Second language acquisition (SLA) research arose from the developments of the proposals made by Chomsky (1965) regarding the concept of The Language Acquisition Device (LAD), a language faculty that enables children to infer hypotheses about the rules of a certain language given that they are exposed to a considerable amount of linguistic input. Furthermore, Chomsky suggested that all languages are structured according to a set of universal principles; then, it is assumed that children have an innate knowledge of these universal principles which enables them to acquire the native language quickly, easily and efficiently. Added to these ideas, Chomsky’s mentalist theory of language acquisition contains the concept of linguistic competence, which consists in the mental representations of linguistic rules that constitute the speaker-hearer’s internal grammar, and linguistic performance, realized through the use of this grammar in the comprehension and production of language. Although Chomsky’s theory was developed within the field of the acquisition of the mother tongue (also known as L1), it had an effect on SLA theories since it showed that the acquisition of a given language could not be explained in terms of habits or imitation as the behaviorist view stated. When applying Chomsky’s proposals to the learning of a second language (L2), the differences between languages are not relevant issues to be considered in such process. Hymes (1971) extended the distinction of the concepts of linguistic competence and linguistic performance to include the communicative aspects of language, i.e. to cover linguistic and pragmatic knowledge. As a result, nowadays, SLA aims at the description and explanation of the learners’ linguistic or communicative competence by examining their performance.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / Writing is a complex linguistic ability that needs years of practice in order to be mastered. As a matter of fact, it is an ability that can never be fully acquired. Its acquisition involves a series of cognitive processes and socio-linguistic factors. Actually, writing may be considered an extension and reflection of one’s interests, knowledge and perspectives, which are transcribed into words to keep them in the permanent mind across time. Since 1970, the writing process has been of major concern for the academic field, considering the growing status of writing not only as a way of practicing other abilities, but as an independent skill of communication. Within the same field, universities have given an increasingly important role to written activities, using exams and papers in order to measure the students’ writing competence for a variety of purposes, such as assessment, evaluation and as a tool to choose possible candidates to enter these institutions. The latter has led to the development of different types of tests which reflect the student’s capability in English as a second language. This research aims at the presentation of important aspects about the writing process, placing emphasis on English as a second language, and a study of 4th year students of Linguistics of the University of Chile in essay writing, in order to, first, cover the aspects evaluators might consider when assessing writing, and second, the results this kind of study may offer.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Esta investigación tiene como objetivo determinar el grado de transferencia negativa pragmalingüística y sociopragmática desde el español de Chile (L1) de dos grupos de aprendientes formales adultos de inglés (L2), con diferentes niveles de competencia lingüística en dicha L2, en la realización del acto de habla solicitud. Además, determinar los efectos del nivel de competencia gramatical en inglés de los dos grupos de aprendientes en su habilidad para emplear las fórmulas sintácticas formulaicas favorecidas por los hablantes nativos de inglés en la realización de solicitudes.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The present study attempted to establish relationships between second or foreign language learners’ metacognitive awareness and the level of listening comprehension proficiency. Metacognition is defined as the awareness of the knowledge an individual has or does not have and to the ability to monitor and control cognitive activities in learning processes (Flavell, 1979; Maichenbaum, 1985). According to Vandergrift & Goh (2012), listening is the most commonly used, important, and active skill in oral communication; and yet, it is the skill which is least likely to be taught effectively and the most underresearched one. Vandergrift (2004, 2007) and Vandergrift and Goh (2012) proposed a Metacognitive Pedagogical Sequence that intends to improve students’ use of metacognitive strategies when performing listening comprehension tasks. The present research is a quantitative quasi-experimental study which intends to explore the effects of an implicit metacognitive listening strategy intervention on the students’ listening comprehension level of proficiency. In order to conduct this research, two groups were selected as the experimental and control groups. The participants were 12 second year students from the English Linguistics and Literature program offered at Universidad de Chile. On the one hand, an implicit metacognitive intervention based on the Pedagogical Sequence was designed for the experimental group and, on the other hand, the control group continued with their regular listening classes. The students in the experimental group attended six 45-minute listening instruction sessions given by the teacher of the Listening subcomponent of the English Language II course. Two sample versions of the First Certificate in English (FCE) listening comprehension test were given in order to assess the students’ listening comprehension proficiency. The first version was used as a pre-test whereas the second version was used as a post-test. The questionnaire chosen to elicit the data about the students’ level of metacognitive listening awareness was the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire designed by Vandergrift, Goh, Mareschal, & Tafaghodtari (2006). Concerning the results of the study, the general averages of the experimental group listening comprehension tests and of the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaires increased. In turn, the metacognitive instruction intervention was moderately successful. Therefore, it can be claimed that there was a slight improvement on the students’ listening performance and their metacognitive listening awareness.

This thesis was based upon an interdisciplinary research project “Information and Communication Technologies” (ICT‘s) for Language Learning and Edutainment in Internet a , FONDEF D05I-10243), where we could apply our knowledge about Error Analysis and focus our attention on five of the phonological processes that occur when Chilean-Spanish native speakers from Santiago, attempt to pronounce words in English. We noticed how important the teaching of phonetics is when learning a foreign language, English in this case and how it has been treated by the current trends in teaching foreign languages, which leaves it aside or ignores it. According to different studies, ¯formal phonological instruction results in improved student accuracy of pronunciation. For this reason, we thought our participation in the project mentioned above as a crucial contribution to the development of a software for secondary-school students to practise the English they learn in the classroom. We were aware of the fact that we could not demand much from their pronunciation, but we also knew that it was important to emphasise the allophonic differences that many times change the meaning of a word, so we agreed on the criteria used to work on the samples that we got from the project. From here, we decided to start our own research on the words recorded by a certain group of speakers. According to theories on Error Analysis (EA), the errors made by the speakers are considered to be a useful device in the process of Second Language Acquisition, and by doing our research, we will attempt to provide examples of these errors and how they affect the intelligibility of a word. At the same time, and as a way to complement our investigation, we considered some aspects of Interlanguage that are rarely taken into account when dealing with SLA and phonetics, mainly the psycholinguistic processes which help the development of the learners‘ interlanguage. As it was said before, we will want to highlight the importance of the allophonic features of words uttered by native Chilean-Spanish speakers and the possible errors they will make by doing so.

A través del presente trabajo de tesis, se ha buscado detectar los rasgos fonológicos que provocarían un quiebre en la comunicación lingüística en inglés entre hablantes de español de Chile y de chino mandarín. Para este propósito se ha analizado la mutua inteligibilidad a nivel de fonemas vocálicos y consonánticos expresados a través de pares mínimos, además de la incidencia de la correcta acentuación del núcleo en la oración. Se han utilizado grabaciones de hablantes de chino mandarín y de español de Chile. Estas han sido expuestas mutuamente a ambos grupos de hablantes, a fin de evaluar la inteligibilidad de la pronunciación. Los porcentajes de aciertos y errores obtenidos han sido expresados en tablas y gráficos, los cuales a su vez han sido analizados a fin de encontrar posibles respuestas a los resultados.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / The present investigation examined narrow focus stretches of speech by speakers of British English, and their importance in EFL teaching and learning. This study is relevant to EFL teaching and learning since it opens a scope of knowledge that has not been much explored yet. The corpus of this study was composed of natural speech by British speakers of English. It consisted specifically of eight conversations between two native speakers of the language, who tackled diverse topics and who interacted with each other in a natural manner. This posed a very complex scenario for the researcher, as the division into intonation groups became one of the most difficult tasks carried out in the analysis. Although many variables made it laborious to work with this type of data, the findings were revealing: More than 50% of cases were patterns in narrow focus. This can be a starting point for further research with this kind of corpus regarding intonation.

La sicología cognitiva ha contribuido con una serie de hallazgos en relación con el aprendizaje. Estos logros conciben el aprendizaje como un conjunto de procesos que posibilitan el procesamiento de la información que reciben los seres humanos. La aproximación cognitiva intenta analizar y comprender cómo la información se recibe, se procesa y se estructura en la memoria. Esta perspectiva, a diferencia de aquellas que conciben al aprendiz como un receptor pasivo de información, atribuye gran importancia a las habilidades de procesamiento que los individuos traen consigo a la situación de aprendizaje y, en consecuencia, se visualiza a los aprendientes como participantes “activos, constructivos y capaces de planificar” (Mc Laughlin 1990:113). Se parte del supuesto que cuando los aprendientes reciben información novedosa, la procesan, la almacenan y, posteriormente, la recuperan para aplicarla a nuevas situaciones de aprendizaje.

The present study aims at identifying and describing a set of syntactic choices made at discourse-text level by native speakers of English and advanced EFL learners in spontaneous production of oral, informal narratives, relating them to the cognitive constrains of the spoken medium.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa. / Until very recently in the history of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies kept vocabulary acquisition in a lower status compared to other aspects of language as a system of communication. Current research has demonstrated the importance of vocabulary acquisition within the SLA field. This study tries to bring together two fundamental components of language teaching - the vocabulary component and the way it is presented and taught, and the cultural models and ideologies that influence the creation of a language course through the analysis and comparison of the two official Chilean 1st grade curricula for teaching English and Mapudungun. Results suggest there are problems both in terms of SLA theoretical support and in terms of vocabulary acquisition theories. Each program upholds clear, but quite different cultural models that define the status of these two languages in our country.