Teacher Targets: A model for CLIL and ELF teacher education in polytechnic settings

The objective of this paper is to present an alternative model for CLIL/ELF teacher education, called the Teacher Target Model, which may help hard-science teachers undertake English-medium instruction more efficiently. Conceived as a visual educational trope for changing mentalities and practices, it derives from the needs analysis of a group of polytechnic teachers who have participated in the cycles of in-service training seminars given at the Polytechnic University of Madrid since 2009. Their notions, impressions, and video-recorded performances reveal that in general they hold a monolithic conception of classroom interactions and teaching procedures, with an ensuing impoverishment of genre and language repertoires. To bridge this gap, the model proposed here cross-weaves five discursive strands converging in university lectures, namely disciplinary discourse, (meta)discourse of the medium, embedded genres, lecture phase, and teaching style, thus fostering natural communication beyond the delivery of technical content and bringing ELF instruction closer to the CLIL dynamics

Pragmatic and Metacognitive Applications of Metaphor and Metonymy in Dialogic Professional Genres: the Case of the Job Interview

This article brings into focus the notion of metaphorical competence (MC) and posits the inclusion of its explicit training in LSP syllabi, stressing its important function in dialogic self-evaluative genres like the job/selection interview. A perspective of the different approaches to MC is given prior to discussing the features and specific difficulties intrinsic to the interview, as well as to analysing the meta-cognitive and pragmatic roles of metaphor and metonymy and the constraints governing them. Both tropes prove efficacious lexical activators and mnemonics and valid politeness strategies, especially as conflict neutralizers, intimacy builders, hedges, persuasive devices and topic-closing formulas. Key words: metaphorical compe- tence, metaphor, metonymy, metacognition, pragmatic impact, LSP

Semiotic Shortcuts. The Graphical Abstract Strategies of Engineering Students

  Graphical abstracts are representative of the rising promotionalism, interdisciplinarity and changing researcher roles in the current dissemination of science and technology. Their design, moreover, amalgamates a number of transdisciplinary skills much valued in higher education, such as critical and lateral thinking, and cultural and audience awareness. In this study, I investigate a corpus of 56 samples of graphical abstracts devised by my aeronautical engineering students, to find out the ‘semiotic shortcuts’ or encoding strategies they deploy, without any previous instruction, to pack information and translate the verbal into the visual. Findings suggest that their ‘natural digital-native graphicacy’ is conservative as to the medium, format and type of representation, but versatile regarding particular meanings, although not always unambiguous or register-appropriate. Consequently, I claim the convenience of including graphicacy/visual literacy and some basic training on graphical abstract design in the English for Specific Purposes and the disciplinary English-medium curriculum.  

¿Qué implica enseñar en inglés? Temores, limitaciones y recursos

Si bien el título de esta comunicación deja claro que la docencia de grados bilingües entraña obstáculos—tanto de índole institucional como personal—mi propósito es transmitir un mensaje de ánimo y optimismo a los centros y departamentos comprometidos con este reto educativo. Muchos temores emanan de la desinformación y de la ausencia de estrategias, y se pueden mitigar en gran medida con ayuda de una planificación eficaz y de redes de cooperación sólidas. La implantación e implementación de planes de estudio en lenguas extranjeras no está siendo uniforme en nuestras universidades, y así encontramos regiones con una larga tradición de bilingüismo, e incluso de multilingüismo, como Cataluña, la Comunidad Valenciana y el País Vasco, y áreas en las que las diversas instituciones de educación superior que coexisten adoptan la enseñanza bilingüe con intensidades y ritmos diferentes. Tal es el caso de la Comunidad de Madrid. En mi entorno académico inmediato, la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (de ahora en adelante UPM), persisten una serie de mitos, conceptos erróneos y hábitos en torno a la docencia bilingüe difíciles de combatir y que generan inseguridades y reticencias. Abordaré primero los que circulan en la esfera colectiva para pasar después al plano individual. A continuación facilitaré ideas y apuntaré recursos para mitigar ambos tipos de dificultad

Descriptive Strategies in U.S. Patents

While the knowledge contained in US patents descriptions is essentially the same as that conveyed by textbooks and journal articles (Myers 1995, Owen-Smith 2003), it must be shaped to claim temporary exclusive property over an invention. To effectively safeguard the value of such property, patents must reveal enough to suggest technical feasibility but conceal detail to cloud the specifications making replication easy. Usually co-authored by inventors and lawyers, the genre is therefore expected to hold a subtle interplay between boosting and hedging and gather traits from interdisciplinary discourses (Hyland 2000), in this case technical and legal. The aim of this study in progress is twofold: 1) to identify the linguistic act patterns used to match the requirements of legal patentability and the commercial interests of inventors, and 2) to bridge a gap in the know-how of readers and technical students by determining the discursive moves and interdisciplinary traits of the genre, comparing them with more familiar instances like manuals or specialized publications. To achieve this purpose, a corpus of 343 US electro-mechanical patents has been analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively with concordancing software at a macro (rhetorical) and microlevel (linguistic realizations). At this first stage of the research, the prime focus has been set on the most common boosting and hedging devices which stylistically feature the genre and may constitute a lexical and discursive technolectal repertoire useful for both professionals and engineering students. Among the devices detected, some (e.g. signaling nouns and verbs, repetition, evaluative adjectives and adverbs, inferential markers as code glosses) are signs of a pragmatic deference towards the non-expert members of the discursive community (i.e. lawyers and potential investors) and prove to be efficient means to overcome knowledge asymmetries

La repetición como agente de cohesión en el texto técnico

El propósito de este trabajo es subrayar la importancia de la repetición en el establecimiento de la cohesión del texto escrito, resaltando de manera especial funciones tradicionalmente relegadas al análisis conversacional pero de gran utilidad en la enseñanza del discurso técnico, como la señalización temática y la organización macroestructural, que trascienden idiolectos, realces enfáticos y constricciones idiomáticas y estilísticas. El presente estudio, desarrollado conjuntamente por miembros de las Unidades Docentes de Lingüística Aplicada de las Escuelas Técnicas de Ingenieros Aeronáuticos y de Caminos, Canales y Puertos de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, revela que la frecuencia en el uso de la repetición no parece ser el factor diferenciador entre la escritura profesional competente y los textos de cohesión deficiente redactados por los estudiantes de ingeniería, sino que más bien se trata de pautas conscientes de utilización temática y metadiscursiva de la repetición que generan conexiones léxico-sintácticas a distancia y una progresión no lineal

Abridged Abstracts: Rushing the Research Race

Mediante un análisis de corpus manual y electrónico exploro la estructura retórica y los rasgos discursivos de los resúmenes abreviados en dos campos diferentes: la Lingüística Aplicada y la Ingeniería Electrónica, Informática, y de Telecomunicaciones. Mi objetivo es analizar hasta qué punto estos resúmenes abreviados, que curiosamente incluyen elementos en apariencia superfluos, son informativos. Según mis hallazgos, este tipo de resumen soporta una tensión entre dos fuerzas opuestas: economía retórica por una parte, y meta-referencia y autopromoción, por otra. Mi conclusión es que estos dos últimos elementos, aunque prescindibles, balizan contenidos específicos, facilitando con ello la escritura y agilizando la criba de información.Through manual and electronic corpus analysis, I explore the rhetorical structure and discursive features of abridged abstracts in two distinct fields: Applied Linguistics and Electronic, Telecommunications and Computer Engineering. My goal is to discuss whether shortened abstracts, which do include some apparently superfluous elements, are truly informative, and to compare trends in the two broad fields mentioned. According to my findings, abridged abstracts withstand a tension between two opposing forces: rhetorical economy on the one hand, and meta-reference and self-promotion on the other. My claim is that, although dispensable, meta-reference and self-promotion fulfil important beaconing functions that facilitate text production and accelerate research screening

THE EMOTIONAL PROSODY OF U.S. FATAL AIR-ACCIDENT DOCKETS ONLINE: RISKING RISK COMMUNICATION?

Risk communication is grounded in both rationality and emotion (Fischhoff & Kadvany 2011, Bo-holm & Corvellec 2014). Recent investigations have proved that emotions do affect risk and danger percep-tions by functioning as ‘mediators’ (Xie et al. 2011) and become important in decision-making. My study explores how emotion is induced by the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States of America (NTSB for short) to influence the mentalities and behaviours of its broad mixed audience and thus increase risk prevention. With that research purpose in mind, I examine an electronic corpus of over 500 online samples of fatal aviation dockets issued yearly online by the NTSB between the time span 2010-2015 and contained in its website databases. The emotional engagement deployed to mediate the perceptions of risk and danger by the general public constitutes a unique genre among all other world transportation agencies, since through informative vividness it pursues to activate the processes of memory, inference (i.e. judgement) and decision-making. I take Stubbs’ (2001) concept of ‘discursive prosody’ as point of departure and resort to a blended theoretical framework that combines Narratology, Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Proximisation (Cap 2013) and Positioning (Harré & van Langenhove 1999) Theories. I will show that the NTSB’s emotional prosody is more rhetorical than lexical and that the narrative strategies of focalisation and speech representation play a salient role. To conclude I will reflect on some of the possible consequences of over-exploiting emotional engagement in risk communication

Understanding the inventor’s mind through patent analysis: a clil team-teaching experience at the Technical University of Madrid

Describimos una iniciativa de enseñanza en equipo, basada en la metodología CLIL y aplicada recientemente en la Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Agrónomos de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Dos profesoras—una ingeniera agrónoma y una lingüista, junto con cerca de 20 estudiantes de máster, analizamos una patente contrastándola con un artículo de investigación homólogo, escrito por los mismos autores sobre el mismo objeto tecnológico, y examinando sus diferentes contextos y consecuencias sociales. Con una duración de siete horas y media y un carácter eminentemente práctico, el seminario impartido no sólo se ha diseñado para proporcionar contenidos disciplinarios (agronómicos) y procedimentales (las estrategias propias de la escritura de patentes), sino también para suscitar sensibilidad hacia el lector y fomentar competencias transversale

Genre-based strategies for integrating critical and creative thinking in Engineering and Journalism

In this paper we propose genre-based strategies for integrating two key lifelong competencies, critical and creative thinking, in Engineering and Journalism. In both disciplines there is a need to apply professional expertise in various contexts and to communicate with different audiences. Drawing on previous studies, we sketch a basic needs analysis in these professional fields, point to major learning obstacles, and provide guidelines for collaboration between language and content teachers in English-medium instruction settings. In such collaboration, genre is simultaneously the hub, the framing structure, and the shared middle ground between content and form and even between disparate disciplines. Our goal is an integrative pedagogy that merges the acquisition of disciplinary content and procedures with the practice of ‘soft skills’ and the ability to transform and interrelate knowledge. Our contention for both Engineering and Journalism is that by allowing students to understand genres and explore their potential, we can provide them with learning experiences in which critical thinking and creativity are engaged