Lidia Mañoso-Pacheco
Accredited by the Accreditation Agency of Spain (ANECA) as Profesor Contratado Doctor, Profesor Ayudante Doctor and Profesor de Universidad Privada. She is a professor of English at the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain. Besides, she holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the Complutense University of Madrid. Her research interests focus on journalistic discourse, approached from discourse, semantic and pragmatic perspectives
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of Teaching in Today’s Society: Factors Involved in Educational Quality", published in the journal Social Sciences (open access)
of Teaching in Today’s Society: Factors Involved in Educational Quality", published in the journal Social Sciences (open access)
This paper proposes a taxonomy of the source of information in the press media regarding the concreteness parameter, i.e. the degree of precision with which the original author of the reported utterance is defined in the reporting clause. Evidence sources are mainly divided into the subtypes that follow: specific, specific-generic and non-specific; other parameters have also been considered in the classification, such as the animacy factor (human vs. inanimate sources) or the semantic nature of the elements in the pre-citation segment (professional vs. personal basis).
The corpus comprises digital news from four broadsheet British and Spanish journals, namely The Times, The Guardian, El Mundo and El País. The quantitative analysis reveals a shared tendency to specify the human source of information, as well as an inclination to include references to inanimate entities on the part of the Spanish press. Moreover, British journals seem to be more prone to use non-specific sources than the Spanish news group.
On the other hand, the qualitative results appear to uncover the ways in which journalists chose the configuration of the source in order to activate certain implicatures in the reader’s imagery. For instance, there might be established a connection between the lack of delimitation of the agent of the assertion with a potential intention to strengthen the newsworthy value of the source on the part of the writer. This factor is noticeable in the use of enigmatic heads where, since the identity of the source(s) is not easily identified, readers end up assigning them high authoritative status and consequently, their information is taken less critically (Smirnova 2009). News reporters then seem to be well aware of the potential reporting sources hold for positioning the readership and use them to subtly launch personal opinions without jeopardising the overall objective tone of their articles.
In this paper, I present a taxonomy of reportives that takes as point of departure a full understanding of evidentiality as a functional-conceptual domain, which means a generic category on its own that includes the expression of evidentiality by grammatical, semantic and pragmatic means. The proposed classification divides reportives into various subtypes regarding several parameters of analysis: concreteness (specific vs. non-specific source), reporting style (quotative direct vs. quotative indirect), writer’s commitment (qualified vs. non-qualified), clause type (finite, non-finite or prepositional phrases) and person (first, second, third or unspecified). Direct reportives will be proved not to be always proper verbatim reproductions of the words of the original source in all the cases, since the former voice of the assertion may well be mingled with the voice reporting the evidence. Following this perspective, quotative direct reportives are not considered in my study proper verbatim reproductions of the prior source. Furthermore, within indirect reportives the distinction between de dicto and de re reported speech will be beheld. As regards writer’s commitment, I will analyse cases of reportives in which the writer qualifies her/his commitment to the truth of the proposition (qualified reportives), in addition to non-qualified samples. With respect to person parameter, the number of first-person reportives, whose pragmatic function is closely associated with denying the validity of the evidence and mitigation of responsibility, is expected to be reduced in the corpus. However, inferential-conceptual reportives in the first present indicative are foreseen to be more frequent.
A quantitative analysis based on this taxonomy will be carried out on reportive evidentials in a compilation of journalistic texts extracted from British and Spanish journals from various lines of thought (The Guardian, The Times, El País and El Mundo). The results will uncover that reportives in newspaper discourse are often used to launch personal opinions and criticisms, even in articles that are supposed to be objective. Intertextual transparency is blurred by subtle introduction of writers’ opinions by means of qualified reportives, and direct reporting is often used in the place of indirect reporting, when the words cited cannot count as a verbatim reproduction of the words of the original source. In other instances, writers tend to clarify who the author of the original assertion is, by making use of reportive evidentials to merely reinforce the veracity of the discourse of the source of the report, or of qualified evidentials to support journalists’ own ideas.
Oscar Pistorius’s social worker has told the court that the athlete was “barely coping” in the days after he killed his girlfriend, but not suicidal. Yvette van Schalkwyk became “upset” when Mr Pistorius was accused of faking emotion and vomiting at his murder trial in Pretoria and decided to testify in his defence (Maclean 2014).
This paper aims at exploring this mixed reporting style in order to discover interesting generalisations in terms of evidentiality, subjectivity, gender distinction and rhetorical purpose, among others. The news reports that will be discussed have been collected from a corpus of digital news published in British and Spanish quality newspapers, namely The Times, The Guardian, El Mundo and El País.
Among the functions that have been typically associated with this reporting style the following can be identified: adding concision, distancing from the quoted information and qualification of the reported segment (Leech 1988; Obiedat 2006; Smirnova 2009). Thus, mixed style appears to be employed as a distancing device on the part of media writers, an issue that will be comprehensively assessed in this investigation.
Para tal fin, este estudio ha diseñado un cuestionario online ad hoc compuesto por 12 ítems cerrados, validado por la técnica del juicio de expertos, en el que han participado 348 alumnos/as universitarios seleccionados a través de un muestreo no probabilístico por accesibilidad. Los/as participantes son estudiantes del Grado en Educación Infantil, Educación Primaria y doble Grado en Educación Infantil y Primaria en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid durante el curso académico 2021-2022. Los datos obtenidos de la muestra han sido analizados de forma descriptiva e inferencial mediante el programa SPSS, utilizando como estadístico de contraste la Prueba no paramétrica para muestras independientes de Kruskal-Wallis.
Los resultados parecen indicar que la población del estudio considera necesario acomodar su lenguaje para evitar sesgos de género en el entorno académico y erradicar así toda forma de discriminación hacia las mujeres. Los/as participantes coinciden en manifestar su intencionalidad por incorporarlo a su lengua de instrucción cuando ejerzan su profesión docente, así como en esforzarse porque su futuro alumnado estandarice su uso. A pesar de la buena acogida hacia el empleo del lenguaje no sexista, prácticamente la mitad de la muestra reconoce usarlo para obtener mejores resultados académicos, lo que podría desvirtuar estos resultados. Además, el factor género ha demostrado ser un factor determinante, siendo más relevante la eliminación de los sesgos de género en el lenguaje para las encuestadas que para sus homólogos masculinos. Con este estudio se pretende ofrecer una nueva visión crítica sobre el empleo del lenguaje inclusivo en el marco de la educación superior reglada, conociendo en profundidad la postura de estudiantes en formación, quienes en definitiva serán los agentes del cambio social en un futuro muy próximo.
This study aims at discussing some of the main word formation processes in English, then focussing on innovative teaching recommendations to address neologisms in the EFL class. To conduct the study, the researcher has consulted core publications in the field of teaching and linguistics included in scientific databases. The selection of the sources of reference has been done considering the international scope of the publications, as well as their position concerning the domains above-mentioned.
The theoretical revision presented in this study departs from reviewing major word formation processes following Yule’s taxonomy (2020), namely borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, conversion, and derivation. Besides, it discusses some of their classifications and subtypes, as it is the case of ‘hypocorism’, a kind of shortened or clipped form.
The study finishes dealing with neologism and discussing possible ways of incorporating them in class. For instance, creating classroom dynamics consisting of guessing the word process behind some words, deducing the definition of neologisms with visual aids, or inventing new terms in groups using already-existing words.
The methodological practices and approach presented in this research purport to facilitate the teaching-learning process, conceiving English as a living entity where new terms are constantly coined, and pushing instructors to be up-to-date when transmitting the target language culture.
The present study deals with fostering letter-sound awareness as an innovative way to approach learning skills since kindergarten level. To that aim, the research presents theoretical principles and teaching resources to be implemented in class. In order to conduct the study, the researcher has consulted core publications in the field included in scientific databases, such as Scopus. The sources of reference have been selected considering the international scope of the publication, as well as their position in relation to the domain of teaching and linguistics.
The study starts by acknowledging the difficulty found in English between sound and letter association when acquiring literacy at early stages. Then, the two above-mentioned scales are presented for measuring reading ability. Synthetic Phonics, the method suggested, focuses on word recognition. The paper also presents some steps for teaching reading to young learners, which depart from discrete sounds recognition to build up bigger units. The theoretical revision finishes discussing the two main approaches for teaching consonants: reliability and frequency, concerning stability and common usage of phonemes, respectively. Finally, the study suggests the implementation of Jolly phonics songs in class, as a meaningful way for reinforcing letter-sound awareness by using music and action performance.
This study focuses on the sort of lexical resources, syntax, punctuation marks and typographical properties that configure headlines in the news. The proposal configures itself as a basis for a teaching proposal to be used either as language input or as a follow-up task in class. News headlines are characterized by special typography, such as large bold letters aimed at drawing the readers’ eye, telegraphic style in terms of lexis and marked focus on the part of syntax. Students should be able to master all these devices, actively engaging in a process of creative writing that allows them to approach the mechanics of writing from an innovative approach.