Recursos

Between the years 2014 and 2015 researchers started to work as supervisors in the teaching practicum. From that point on, every year they noticed that the student-teachers struggle regarding how to assess English at the elementary school level. Since students from the Bachelor “Elementary Education with a minor in English” already take an evaluation course, researching the reasons for that weakness was key to better support our students. That is why this article presents the results of the qualitative research carried out in 2016 aiming to explore the need for designing an evaluation course taught in English and tailored to the students enrolled in the Bachelor “Elementary Education with a minor in English” at the University of Costa Rica, Western Campus. Through the use of an exploratory and phenomenological design, the researchers interviewed thirteen studentteachers, nine former students from this bachelor, an experienced elementary school teacher, and two authorities from the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica (MEP) to obtain their perspectives about the course ED0196 “Evaluation of the Learning Process in Early Childhood and Primary Education.” Also, the syllabus of the course was analyzed based on what students must know to assess a foreign language. Data showed that although students learn about many instruments and assessment criteria, many of them are not tailored to assess English as a Foreign Language but other core subjects. Based on the findings, the researchers concluded that the course ED0196 does not meet the needs of these students, and therefore, the university needs to design a course specifically tailored for them.

This study reports evidence of cross-linguistic influence in possessive constructions in the speech of an EnglishSpanish simultaneous bilingual child between ages 2;3 and 5;6. Although in English possessives might be prenominal (‘-s), they might also be post-nominal (of possessives); the latter realization of the possessive is restricted to certain semantic contexts. In contrast, possession is always post-nominal in Spanish. Unlike the monolingual child English data and the English parental speech which revealed mostly instances of the pre-nominal possessive (only 3% in the child data), the bilingual child produced post-nominal possessives in 33% of his English possessives. Similarly, though the monolingual child Spanish data revealed no non-target-like forms, the bilingual child produced a significant number of pre-nominal possessives (e.g.’de las cabritas mamá’), which is never grammatical in Spanish. The non-target-like forms found in the bilingual child data strongly suggest evidence of influence of Spanish onto English as well as influence of English onto Spanish.

Spanish has a rich verb inflectional system with up to 53 inflectional verb forms distributed between regular and irregular verbs and in which roots are always bound, as verbs must contain markings for person, tense/aspect, and number. The acquisition of verb morphology by native speakers reportedly reflects this complexity in that children produce multiple non-target-like forms wherein tense, person, and number errors are found. This study reports all verb forms identified in the spontaneous speech by a group of 15 native Spanish-speaking children ages 3;6 to 5;6. The analysis of all 233 verb forms analyzed revealed some pronunciation errors, number agreement errors, errors in the use of clitic pronouns, and incorrect use of person and tense agreement. The majority of non-target-like forms identified consisted of regularization of verb forms wherein regular conjugation morphemes were attached to irregular verbs. A few –ar type verbs additionally showed ir-regularization of regular verbs, as children used conjugations which apply to irregular verbs with regular verbs.

This article is a systematization of experiences on the Continuing Education Program of the Western Headquarters of the University of Costa. The objective is to present the challenges and achievements of the first year of work. Five steps were used for the methodology: Departure Point, Initial Questions, Rebuilding the lived Process, Reflection, and Arrival Points. In the reflection step, it is explained why the changes occurred in terms of geographic location, project target population, program objectives, and administrative management issues. The greatest achievement of the program was to offer more courses than those established in the objectives, and its greatest challenge was to deal with the administrative management involved in opening such a program

This paper examines the connection between student self-evaluation strategies and autonomy development in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. To this end, 18 students enrolled in a phonetics class participated in a constructivist-based action research plan. Using different autonomy-oriented instruments, students set their learning goals and self-assessment strategies to foster learner autonomy and evaluated their learning experiences at the end of the semester. The study adopted a triangulation mixed methods design, where quantitative results were used concurrently with the qualitative data. Findings suggest clear-cut connections between self-evaluation strategies and the development of learner autonomy in the context of EFL.

This study describes the substitution patterns of the trill found in naturalistic speech by 34 monolingual Spanish-speaking Costa Rican children between ages 3 and 5;6. In the 843 target-words identified, a total of six different phonetic realizations of the trill were found: a trill (2% of the time), an assibilated rhotic (45% of the time), a post alveolar affricate (9% of the time), a voiced labio-dental fricative (17% of the time), a voiced interdental fricative (9% of the time), and a lateral approximant (3% of the time). Interestingly, these phonetic realizations were not used consistently, as children relied on two or more phonetic realizations, regularly within a single session and to pronounce the same word. surfaced most likely as a result of the children’s input, whereas and, which are not part of the children’s input, as well as the other phonetic realizations, surfaced most likely as approximations of the articulatorily very complex trill.

O artigo relata a situação do crioulo limoense, uma língua minoritária derivada do inglês e do crioulo jamaicano, falada por uma parcela da população afro-costarriquenha. Por meio de um questionário aplicado a quarenta e cinco participantes, é evidenciado que, embora exista uma demanda externa que força esse grupo linguístico a usar o espanhol para o trabalho e a educação, o crioulo limonense é a língua dominante para a maioria dos afrodescendentes. Essa parcela da população expressa seu orgulho de ser afrodescendente, destacando sua gastronomia, sua música calypso e o fato de serem bilíngues como características que os identificam. Eles enfatizam a importância de manter essa língua minoritária para que possam transmiti-la às novas gerações como uma estratégia de proteção identitária e preservação da sua cultura e tradições.

Despite listening being one of the most crucial skills in the process of communication, research shows that it has been neglected in most English as a Foreign Language (EFL) programs, both worldwide and in Costa Rica. Worse yet, mismatches between theory and practice often result in poor listening assessment in many institutions. Thus, this article examined current listening testing practices by Ministry of Public Education (in Spanish, MEP) in-service teachers ranked C1 according to the Common European Framework (CEF) in bilingual secondary schools of the West Area of Costa Rica. Listening tests created and administered by those teachers were analyzed for their compliance with both theory on listening assessment and MEP’s guidelines on assessment. The study revealed that even though teachers had previously received training on testing, the tests they created do not fully comply with both MEP’s guidelines and theoretical principles on listening assessment. Findings expand conclusions drawn by Gamboa and Sevilla (2013) in previous research on listening assessment and provide several contributions to the current bulk of literature on listening testing practices in Costa Rica. Such conclusions also reveal areas of listening assessment that need to be further tackled through teacher training.

This article analyzes the construction of masculinity in Devi Mahasweta’s “The Hunt”. Michael Kimmel and R.W. Connell’s work on gender identity are used as a theoretical support to identify the different masculine archetypes present in the text. Also, masculinity is conceived as a discursive structure determined by the socio-historical conditions that interpellate individuals; in this case, capitalism. Finally, it is concluded that each character embodies a particular, and in some cases more than one, male identity in conflict. These male identities are the result of capitalist and cultural globalizing processes that affect the Kuruban society.

The aim of this study was to assess factors affecting the quality of paraphrases written by college level EFL learners. A three-dimensional paraphrasing competence model by McCarthy, Guess, and McNamara (2009) was followed to assess the texts for semantic completeness, lexical difference, and syntactic difference. The selected method was a mixed method approach. The quantitative analysis was used to measure the rate of success of each paraphrasing competence whereas the qualitative analysis aimed to describe the perceived difficulty of the competences and the reasons behind it. The subjects were 17 EFL students enrolled in a third year English composition course at the University of Costa Rica. The corpus of the study consisted of 51 paraphrases. Following three rounds of examinations and the analysis of students’ perceptions, the lexical dimension emerged as the most challenging area interfering with paraphrase quality, with semantic completeness also emerging as difficult. Other factors affecting paraphrase quality were inappropriate use of passive voice, style and register, and inaccurate lexical substitutions. The study concluded with recommendations to improve instructional cycles by reinforcing reading comprehension and lexical development, and by assessing the different dimensions of paraphrasing separately.