Guided use of writing prompts to improve academic writing in college students

The paper presents empirical data supporting the hypothesis that the systematic and guided use of academic writing prompts is a successful instructional strategy to improve the academic writing in Spanish of college students, mainly during their first semesters. A combined methodology, with pre- and post-tests, was used in this research project conducted from July 2009 to June 2010. The participants were freshmen students of different disciplines of the Human Sciences in a private university in Bogota, Colombia. The aim of this research project was twofold. First, it sought to identify the difficulties students faced in the writing process of academic texts when they are related to real communicative contexts. Second, it involved the design and application of the guided and systematic use of writing prompts for academic writing in a sequence called "The Cognitive Pedagogical Model of Writing for Higher Education". The results show empirical evidence supporting the use of writing prompts designed with specific academic purposes to improve the academic writing level of college students in their first stages of study. However, further research is needed to consolidate the results presented here

Un formalismo para la extracción de información semántica en textos matemáticos

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid,. Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Ingeniería Informática. Fecha de lectura: 12-6-199

Modality and the theory of meaning [An examination of the programmes of Davidson, Dummett and Montague]

Each of the three main chapters of this thesis is concerned with a different style of theorising about the semantics of natural language and in particular with the way they would tackle expressions of modality. What unites the three approaches is their commitment to the study of a language through a systematic theory which will account for all its sentences, according to some general principle such as: meaning = truth conditions. They diverge widely on the implementation of this idea, ie. on the aims and form of a theory of meaning. The first promises a very spartan hind, of theory; there is therefore considerable interest in discovering how such an austere method will manage to handle the intricacies of intensionality. To this end several ways of coping are examined, in the first chapter. The second approach permits itself a much richer means of describing the semantics of a language. Consequently, the concern of the second chapter is not so much with coping, as with marshalling these more powerful resources into a detailed analysis of some of the linguistic manifestations of modality. The third approach is, as yet, more often critical than constructive. It seeks to replace theories of the first two kinds, founded on what it sees as an unjustified realist metaphysics, with a more cognitive semantics. In the course of the thesis, different manifestations of modal concepts within sentences of natural language are examined, ranging from the 'outermost', sentential operator occurrences to the 'innermost' occurrences where the modality is interwoven into the property expressed by a simple predicate. Thus in the last chapter, the import of the criticisms raised by the third approach is assessed with special reference to dispositional predicates.<p

Criteria of Empirical Significance: Foundations, Relations, Applications

This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific status of intelligent design, and further discuss confirmation, reduction, and concept formation

Evidence and Formal Models in the Linguistic Sciences

This dissertation contains a collection of essays centered on the relationship between theoretical model-building and empirical evidence-gathering in linguistics and related language sciences. The first chapter sets the stage by demonstrating that the subject matter of linguistics is manifold, and contending that discussion of relationships between linguistic models, evidence, and language itself depends on the subject matter at hand. The second chapter defends a restrictive account of scientific evidence. I make use of this account in the third chapter, in which I argue that if my account of scientific evidence is correct, then linguistic intuitions do not generally qualify as scientific evidence. Drawing on both extant and original empirical work on linguistic intuitions, I explore the consequences of this conclusion for scientific practice. In the fourth and fifth chapters I examine two distinct ways in which theoretical models relate to the evidence. Chapter four looks at the way in which empirical evidence can support computer simulations in evolutionary linguistics by informing and constraining them. Chapter five, on the other hand, probes the limits of how models are constrained by the data, taking as a case study empirically-suspect but theoretically-useful intentionalist models of meaning

Criteria of Empirical Significance: Foundations, Relations, Applications

This dissertation consists of three parts. Part I is a defense of an artificial language methodology in philosophy and a historical and systematic defense of the logical empiricists' application of an artificial language methodology to scientific theories. These defenses provide a justification for the presumptions of a host of criteria of empirical significance, which I analyze, compare, and develop in part II. On the basis of this analysis, in part III I use a variety of criteria to evaluate the scientific status of intelligent design, and further discuss confirmation, reduction, and concept formation