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.

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 / The present study focuses on the cognitive process implemented by learners of English when they encounter unknown lexical items in the course of reading comprehension tasks. Lexical inferencing has been defined as ―the connections that people make when they try to interpret texts‖ (Brown and Yule 1983, Qian 2004). L2 lexical inferencing has been extensively studied by accounting for its different dimensions. Some studies have investigated into the students‘ use of knowledge sources, such as word and sentence knowledge within linguistic sources and world knowledge within non-linguistic sources (Haastrup 2008). Other studies have dealt with the inferential processes whereby students arrive at their conclusions for word meaning, and also with the degree of success of the lexical inferencing process (Haastrup 2008). In general terms, most research studies account for one or two of these dimensions (e.g. Haastrup 1991). In the present study, the following two dimensions are investigated into: learners‘ cognitive processes involved in lexical meaning interpretation, and the lexical inferencing success of their guesses. Thus, the main purpose of this research study is, firstly, to identify the lexical inferencing strategies used by 6 university students of English as a foreign language in the course of a reading comprehension task. These participants form two different proficiency level groups: three of them are intermediate EFL learners and the other three make up a group of advanced EFL learners. Secondly, the study intends to establish a relationship between the type of lexical inferencing strategies used and L2 learners‘ depth of vocabulary knowledge. Thirdly, it also attempts to relate L2 learners‘ use of lexical inferencing strategies and their success in lexical inferencing strategy use.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística, mención Lengua Inglesa / The main purpose of the present study is to account for the oral narratives of personal experience in the interlanguage of Chilean Spanish speaking male and female learners of English. More specifically, the study intends to describe gender differences and similarities in the use of structure elements, the use of extra thematic details, and types of outcomes. The analyzed corpus consists of 30 narratives of personal experience in English. These narratives are made of 502 clauses, 289 of which were produced by male learners, and 213 were produced by female learners. The eliciting technique was a structured interview, where the informants were asked to narrate about an experience of fear of death, their happiest or saddest experience, and the most embarrassing situation they had experienced. The results confirm the presence of gender differences in the interlanguage of the Spanish speaking learners of English, which are consistent with the literature about gender differences in monolingual studies. Also, even though gendered patterns were detected, the results suggest that there is a need to account for the intragroup differences, as indications of an important internal variation was also present.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado(a) en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / This research report presents a study on vocabulary use in the L2 writing performance of a group of students from the program of English Linguistics and Literature at the Universidad de Chile. The data for the study correspond to ten tests used in a previous study (Aranda et al, 2013) and categorized in Top and Bottom groups by four teachers in relation to the quality of their performance. In addition, the study used data from four interviews to the same four teachers in order to know the specific aspects they consider when assessing vocabulary use in L2 writing performance. The tests were analyzed qualitatively in search for lexical diversity and lexical sophistication features that could account for the difference in perceived quality between the two groups. Such features included the Lexical Frequency Profile for each test, the computation of MTLD, the presence of words related to the topic of the tests and the presence of lexical errors. The interviews were transcribed and a list of the most important aspects of assessment of L2 writing according to the teachers was elaborated. The aspects identified include lexical sophistication, lexical diversity, lexical error and topic appropriateness. The results of the tests’ analyses and the interviews were contrasted, looking for the degree of coherence between them. Results show that, even when there is some degree of coherence between the tests’ analyses and what the teachers say they evaluate, lexical error is the most meaningful aspect when comparing Top and Bottom tests. This is so even when teachers considered lexical sophistication as the most important aspect for them when assessing L2 written vocabulary.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / Current research has established that vocabulary learning is essential in the process of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Since vocabulary learning is an extremely variable practice, choosing the right method to teach it is important so as to achieve proficiency in the target language. In this sense, the Language Planning and Policies (LPP) of different countries lay a fundamental role when establishing language policies and the creation of curricula and textbooks for teachers and students. Following this, the present study focuses on the analysis of the English textbooks from 1st to 4th year of high school, designed for public schools, as well as the curricula from the Chilean Ministry of Education. The aim of this study was to verify if the curricula creation follows what the current academic literature establishes regarding vocabulary acquisition techniques and whether what was presented in the curricula corresponds to what is taught to high school students in their English textbooks. The results show that the teaching of English vocabulary in public education does not entirely follow the major guidelines that have been explored in the literature about vocabulary teaching and learning by different authors, rather, it takes some notions from it, which are not fully developed. Additionally, the Chilean Ministry of Education does not seem to have a clear explicit public policy in regards to English education in the country.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / This study explores the perceptions of teachers and students in an EFL university in Chile and how these perceptions have an impact on the validity of the test. The research questions conducting the study were focused on the comparison between teachers‟ and students perceptions regarding oral tests. In order to elicit the perceptions of teachers, interviews were conducted in order to gather information regarding their evaluation, knowledge and general opinion of the oral tests. Students‟ perceptions were elicited through the application of a survey which gathered information regarding their levels of satisfaction, knowledge and general opinion of the oral tests. These perceptions were later on compared and contrasted. The results indicated that teachers agreed on several aspects of the test and had a general positive perception of it. Conversely, students had a negative perception of the overall test and displayed a very heterogeneous range of perceptions and opinions. The analysis conducted indicated that students are not fully informed of test procedures and criteria of evaluation, thus compromising the construct, face and consequential validity of the test. At the same time, teachers do not fully agree on the criteria of evaluation generating issues in the reliability of the test.

Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / This study reveals the results of the Social Representations (Moscovici, 1984) and Linguistic Ideologies (Kroskrity, 2010) behind the most influential and widespread varieties of English in the context of English as a foreign language in Chile: Received Pronunciation -British English- and General American -American English- in monolingual Spanish speakers from a middle-class background. This investigation, inserted in an anthropological perspective, focuses on notions from Hispanic-phone speakers who are not related to academic environments, pursuing thus a similar approach to Folk-Linguistics. The corpus of this research is composed of personal interviews performed to participants corresponding to three different age sets (adolescent - middle-age adult - mature adult) where the participants provided their opinions about English language and the most prominent varieties of English. The findings revealed a common perception of English as a working tool and the acknowledgement of English as a global language; besides there was an average preference towards the British English variety, especially in the adult participants, who also depict a more prominent rejection towards American English. In contrast, the younger group presents a more positive appreciation of American English in terms of production; however, they place British English in a superior status. As a complement, the theories of Symbolic Power by Bourdieu and Discourse and Power coined by Foucault will be considered in this research since these concepts are present in the participants‟ discourse.

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