorar la manera como estudiantes de pregrado expresan y usan el poder en las aulas de clase. El estudio también intentó averiguar las fuentes de poder de los estudiantes y sus puntos de vista sobre el tema. Los participantes fueron dos grupos de futuros profesores de inglés del Programa de Idiomas Modernos de la Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia. Las principales fuentes para recolectar información fueron observación directa de clase, un diario del profesor y entrevistas semi-estructuradas. Los hallazgos fueron agrupados en cuatro categorías relacionadas con liderazgo, fuentes de poder en los estudiantes, el tipo ideal de poder y algunas creencias erróneassobre el poder.Palabras clave: interacción de clase, aprendizaje colaborativo, fuentes de poder, relaciones de poder entre estudiantes y tipos de poder.

Two Hugolian Moments in Novels by Patrick White

the courSe oF reading graham robb'S excellent biography oF Victor hugo, have stumbled on two details that might have found their way into the fiction of patrick White, bearing mind that he would have studied Hugo as part of the Modern Languages program at Cambridge. the first relates to the episode The Tree of Man which stan centers his credo on a lump of sputum as a way of signifying the inclusiveness of his pantheism:don't you believe perhaps? asked the evangelist, who had be- gun to look around him and to feel the necessity for some further stimulus of confession. i can show you some books, he yawned.then the old man, who had been cornered long enough, saw, through perversity perhaps, but with his own eyes. He was illuminated.He pointed with his stick at the gob of spittle.that is God, he said.As it lay glittering intensely and personally on the ground. (476)the same modulation from spittle to deity occurs Hugo's L'Âne, which haven't read, but which Robb quotes at one point: in a passage of L'Âne, Man boasts about his glorious creations-his sculptures, his inventions, his pots and his books-and then the ass, losing patience with the egocentric fool, puts him firmly his place: 'Very well then, spit on the wall, and now compare . . . / the great starry sky is the spittle of God' (394). What Hugo presents antithetically, White elides, but it seems likely that his yoking of heterogeneous ideas by violence together might well owe something to Hugo.Robb also informs us that, at a point before the collage had become an es- tablished vector of high art, Hugo had made a point of incorporating extraneous materials and media into his graphic work:Attempts to drag Hugo into the mainstream, to offer his work as it were the benefits of an institution, serve a useful purpose but entail a serious distortion. one simply cannot have one's hero astoundingly original and well behaved at the same time. Anyone who investigates the origins of a new style should expect to find a mess. Hugo scribbled, smudged, scratched and toyed. He was a lover of substances and textures-inanimate and human-a frotteur and a voyeur, a hoarder and a thrower-out; a man who, old age, stirred his food into an indescribable sludge which he called gribouillis (scribble).the single aspect of his art that provides a key to all the others has been obscured by misplaced veneration. …

Caracterización de las prácticas evaluativas en lengua extranjera

Se presenta una síntesis de los resultados más relevantes encontrados en la investigación titulada “Las prácticas evaluativas aplicadas en el área de francés del programa de Lenguas Modernas”. Este estudio tiene como objetivo dar cuenta de los discursos, herramientas y prácticas de los profesores de francés en la planeación, el diseño y el desarrollo de estrategias relacionadas con la evaluación, así como los factores que influyen en el desempeño académico de los estudiantes. Su propósito es generar espacios de reflexión para unificar criterios aplicables al quehacer pedagógico en el contexto de la evaluación en el área de las Lenguas Extranjeras.

Autonomy in English learning and its relationship with independent works assigned to students

The objective is to analyze the influence of learning practices and inde­pendent assignments, on the development of the autonomy of the students of the English basic cycle of the Modern Languages program. Descriptive and correlational investigation was used, which by means of quantitati­ve and qualitative interpretation of data relates the variables in the study, to determine its influence on the development of autonomy in students. Though some of them (25%) are autonomous, the rest do not reach this characteristic, due to little control exercised on their learning processes and because the tasks that are assigned to them do not help in the develo­pment of autonomy. The conclusion is that the strengths found in relation to the motivation of the students, their satisfaction with the program and their interest in ICT, are factors that if promoted, would contribute to the development of autonomy, work that has already begun and is commented on at the end of this article.
 Recieved 07-01-2010/ Accepted: 02-10-2010
 How to reference this article:
 Cabrales Vargas, M., Cáceres Cabrales, J. A. & Feria Marrugo, I. M. (2010). La autonomía en el aprendizaje del inglés y su relación con los trabajos independientes asignados a los estudiantes. Íkala, 15(3), 119 – 150.

Contrasting Two Approaches to Distance Language Learning

In this article we contrast two distance foreign language programs developed at two European institutions of higher education (the Modern Languages Program at the Open University, UK; and the English Program at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) as instances of two pedagogical models used to address the many challenges posed by teaching languages at a distance. A detailed analysis of both approaches reveals that the pedagogical choices made by both universities are in great measure determined by the historical and cultural contexts in which both institutions are embedded. In addition, we discuss the similarities and differences between the two and draw several conclusions regarding the appropriateness of the two distance universities' general educational, administrative, and technological models for distance language learning.

El trabajo de grado en la Licenciatura en Lenguas Modernas de la Universidad del Valle

El propósito de este artículo es presentar los hallazgos de un estudio descriptivo e histórico basado en la reconstrucción y el análisis del proceso de realización de los 206 trabajos de grado aprobados desde 1994 hasta junio de 2003, desarrollados por los estudiantes de la Licenciatura en Lenguas Modernas de la Escuela de Ciencias del Lenguaje de la Universidad del Valle. Se hizo la clasificación de estos trabajos según el área temática e incluyó los resúmenes, las metodologías utilizadas, los autores, los directores y los jurados evaluadores. Además, esta información se sistematizó en 8 archivos en formato electrónico.

Didáctica de los textos narrativos: una propuesta para el desarrollo de la competencia poética

Este artículo presenta la síntesis de una investigación en la cual se evalúa la implementación de una propuesta didáctica con tres grupos de estudiantes inscritos en la Licenciatura de Lenguas Extranjeras de la misma universidad. Se asume la integración de los principios básicos de la investigación formativa, proponiendo una opción didáctica de tipo interpretativo que reoriente en la formación inicial el orden conceptual y metodológico que en nuestro medio ha hecho tradición cuando se trata de la aproximación a los textos narrativos. Se explora de manera particular el método hermenéutico para lograr el desarrollo de la competencia poética de los estudiantes, mediante ejercicios con relatos verbales, no verbales y literarios.

Impacto de la formación investigativa en los estudiantes de Licenciatura de Idiomas de la Universidad de Caldas

Mediante el presente artículo las autoras pretenden compartir con los lectores, las experiencias investigativas de asesores y estudiantes del Programa de la Licenciatura en Lenguas Modernas, de la Universidad de Caldas, durante la etapa de Práctica Profesional Educativa. Se relatan los logros obtenidos a través del trabajo de investigación titulado “Investigación-Acción para Iniciar la Formación Científica de Licenciados en Lenguas Modernas”, patrocinado por COLCIENCIAS y ejecutado durante los años 2004-2005. Se describen además los efectos del proceso de investigación que desarrollan los investigadores en formación, tanto en su quehacer pedagógico como en el disciplinar.

The Modern Language Curriculum in a Technological University: A Non-departmentalized Case Study

In the following study we outline the mission of a technological university and the place of a non-departmentalized modern language program within this context. We discuss the perception of the modern language program and its curriculum by the administration, the faculty, and the students, whose competing discourses must be addressed in order to bring about effective curricular change. We go on to discuss the changes we have already implemented, and others that are still in the process of implementation. The results of recent surveys and interviews undertaken show that while faculty might place a higher value on LSP courses, the pragmatic motivation in learning a language does not come first for our students. Other motives - travel, leisure, culture appreciation - are at least equally important. While modern language faculty face considerable odds in retaining students in courses that may be perceived as less necessary for a technological education than the strictly technical in nature, needs analyses of Michigan Tech's institutional context show that these courses are not only desirable, but professionally as well as personally necessary to engineering students. The Modern Language Program at Michigan Tech is moving in the direction of a broader concept of modern language learning, one open to greater interdisciplinary and intercultural depth.

Book Reviews

Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Aging in Literature, Laurel Porter and Laurence M. Porter (Eds.). International Book Publishers, Troy, MI, xi + 179 pp., $10.95 (paper). Elizabeth W. Markson, PhD, Elizabeth W. Markson, PhD Book Review Editor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Frank Nuessel, PhD Frank Nuessel, PhD University of Louisville Classical and Modern Languages Program in LinguisticsLouisville, KY 40292 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar The Gerontologist, Volume 25, Issue 5, October 1985, Pages 558–559, https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/25.5.558 Published: 01 October 1985

A Modern Language Program Based on the Expressed Interests of the Individual Student

I wonder what the reaction of our students would be if we were to ask each one as he or she came into our room that first day of classes, "What would you like to be able to talk about in the language which we are going to begin to study today?"