Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Motivation in language learning has been a topic of great relevance in the last decades, since it has been established as the reason why a person would invest in learning a language and success in doing so (Ushioda & Dörnyei, 2012; Dörnyei, 2014). More recently, studies have devoted themselves to inquire the effect that socioeconomic factors have on language learning motivation (Gayton, 2010; Kormos & Kiddle, 2013). Nevertheless, they have failed to provide a thorough insight on the underlying socio-psychological phenomena that lead to such relationship. Under the scope of Linguistic Anthropology and its approach to language as a contextually and culturally embedded phenomenon, this study draws on Social Representation (Moscovici, 1979) and L2 Motivational Self System Theory (Dörnyei 2005; 2009) to determine the ideologies and social representations that trigger two socio-economically different groups of students’ motivation to learn English. In order to do so, data were qualitatively collected through focus groups among students from public vocational-technical schools and students from private schools, followed by personal semi-structured interviews. Results showed how motivation to learn English is highly determined by a social representation based on its aspirational aspect; in the case of middle-low status students such representation implies upward mobility towards a higher socioeconomic status in Chile, whereas for high status students the aspiration implies living abroad. In addition, an idealization of the Anglo-American culture and language is identified. Therefore, implications for a more realistic approach towards English as a Foreign Language are discussed.

Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / The present study is intended to research into intermediate TEFL students’ development of their ability to use some of the basic argumentative writing resources that they are expected to develop as part of their academic studies and EFL teacher training. In their future professional role as, mainly, secondary school English teachers, and due to the fact that one of their tasks will be to help their students develop their critical and argumentative abilities (de Zubiria Samper, 2006), EFL teacher trainees need to develop their own critical argumentative discourse abilities in order to meet the needs of their prospective students. On account of its nature and main objective, this study may eventually offer some proposals that might be implemented for the development of TEFL students’ abilities to write argumentative texts.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / No autorizada su publicación a texto completo, según petición de su autor / To date, most of the existing standard grammatical descriptions of the English language have used decontextualised written sentence tokens as their primary source of data. However, these standard grammatical descriptions have overlooked the complexities of the constructions and patterns which can be normally found in oral interactions. The present research study aims to determine the defining structural properties and discourse-pragmatic functions of adnominal and sentential English relative clauses in spontaneous oral narratives produced by adult native speakers of British English. For this purpose, 110 relative clauses which were gathered from 4 interviews collected from an online British database of real life personal narratives of health and illness experiences were analysed. Results show that some instances of adnominal relative clauses and sentential relative clauses differ structurally from relative clauses commonly found in written English for such factors as the proximity between the antecedent and the relative clause, on the one hand, and the role of ellipsis in spoken interactions, on the other hand. It was also found that relative clauses in spoken interactions can be considered supra-sentential units which serve six different discourse pragmatic functions: narrative, evaluative, argumentative, reporting, descriptive and informative.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Among the abilities that human mind has, there is the one of perceiving prominent objects because of its shape, color, or any other characteristic that could call our attention according to the context. In this thesis, what is intended to be demonstrated is that what our mind is able to segregate can be verbalized by means of using the language. The linguistic devices analyzed in this research are prepositions of place (in, on, at, to and over) and the locative relations established between the connections that they provide are observed and described in order to demonstrate how human mind works in order to organize things, people and places in the space. The corpus of this research was elaborated with 12 letters taken from the section ‗Letters from‘ from the weekly online version of a British newspaper called ‗The Guardian‘. The letters were divided into sentences that contained prepositions in, on, at, to and over which depicted locative relations. After going through the analysis, the results demonstrated that the prepositions play a key role when establishing the prominence of an entity since they are in charge of positioning one entity (figure) as the focus of attention in relation to other entity (ground). Each preposition plays a different role depending on the context they are set and the meaning that the writer wants to depict.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / No autorizada su publicación a texto completo, según petición de su autor. / The present research focuses on the implicit compliments among the native speakers of American English. The pioneering research by Manes and Wolfson (1981) revealed that verbal compliments in middle-­‐class American society are “formulaic”, meaning that a small variety of constructions accounts for the majority of the data. Since then, existing research has focused almost exclusively on the explicit compliments and appears to have adopted a restricted view of the gender differences in verbal complimenting behaviour. This work argues that a more balanced picture of complimenting is required, and to this end, presents discourse and conversation analysis of 40 samples of implicit compliments, produced by male and female TV presenters of 4 American talk-­‐shows. By taking a stance of the “difference” approach to gender discourse (e.g. Tannen, 1991), it attempts at discovering gender-­‐based differences between their topics, linguistic realisation and functions. Overall showing a significant distinction between the use of implicit compliments by men and women in terms of their form and function, and an asymmetry in their topics, the research makes a contribution to the existing work on discourse and gender. On the one hand, it adds new perspectives and findings about the difference in the ways men and women construct conversations and build social relations through complimenting. On the other hand, it shows how a shift from explicitness to implicitness in evaluative language allows the speakers to deal with topics not commonly associated with gender expectations.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / The study reported in this thesis investigated how the pragmatic abilities of three groups of English Language Teaching student in a Chilean University could be classified. The speech act of request (Saeed, 2009) was considered as the speech act of choice to evaluate the pragmatic performance of the participants. Bachman’s (1990) Model of Communicative Language Ability along with The Common European Framework of Language Reference (Council of Europe, 2001) were used to stablish the language domain that was to be assessed. Transcriptions of the participants were analyzed using a rubric designed specifically for this purpose. The analysis showed that the ELT students’ performance could be classified in three different levels. Furthermore, only two of these groups had a marked pragmatic performance, whereas the other could be considered a transition of two different levels of performance. These findings are expected to raise awareness of the importance of this ability in the instruction of English as a second language.

Tesis para optar al grado de Licenciada en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The analysis presented in this presentationcenters on conversational turn-taking in these interviews and a comparative analysis of the interactions among different politicians according to a conversational structural interaction, examining, specially, the organization of turn-taking, along with, the conceivableadjustments thatturn-taking system can suffer such as interruptions, overlaps and some others In this opportunity, the analysis will be particularly keen on deviances from the turn-taking regulation that stipulates that only one party should talk at a time. The original hypothesis is that the interactions amongst politicians and the interviewer are surrounded by general features of the political interview; however these interactions also display certain areas of variability that replicatecertain ambiguity about the roles of the interlocutors.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística, mención Lengua Inglesa / The relations holding between politics and cognitive science have to do with the cognitive unconscious level: much of what we interpret from political discourse does not lie in the linguistic expressions being used but in the interpretation that is activated and configured in our minds by such expressions. According to van Dijk (2002) and Lakoff (2009), the domain of political discourse and cognition has not received enough attention so far. Taking this into account, the main motivation of the present research was to attempt to determine discoursal interconnections holding between the operation of conceptual metaphors by means of the examination of the paradigmatic sets of linguistic expressions which formalise them at text level, and the expressions of evaluative meanings according to the proposals by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), the former, and Martin and White (2005), the latter. Focusing on political discourse, the corpus chosen consisted of public political speeches given by the latest two presidents of the United States, namely, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It is proposed the existence of linguistic differences in opposing politicians’ public speeches when they express their ideological positions by means of joint expressions of Conceptual Metaphors and Appraisal Items, this difference being in correlation with Lakoff (2009)’s proposal of metaphorical systems of moral values. In addition, it is also proposed the existence of a metaphorical evaluative discourse modelled by the participants in discourses such as the ones presented in this study.

Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Much of the research work concerning vocabulary learning strategies use confirms the usefulness these strategies have for learners. Relatively recent work on educational psychology has pointed out the influence of learners’ self-regulatory capacity on their performance. The present cross sectional research examines first year undergraduate students’ vocabulary proficiency; identifies their use of strategies and their level of self-regulation. It also seeks to respond if first year students use vocabulary learning strategies, and if there is any relationship among the use of strategies, self-regulation and success in vocabulary acquisition. Results suggest that, in fact, there is a connection in the use of strategies and the level of success. They also indicate that self-regulation enhances the use of learning strategies.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / No autorizada su publicación a texto completo, según petición de su autor / El presente estudio entrega los resultados de un experimento de decodificación auditiva del texto hablado en inglés con la participación de oyentes nativos del español de Chile. Las interrogantes que motivan el estudio se relacionan con qué tipo de errores de percepción auditiva son cometidos con mayor frequencia, en qué contextos se producen y qué factores podrían estar afectando la correcta decodificación del texto hablado en inglés. Los resultados de este experimento dan cuenta de la complejidad de los errores de decodificación cometidos, debido en gran parte, a que no solamente es el componente fonético-fonológico el factor involucrado en las decodificaciones erróneas, sino que además, participan de manera importante factores como el conocimiento gramatical y semántico-pragmático de de la lengua inglesa.