Reading to learn in chemistry ESP courses = Leer para aprender en cursos de Inglés con propósitos específicos, aplicación experimental del ciclo de andamiaje en la Facultad de Ciencias Químicas de la UNC

The development of reading comprehension in a foreign language has been of concern to many applied linguists, who have proposed different approaches to enhance students’ comprehension. Scaffolding has been identified as one of the most effective teaching practices to enrich students’ reading comprehension. This study aims to test an adapted model of the Scaffolding Interaction Cycle (Martin and Rose, 2005) in the context of a reading comprehension course at the School of Chemistry, National University of Córdoba, in an attempt to help solve some of the main problems detected in the mainstream classroom approach, such as lack of understanding of reading strategies and of grammatical structures, and poor comprehension of semantically dense texts. A quasi-experimental study with no random assignment (one-group, pre- and post-test design) based on quantitative and qualitative methods to collect and analyse the data was conducted. In general, the results indicate that the instruction based on the adapted version of the Scaffolding Interaction Cycle contributes to enhancing the teaching of EFL reading and helps poor-skilled readers improve their reading comprehension skills. These results have pedagogical implications for reading courses addressed to non-native students who are studying English for Specific Purposes

Treebank-based acquisition of Chinese LFG resources for parsing and generation

This thesis describes a treebank-based approach to automatically acquire robust,wide-coverage Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) resources for Chinese parsing and generation, which is part of a larger project on the rapid construction of deep, large-scale, constraint-based, multilingual grammatical resources. I present an application-oriented LFG analysis for Chinese core linguistic phenomena and (in cooperation with PARC) develop a gold-standard dependency-bank of Chinese f-structures for evaluation. Based on the Penn Chinese Treebank, I design and implement two architectures for inducing Chinese LFG resources, one annotation-based and the other dependency conversion-based. I then apply the f-structure acquisition algorithm together with external, state-of-the-art parsers to parsing new text into "proto" f-structures. In order to convert "proto" f-structures into "proper" f-structures or deep dependencies, I present a novel Non-Local Dependency (NLD) recovery algorithm using subcategorisation frames and f-structure paths linking antecedents and traces in NLDs extracted from the automatically-built LFG f-structure treebank. Based on the grammars extracted from the f-structure annotated treebank, I develop a PCFG-based chart generator and a new n-gram based pure dependency generator to realise Chinese sentences from LFG f-structures. The work reported in this thesis is the first effort to scale treebank-based, probabilistic Chinese LFG resources from proof-of-concept research to unrestricted, real text. Although this thesis concentrates on Chinese and LFG, many of the methodologies, e.g. the acquisition of predicate-argument structures, NLD resolution and the PCFG- and dependency n-gram-based generation models, are largely language and formalism independent and should generalise to diverse languages as well as to labelled bilexical dependency representations other than LFG

The written production of ecuadorian efl high school students: grammatical transfer errors and teacher's and learner's perception of feedback

346 p.El objetivo de esta tesis doctoral es investigar los errores gramaticales de transferencia en la escritura en inglés como lengua extranjera de alumnos de secundaria ecuatorianos (n=180) y su grado de prevalencia en comparación a los errores léxicos de transferencia. Así mismo, se intenta comparar la variación de los errores gramaticales de transferencia obtenidos en tres grupos de alumnos clasificados de acuerdo a su nivel de dominio de inglés según el Marco Común Europeo (A1, A2, B1) y la variación de dichos errores entre dos tipos de ensayo: narrativo y argumentativo. Finalmente, se desea conocer las percepciones de los estudiantes y profesores con respecto a la retroalimentación en la escritura de inglés como lengua extranjera proporcionada en las clases. Todo esto se realiza con el propósito de contribuir a tratar de cumplir una parte de las metas del Ministerio de Educación del Ecuador relacionadas a la búsqueda de una mejora en el nivel de dominio de inglés como lengua extranjera en estudiantes de educación secundaria