Recursos

The correlation between teacher training and the listening assessment practices is analyzed with regard to teachers in the Costa Rican educational system. The results of a workshop on theory of listening assessment and guidelines provided by the Ministry of Public Education suggest that these testing practices can be improved with training that unifies official guidelines and listening assessment theory.

This research sought to explore the connection between a small-group intensive reading comprehension project and students’ performance in two sample English national exit exams (ENEEs) developed by the Ministry of Public Education, Costa Rica. The data were gathered from an intervention plan that combined the theoretical principles of schema theory, scaffolded reading comprehension, and intensive reading. The study adopts an action-research approach and uses a mixed design that combines quantitative and qualitative data in the analysis and interpretation of results. Participants included twelve students from a public high school in the Western Area of Costa Rica who needed special preparation for the ENEE, which narrows the research scope down to this population only. The data collection techniques included two sample ENEEs, field notes, and research artifacts. Findings reveal positive effects of scaffolded reading comprehension on student ENEE performance, but also they warn that generalizations to larger populations are not possible. The study yields implications at theoretical and practical levels, and it calls for further investigation as a way to tackle the limitations identified.

is qualitative study explores the perception of eight seventh-grade teachers from academic schools in the western region ofCosta Rica about implementing the action-oriented approach (AOA). As the main objective, the researchers sought to assess thepronts. e results show a favorable perceptionof the approach, yet the individuals could not clearly define the AOA for they perceived the materials, the student, and theteacher’s roles as strengths; and tests, materials, and planning as weaknesses. e continuities and variations were not tied to theapproach and the most salient innovations were the teacher’s guide and the mini-project. e researchers concluded that thereexist discrepancies between the participants’ understanding of the AOA and the actual tenets of the approach.

Throughout this paper, and avoiding prescriptions, the role of students is defined as the center of the language teaching-learning process, and assessment as the means for helping students constructing and empowering their own learning. The role of traditional evaluation methods and techniques is shortly analyzed to conclude that these methods and techniques work well for data transrnission but, because of their inherent exclusion factor, they cannot get focused on more important processes that have to be rnotivated at the interior of schools in order to promote meaningful learning. Assessment methods and techniques integrate individual characteristics (the different ways in which individuals learn and perceive the world, the cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the gender), the subject matter (both established contents from language teaching, the considerations from the fields of linguistics, pedagogy, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, didactics), and the socio-historical reality (the educational challenges that democracy, liberty, equity, and justice demand from education).

This article analyzes the pertinence of Interactions 1 as the core textbook in the IO-5400 Oral Communication I course, a first-year-course of the Bachelor’s Program in English Teaching at a public university in Costa Rica. Thus, the methodology proposed in the textbook, its design (images, teaching strategies for the development of oral and listening skills, supplementary book resources, among others) and its curricular approach were studied in order to determine the congruence between the theoretical principles established by the experts on materials design and evaluation and the book in question. Along the same lines, the pertinence of the book in relation to different aspects of the curriculum of the major, such as the students’ exit profile, the objectives and the methodology, among others, were also analyzed. This is a descriptive study that undertook mixed research strategies, where data collection instruments such as a checklist and a Likert scale were combined; the data analysis and interpretation was done through triangulation. The study revealed, on the one hand, that the level of congruence of Interactions 1 with the theoretical principles of materials design and evaluation is insufficient. Conversely, with regard to the curricular aspects of the major, the book proved acceptable as long as instructors contextualize and supplement it with their own resources and teaching strategies so that it is fully satisfactory to the English learning process. Findings call for the use of research-informed criteria in ELT materials design which match the specific English teaching language curricula

El V Congreso Internacional de Lingüística Aplicada (CILAP) se realizó en la Universidad Nacional (Heredia, Costa Rica) en el Campus Omar Dengo entre el 5 y el 7 de octubre de 2016. Estuvo auspiciado por la Escuela de Literatura y Ciencias del Lenguaje, de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Se recogen en este tomo diecinueve documentos presentados de las diversas actividades del congreso (conferencia inaugural, mesas redondas, talleres y ponencias). Los siguientes ejes temáticos orientaron su desarrollo: adquisición y aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras, traductología, lenguajes en áreas especializadas, política lingüística, lingüística aplicada a áreas específicas y análisis del discurso.

Current complexities of English teaching in Costa Rica’s public secondary education are discussed. Using an autoethnographic research approach, critical incidents of an EFL teacher are examined in light of Complexity Theory. Findings suggest that classrooms are unpredictable sites of struggle where multiple rationalities coexist (and often conflict), which must be understood before random decisions are made. For applied linguistics, the study is relevant at three levels: it expands the bulk of literature on the subject, it calls for more attention to the complexities of EFL, and it opens an avenue for reflection and future research directions.

This study examines the simultaneous bilingual acquisition of English and Spanish by a boy from age 1;2.0 to 2;3.3. Transcripts and diary recordings were examined in order to establish the way in which phonological, lexical, morphological, syntactic, and pragmatic skills developed in the child’s speech. The child’s development was contrasted to that in monolingual English and Spanish-speaking children of comparable ages, and the results evidenced an analogous progress at the phonological and morpho-syntactic levels, which suggests language autonomy. The child’s rate of translation equivalents was also analyzed, as well as his rate of mixing and whether these were grammatically constrained. The boy started making use of translation equivalents as soon as these were available in his speech, and by and large, his mixing resulted from lack of equivalents in the two languages. He always used more of the interlocutor’s language and was able to correct himself and to use the appropriate language after his interlocutor prompted him to do so. Furthermore, the child’s mixing never evidenced any violations to the grammatical constraints that apply to adult language mixing. The latter observable facts also suggest an autonomous development of the two languages.

The graduate program in Teaching English at the University of Costa Rica offers yearly English courses to satisfy the language learning needs at different departments, research centers, or similar institutions. The objective of this article was to analyze the extent to which a group of student teachers fulfilled the roles of the instructors in the Task Based Language Teaching method used in the graduate program. The study used a mixed-methods approach and the subjects were three instructors during their teaching practicum. The roles of the instructors were assessed by the practicum supervisors, fellow students in the practicum, the students in the course, and the instructors themselves through rubrics, observation sheets, surveys, and teaching journals. The results from the different instruments using different scales pointed to the instructors fulfilling the roles of sequencing tasks and motivating the learners a majority of the times. The roles of preparing the learners for tasks and raising consciousness were fulfilled to a lesser extent, which indicated that the instructors needed to work further on these areas. The study concluded with recommendations for improving the roles that revealed weaknesses, notably aimed to provide a manageable numbers of vocabulary items and grammar structures in the pretask, as well as to provide prompt feedback, and to elicit students’ knowledge for the development of lessons