Recursos

This study examines future teachers’ theoretical reflections on Critical Incidents and how these link to Costa Rica’s English teaching system. Participants included 30 senior college students from an English teaching program. Using narrative research techniques, the authors have concluded that: (1) spaces for reflection must be created in EFL so that students’ voices are heard; (2) both instruction and assessment need to be tackled not from the native speaker angle but from the learner language perspective; and (3) because mistakes are both inherent to foreign language learning and an indicator of language development, more tolerance to learner errors needs to be exercised. The study proves relevant for language pedagogy and Applied Linguistics (AL) since it paves the way for further research, opens room for reflection and dialogue, and enhances our understanding of the issue at stake from a future-teacher standpoint.

This article analyzes Anancy’s cognitive and sociohistorical identity beyond the moralistic approach of the western philosophy of being. Instead, Anancy stories are studied as a decolonized expression of an afrodescendant Caribbeanness that struggles to survive in an imperial context. There is placed special emphasis on Anancy and his relationship with other animals of the forest present in the stories collected by a group of Costa Rican researchers. Walter Mignolo’s concept of colonial and imperial differences, the notion of the trickster, Mikael Bakhtin’s carnival, the psychological theories of the id and humor are used to support the analysis. Finally, it is concluded that Anancy stories are the result of resistance but more importantly, they reveal a nontraditional subversion that guarantees hope in a hopeless system. In this sense, Anancy does not accept fatalism as a cognitive structure of his identity; even though, he lives in a fatalistic society.

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.

This research paper discusses the benefits and implications of bringing authentic assessment into listening comprehension classes. The study was run in 2016 based on a mixed-methods model to research and included 38 college students enrolled in a listening comprehension class at an English Teaching Major (ETM) from the University of Costa Rica (UCR). Data collection instruments included plans of improvement, portfolios, self-assessment forms, teacher-student conferences, verbal calls, and impromptu reflections. Data were validated through several procedures (e.g., triangulation and reflexivity) and analyzed in the form of emerging themes from the information collected. Findings are that authentic assessment can and should be used more in listening comprehension classes to bring assessment and instruction together, as well as to provide opportunities for skills integration. The study yields implications for theory and practice, and it constitutes a proposal to move from traditional to process evaluation, and from norm-referenced testing towards more criterion-referenced assessment. Nonetheless, the aim should not necessarily be a radical ‘no’ to paperand-pencil tests, but a more balanced use in combination with other strategies so that assessment becomes more reliable, valid, fair, and authentic for all EFL actors involved.

This article presents the most relevant results found in the “Licenciatura” graduation research project for 
the BA in Teaching English offered by the University of Costa Rica, Campus Occidente. The work, entitled 
“Strengths and Weaknesses in Teaching English Literature in Experimental Bilingual High Schools of the 
Western Educational Region of Costa Rica: A Study from the Teachers’ Perspectives”, was conducted in 
2012 and 2013. 36 EFL teachers participated. This paper presents results on the strengths and weaknesses 
of teachers’ academic and professional training in light of the implementation of the English literature 
syllabus of the Costa Rican Ministry of Public Education (known by the acronym MEP in Spanish). 
Qualitative and quantitative methodologies were used. Interviews were conducted with participants and 
English advisors and an online survey was also used. Results show that most EFL teachers do not feel 
trained to deal with the English literature syllabus because teaching literature is not their major, but the 
MEP has assumed that mastering the language is sufficient for an English teacher to teach literature. Most 
teachers reject this presupposition as they think that the MEP’S English literature syllabus focuses on 
literary content rather than using literature to teach and learn English. Teachers assert that there is a 
discrepancy between their academic training and what the MEP expects them to do.

Even though before the 1960’s bilingualism was generally blamed for detrimental effects on cognitive development, various researchers have argued that studies carried out before that date included unbalanced bilinguals or bilinguals from minority groups; their results were hence unreliable. In contrast, many contemporary studies have reported positive cognitive effects of balanced bilingualism, especially regarding metalinguistic skills (i.e., the ability to look at language rather than through it to the intended meaning). By and large, studies that have administered metalinguistic tasks such as grammaticality judgment tasks, word awareness tasks, phoneme segmentation tasks, and Appearance-Reality tasks to groups of balanced bilingual and monolingual children of comparable ages report superior performance by the bilingual children; the latter group shows greater levels of control and analysis, which are fundamentally metalinguistic skills. Based on the meta-cognitive advantage argued for bilingual children, the author stresses the need to design true bilingual programs accessible to all children so these can have the same cognitive advantages as balanced bilingual children appear to have.

This research paper discusses the benefits and implications of bringing authentic assessment into listening comprehension classes. The study was run in 2016 based on a QUAL-Quan model to research and included 38 college students enrolled in a listening comprehension class at an English Teaching Major (ETM) from the University of Costa Rica (UCR). Data collection instruments included plans of improvement, portfolios, self-assessment forms, teacher-student conferences, verbal calls, and impromptu reflections. Data were validated through several procedures and analyzed in the form of emerging themes from the information collected. Findings are that authentic assessment can and should be used more in listening comprehension classes to bring assessment and instruction together, as well as to provide opportunities for skills integration. The study yields implications for theory and practice, and it constitutes a proposal to move from traditional to process evaluation, and from norm-referenced testing towards more criterion-referenced assessment. Nonetheless, the aim should not necessarily be a radical ‘no’ to paper-and-pencil tests, but a more balanced use in combination with other strategies so that assessment becomes more reliable, valid, fair, and authentic for all EFL actors involved.

This study reports on the trends in children’s use of taps by 15 Costa Rican Spanish-speaking monolingual children between ages 3;0 and 5;6. Data were obtained through audio-recordings of the children’s naturalistic speech, yielding 1080 target-words. 80% of the taps were correct, but the remaining 20% evidenced either omissions of the tap (14%) or substitution of the tap for [l], [n], [t], [d], [j], [tS], [D], or for a voiceless assibilated rhotic. A main finding in this study was the consistent omission of the tap in infinitive verb forms before a consonant initial enclitic pronoun. This omission type is interesting in that it appears to be directly related to the complexity involved in nominal enclitics, as children do not always omit the tap in similar phonetic contexts (i.e., /Cr/ clusters). Although this last pattern has been reported for adult Costa Rican Spanish, it has never been reported in child speech.

The Spanish rhotics, namely the simple vibrant or tap and especially the multiple vibrant or trill are acquired late in Spanish as a mother tongue. This study describes two patterns in the acquisition of both rhotics in spontaneous speech by a group of 34 children from the Western region of Costa Rica, with ages between 3 and 5;6, and which constitute a reflection of the adult input. Regarding the acquisition of the trill, among the six different phonetic realizations found in the 843 words analyzed, the trill was realized as such only in 2% of the words, whereas an assibilated rhotic was used instead in 45% of the words alnalized. With regards to the words containing the phoneme (a total of 1108), it was found that in 92% of verb forms made up of an infinitive verb form followed by a personal enclitic (e.g., comérselo ‘eat.refelxive.dative’), the simple vibrant was omitted (e.g., coméselo). The assibilation pattern found to substitute the trill as well as the omission of the simple vibrant in verb constructions of the type infinitive + enclitic have been reported for the casual speech by adults from the Central Costa Rican Valley. In other words, the study evidences a clear reflection of the patterns found in the adult Spanish dialect to which these children are exposed; this is interpreted as resulting from the complexity involved in the articulation of the Spanish rhotic sounds: this is true for child speech as well as for adult speech

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.