In this article we review research on English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning published in Argentina between 2007 and 2013. This is the first review of a Latin American country in this series. Argentina has a century-long tradition of training EFL teachers but a comparatively shorter though fruitful history of foreign language (FL) research. The article examines 88 articles that appeared in locally published peer-reviewed conference proceedings, academic journals and one edited collection. The contributions cover a wide spectrum of topics that illustrates prominent research interests in the country, such as the role of imagination, emotion and affect in language comprehension and production, intercultural dimensions, FL teacher education and development, content and language integrated learning (CLIL), computer-assisted language learning (CALL), the teaching of English for academic or specific purposes, testing, assessment and evaluation, and materials design and course development. The review includes work by specialists whose research may not be known outside the boundaries of Argentina but who produce high-quality situated research that accounts for the specificity of the local educational setting.
This study examines the text organization of formal oral and written discourse using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), where Theme is considered the point of departure of the message (Halliday 1994, Halliday y Matthiessen 2004). In SFL the succession of Themes as a text unfolds constitutes its ‘method of development’ (Fries 1983/1995), which is the ‘scaffolding’ (Stainton 1993) needed for introducing rhematic contributions. Recent work in SFL has suggested that oral English tends towards more ‘contentlight’ and written English towards more ‘contentful’ methods of development (Berry forthcoming a & b). A detailed comparative analysis of the different choices in Theme and grammatical metaphor in thematic position is developed for Spanish, based on conferences by Borges and research articles on his work. Results support the hypothesis that oral discourse, even if it is formal, uses contentlight Themes with interpersonal metaphors whose function is to manifest authorial presence. In contrast written discourse uses contentful Themes with experiential metaphors whose function is to construct highly nominalized methods of development that reduce authorial presence by focusing on abstract entities.
Se discute desde la perspectiva de la Lingüística Sistémico Funcional la importancia de considerar ‘Tema’ como punto de partida de la cláusula. Un análisis detallado de la sucesión de puntos de partida pone en evidencia cómo se estructura lo que se propone llamar aquí el ‘esqueleto semántico’ del texto. Se destacan las funciones que cumplen allí distintos tipos de Tema, y los cambios que se producen en el discurso al modificar su combinación y secuencia. Se demuestra que esta visión posicional, diferente de la visión informativa de Tema como el elemento conocido, permite aplicaciones pedagógicas de particular interés para una comprensión más acabada de la organización del discurso.
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