Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Pese a no contar con el estatus de fonema en RP, es posible encontrar la oclusiva glotal en este acento de manera bastante recurrente. Una de las ocurrencias de este segmento se da en los casos de refuerzo glotal a vocales acentuadas en posición inicial de palabra cuando la palabra portadora es puesta en relieve para expresar algún grado de énfasis. El presente trabajo de investigación tuvo como principal objetivo la observación y el estudio de la naturaleza del énfasis que esta realización del segmento mencionado presenta en términos de frecuencia fundamental e intensidad. Para esto se analizó un podcast descargado de www.bbc.co.uk/podcst de una duración de 29 minutos y 37 segundos. Tras transliterar la totalidad del podcast y seleccionar las intervenciones que no contaban con ruido ambiente que impidiera el análisis acústico, se analizó el material en busca de instancias de refuerzo glotal en el contexto estudiado. En cada instancia encontrada, se midió la máxima, la mínima y el promedio de frecuencia fundamental e intensidad de la sílaba reforzada, de la palabra portadora y del enunciado en el que se encontró el refuerzo glotal. Se buscaron también casos de acento enfático (Vivanco 1996:571) y casos de palabras funcionales que se encontraran pronunciadas con su forma fuerte marcada en lugar de ser pronunciadas con su forma débil no marcada. Los resultados nos presentan unos pocos casos de sílabas reforzadas que se destacan, en cuanto a su máxima de F0 e intensidad, del contexto en el que se encuentran, un número mayor de sílabas cuyo promedio de F0 e intensidad iguala o supera a la media contextual, y un porcentaje no significativo de casos de acento enfático y formas fuertes de pronunciación de palabras funcionales. Creemos que estos resultados sugieren un tipo de énfasis encontrado en las sílabas reforzadas glotalmente en el contexto en estudio que se caracteriza por realizarse de manera gradual, y no por presentarse como un valor binario.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Los estudios referidos a la agrupación de consonantes dentro de una misma sílaba, han sido abordados en gran profundidad por muchos autores, como por ejemplo Roach (2000: 71), Cruttenden (2008: 253), O’Connor (1980: 64) y algunos otros. En nuestro país, Héctor Ortiz (2003: 278) en el libro “La fonética en Chile” hace una detallada lista de investigaciones y estudios realizados en el campo de la fonética donde se puede apreciar una investigación que toma como tema el análisis de la pronunciación de grupos consonánticos por parte de estudiantes de inglés como lengua extranjera.

¿Cuáles son los principales cambios que ha experimentado la Pronunciación Recibida (Received Pronunciation - RP)1 en el contexto sociolingüístico de Gran Bretaña? ¿Es el inglés del Estuario una variedad influyente para el RP en la actualidad? ¿Cuál es la ocurrencia de cinco variables fonológicas, que representan distintos aspectos y estados de variación en el desarrollo del RP General, en el habla de dos parejas de lectores de noticias y entrevistadores británicos descritos como hablantes de RP? ¿Cuan cerca está el habla de dichos sujetos a las descripciones del RP encontradas en la literatura? ¿Existen diferencias en el uso de estos rasgos entre hombres y mujeres? ¿Existen diferencias, en relación a la ocurrencia de estos rasgos, entre el habla generada en la lectura de un guion preestablecido (lectura de titulares) y el habla generada en las entrevistas que se dan en el contexto de los noticieros y programas afines, donde los presentadores no se encuentran restringidos a la simple lectura de un guion?. Las interrogantes precedidas motivaron la presente investigación, que se enmarca en el interés por el estudio de los factores sociales que determinan la variación fonética, el cual, en sus inicios, fue impulsado por la sociolingüística de orientación laboviana y que ha cobrado especial importancia en las últimas décadas en el contexto del inglés británico y, en especial, con el acento que en 1869 A.J. Ellis denominó Received Pronunciation.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / The main purpose of the present study is to discover ESL teachers’ beliefs and what they describe as their own teaching practices. Besides, the purpose is to find out if their beliefs when giving a lesson are strong enough to coincide with other teachers’ practices based on different approaches of second language instruction. The analyzed corpus consists of 5 ESL Chilean teachers; 2 females and 3 males, all around the age of thirty years old. They all currently live and work in Chilean cities and have more than 5 years of teaching experience in different educational contexts. The eliciting technique was a structured survey, where the informants were asked to answer open ended questions, to face a lesson taught through three different teaching methods (Grammar translation, Audio-lingual and the Communicative approaches), to finally mark preferences in a Likert scale. The results confirm the importance of having clear and strong beliefs, and how these determine the way we think, act and make decisions when giving an ESL lesson; which is consistent with the reviewed literature about teaching beliefs. Also, even though not all the participants were consistent in their responses, most of them showed coincidences between what they declare as their own teaching practices and what they believe about other teachers’ instruction. The study will benefit different actors belonging to the teaching context. First, ESL teachers will be able to understand which their ESL beliefs are, second, English institutions will have the opportunity to use this to know in advance what type of teacher they are hiring, and third, students learning English as a second language will be able to choose who the most suitable teacher is according to their needs. In general terms, this study will contribute to the field of teaching English as a second language.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / The present study aims at comparing the efficacy of a deductive approach against an inductive approach in the teaching of passive voice in English in a college context. The participants of this study were 36 second year psychology students from Universidad Austral de Chile in Puerto Montt, Chile. The students were divided into two groups that were taught the passive voice of simple past, simple present and simple future. One of the groups was taught using a deductive approach while the other was taught using an inductive approach. After the passive voice was taught a posttest was given in order to determine which approach proved more effective. The results seem to indicate a relevance of the deductive approach in the context studied but also of bias toward the deductive approach in the methodological design of the posttest. A re-evaluation of previous research indicated how the methodology used in certain inductive approaches can be affected by deduction.

Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades / Informe de Seminario para optar al grado de Licenciado en Lengua y Literatura Inglesa / The purpose of the present study was to analyze the pronunciation of English consonantal sounds in proper names and other capitalized items by a group of 12 advanced Chilean Spanish learners of English with the aim of studying the deviances produced. These learners were undergraduate students of the English Linguistics and Literature academic programme, Universidad de Chile. The data of the study consisted of the subjects' recordings of a selection of news headlines taken from the BBC World News. The data processing involved the identification of deviant forms, their classification on the basis of a taxonomy of the difficulties caused by English consonant sounds to Chilean Spanish speakers proposed by Professor C. Vivanco (1991), the corresponding explanation of such deviances, and the quantification of the different types of difficulties.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Autor no autoriza el acceso a texto completo de su documento. / This corpus-based research aims at describing a perspective on the conceptualisation of aspect of the English future time auxiliaries will and be going (henceforth, future markers). The main focus of this description is on the aforementioned future markers and their relationship with the operators probably, definitely and certainly. From a semantic point of view, such operators are understood as the lexicalised features denoting a gradual expression of certainty in relation to speakers’ occurring awareness on the reliability of the proposition. Additionally, the study attempts to relate the notion of epistemicity to the practical nature of certainty within speakers’ utterances regardless of the implausibility of future time situations. This leads to suggest that, due to the lack of clear-cut differences between will and be going, both are likely to be used interchangeably in spite of the canonical generalisations of future tense and aspect.

Tesis para optar al grado de Magíster en Lingüística mención Lengua Inglesa / Studies regarding the pronunciation of consonant groups have been carried out by many authors such as Roach (2000); Cruttenden (2008); O’Connor (1980). In Chile, researches done by Pilleux (1972); Montero (1979) and lately Bastías (2012) have summarized categories of difficulties when pronouncing consonant groups in word initial and final position; common errors produced by English learners when pronouncing consonant groups in word medial and final position and the conclusion that the more years of training in English language would not mean a better pronunciation of these English consonant groups in certain individuals, respectively. This study aims at discovering and analysing the deviations produced by a group of English learners as a second language when pronouncing RP consonantal groups in word final position and in the boundaries of words. The corpus will include 20 sentences recorded by 28 students of the English language and literature undergraduate programme at Universidad de Chile. These 28 students include 14 individuals who belong to 2nd year and 14 individuals who belong to 4th year. The information in this descriptive study is very useful for those teachers who work in the English Phonology area, since it may help them to know what are the deviances, the type of errors and the strategies they employ when pronouncing a consonant group of sounds in word final position or in the boundaries of words. Teachers might be able to organize and grade their class material and teaching strategies in order to reach the subject learning objectives effectively.

No description available.

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.