The purpose of this article is to investigate whether Yunior, a character and narrator in the three short stories under study, “Invierno”, “The Pura Principle”, and “Nilda”, becomes absorbed into American culture or obtains a positive relationship with this culture without losing his Dominican identity. Quantitative analyses of the vocabulary in the L1 code-switches (Spanish) and of the L2 (English) vocabulary used by Yunior in the stories were carried out to appraise his linguistic progression. Code-switching was analyzed because it gives insights into how situation and context influences language use and why the characters use the language they do. The results obtained, by means of three common lexical measures used in foreign language research (lexical density, age of acquisition and lexical sophistication), allowed us to assess Yunior’s change of identity. According to the acculturation model, Yunior becomes acculturated in the host country, showing progression and integration with many cultural aspects of American life and the English language due to his formal education and early age of acquisition of L2.
The purpose was to check whether Yunior, character/narrator in three short stories by Junot Díaz (2012), reduces the use of codeswitching (Cs) to Spanish (his first language, L1) from the first chronological story to the third one: “Invierno”, “Nilda”, and “The Pura Principle”, respectively. We hypothesize a reduction in the number of words used in his mother tongue and a decrease in emotional words, implying a change in his emotional identity. (Costa et al., 2017; Dewaele, 2010; Ferré et al., 2010; Pavlenko, 2008). From the latter, we qualitative and quantitatively analyzed Yunior’s Cs to L1. A change in Yunior’s emotional identity could not be found probably due to the small size of the vocabulary corpus and the lack of emotional ratings for many of these words. Yunior keeps using Cs to his L1 for family and intimate matters in the three stories and English when seeking detachment.
The purpose of this study is to examine which teaching methodology – context provision or imagination elicitation – is more efficient to learn emotional vocabulary in the English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. A pre-test / post-test design was used to test the benefit of the two types of instruction, compared to a traditional teaching method. A total of 60 EFL students at a B2 level (Council of Europe, 2001, 2018) participated in the research. A set of 40 emotional words was selected according to the following criteria: to be emotional and mid-frequency vocabulary in English, and rather unknown words by B2-level students in order to allow room for learning. Statistical analyses showed that the instruction phase was successful, since the groups significantly differed in the post-test. Although the two experimental treatments were effective, the imagination elicitation approach turned out to be better than the context provision method. The conclusion has relevant pedagogical implications for the EFL classroom.
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