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Lecturers' abilities to use semiotic resources to construct meaning and to create engagement play an important role in university classrooms where English is the medium of instruction (EMI). The main focus of this study is on how EMI lecturers enrolled in a professional development program use semiotic and interpersonal resources to engage students through pair work activities. Two analyses were conducted on a dataset of twelve micro-teaching sessions extracted from an EMI teacher training corpus. The first analysis identified the moves and pedagogical functions lecturers instantiated while carrying out engagement episodes (EEs). The findings of this analysis served to design the “Pair work engagement episodes framework”, which includes five basic moves: 1) contextualizing, 2) setting up, 3) monitoring, 4) eliciting, and 5) summarizing. The second analysis illustrated how the pedagogical functions found in each move of four EEs were constructed multimodally through verbal and non-verbal communicative modes (i.e., spoken, written, non-verbal materials, space, and posture). The pair work EEs framework and the multimodal analysis lend support to strategies that may be implemented in EMI professional development programs to enhance lecturers’ multimodal interactional competence.

As a result of the internationalization of higher education (HE), universities are implementing far-reaching changes such as the adoption of English-medium instruction (EMI) programs. In this new educational scenario, teachers are one of the agents most affected, as they clearly experience how the change in the language of instruction impacts their teaching and their students' learning. Although many universities are drafting policies to guide their academic staff in this process, what remains to be examined is whether teacher's views and experiences are aligned with what these policies determine, if they are complementary or far removed from each other. By adopting a qualitative approach, this paper sets out to analyze the current (mis) alignment between EMI language policies and teachers' practices as reported by 28 lecturers in 10 HEIs across Europe, taking part in an online teacher education program. Drawing on thematic analysis, three main categories emerged in the data examined. Findings reveal that the gap between top-down policies and bottom-up classroom experiences is still a reality that needs to be bridged. Some implications can be drawn from the study such as the need to redefine the diverse roles that English plays in this educational context and to include new contents in the training lecturers and students receive and, finally, the inclusion of top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the drafting of new policies.

[EN] The objectives of this paper are to identify the metadiscourse devices used by English learners at the different levels of language acquisition established by the Common European Framework of Reference and to categorise them to facilitate the assessment and learning of textual and interpersonal devices. First, a learner corpus of essays written by English learners was compiled. Then, the metadiscourse devices were classified in different levels and categories. The results showed the lists and frequencies of metadiscourse devices. The examples aim to make additional and explicit connections between levels of language proficiency and assessment of metadiscourse devices. It can be stated, as a conclusion, that metadiscourse devices portray specific ways of argumentation in essay writing in different levels of EFL proficiency., Spanish Ministry of Economy, Spain, Grant ID FFI2016-77941-P.

[EN] This research draws on Androutsopoulos (2014) to analyse the language, language mixing phenomena and participation in online exchanges among members of a transnational community: colleagues in a project team who have been working together for over four years. Informed by sociolinguistics and Computer-mediated Discourse Analysis theory (Herring, 2004), this contribution compares the colleagues' usual moments of sharing on WhatsApp with their interactions using the same medium during three extraordinary online moments of sharing, which are also significant off-line moments for the group. These three special moments of sharing took place after the terrorist attacks in Manchester in May 2017 and in Turku in August 2017, and the outbreak of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in Europe in March 2020. An examination of the messages exchanged during these extraordinary moments provides considerable evidence that moment, style and audience engagement are closely intertwined. While graphical elements, such as emoji, as well as textese language, are pragmatically unmarked in the typical practices of the community, their absence is the marked choice during the three special moments of sharing analysed. Importantly, the study also shows that code-switching is a key strategy to demonstrate group solidarity during moments of sharing that are special and highly significant for the participants. (C) 2021 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V.

[EN] This study looks into the meta-pragmatics of e-releases by providing corpus-based data on variations in the use of first-person references in e-releases from two oil companies: BP and Repsol. Previous research on corporate press releases had approached this particular feature (Jacobs, 1999a, 1999b), but no further attempts have been made to look into their usage in press releases published on corporate websites of different organizations. Two corpora of nearly 100,000 tokens have been examined for first-person pronouns and determiners in order to identify their frequencies and their referents. The results reveal an interplay of multiple first-person voices that enhance the dialogic nature of e-releases and possibly their persuasive effectiveness. The variations detected show that BP uses first-person references far more frequently than Repsol, yet lower frequencies seem not to correlate with higher frequencies of third-person references. The range of referents identified is also broader for BP. The differences suggest distinct approaches to exploiting the communicative potential served by the use of first-person references, and thus different communication strategies applied by companies operating on a global scale but within the same industry., I would like to thank the Department of Applied Linguistics, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia for the travel grant to present preliminary results of this research at DICOEN 2017. I would also like to thank Alex Lostado from the Erasmus University of Rotterdam for his help with the statistical treatment of the corpus data.

[EN] In this article, we examine language choice and code-switching in two different social media multilingual communities: comments posted on the official Facebook pages of the most important football clubs in Cameroon and Spain. In these two cases, non-standardised languages like indigenous Cameroonian languages or "minority" languages like Catalan have to compete with other languages. By means of a quantitative and Computer-mediated Communication Discourse Analysis (CMCDA), our results show that translingual written exchanges are frequently adopted and serve to establish local and global identities in these highly multilingual environments. Specifically, the results of this case study demonstrate that language mixing strategies are vital to create distinct in-group language style and alignment. However, the article concludes that multilingual interactions are constructed differently by the two communities. The language mixing strategies in the Cameroonian comments are more varied and provide richer examples of language mixing phenomena than the texts from the Spanish clubs. We argue that this is likely because language mixing and lexical creativity are deeply embedded in Cameroon's daily communicative practices. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved., The authors would like to thank the editor of Lingua, Marta Dynel, and the anonymous reviewers for their help and suggestions. Their work has led to significant improvements to this article.

[EN] Self-mentions (i.e., first person pronouns and self-citations) have proven to be one of the most powerful ways of rhetorical self-projection in academic discourse and their role in the construction of a self that engenders credibility in more overtly persuasive genres, such as political debates, has been extensively studied, given the vast literature on pronouns in political discourse analysis and specifically on their uses in political debates. To gain a better insight into the ways in which politicians can build a credible ethos through a competent and authoritative presentation of themselves in electoral debates, this paper compares the frequency and rhetorical roles of the self-mentions used by the candidates of the two major political parties (i.e., Democrats and Republicans) during the debates held for the United States presidential election of 2016. The Republican candidates (i.e., Trump and Pence) were found to make a notably greater use of self-mentions than their Democratic counterparts (i.e., Clinton and Kaine). Significant differences were also found in the rhetorical roles most commonly adopted by each politician to convey authority through the use of exclusive pronouns and self-citations., This research has been financially supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades (Reference FFI2016-77941-P). Ana Albalat-Mascarell has been awarded with a FPU grant by the Spanish Government, Ministerio de Educacion Cultura y Deporte (Reference FPU14/06506).

This study focuses on the analysis of morphologically induced new hybrid blending patterns in Spanish due to the influence and contact with English. Our data-driven approach does not separate word creation from grammatical phenomena but considers hybrid blends – a completely new emerging pattern itself in Spanish – as the output of speakers’ or users’ word creativity and manipulation that may be subject to morphological laws. However, the limited number of existing examples as well as the understandable lack of records for such recent data led us to analyze them in terms of tendencies and probabilities. We pay special attention to the ordering of the source words according to foreign or native origin; the presence of full forms and the distribution of full words and splinters, clipping and overlapping of the source words, as well as the semantic patterns and relations between the source words.

The process of personal-name clipping is considered productive in most contemporary languages. This research study is intended to delve into the process of clipped personal names in various languages, with the aim of deciphering convergent motivations underlying the formation of clipped names, and analogous morphological variations. The first step in the analysis is data collection: a number of 720 given names have been collected from a total of twenty-three languages, based on previous publications and questionnaires filled out by multiple native speakers and linguists. The data-processing stage has revealed that monothematic and dithematic structures are preferred, and some universal, non-diminutive endings (or suffixes) have been extracted: -i, -o, -a, suggesting a vocalic preference over a consonantal closure. Also, some relevant findings show how converging patterns can be used to draw a comprehensive classification of motivations and morphological variations, which sheds more light on the governing implications of clipping and hypocorism.

The main thrust of this paper is to unveil the female identities embodied in a corpus of TV toiletries ads through a pragmatic and multimodal description of the most recurrent thematic cores touched upon in the ads. These thematic cores have been arrived at through an analysis of the implied meanings conveyed about women and the product/brand advertised, together with their classification into topical emerging categories. In order to test the validity of such topical themes, a group of 8 female informants expressed their level of agreement (5-point Likert scale) with a list of implied meanings for each of the ads analysed. Findings reveal that the TV ads construct female identities around two main recurrent thematic cores: (i) women's sexual and beauty empowerment and (ii) women's ability to overcome inner emotional struggles about ageing or confidence loss. Both thematic cores tap into stereotypical views that urge women to be and stay beautiful through the consumption of the products. Female participants are also reminded of their self-worth as women and urged to redefine beauty standards as ways of empowering them to feel good about their looks and of regaining self-esteem. Although verbal stimuli are key for the recovery of implied assumptions, visual and, to a lesser extent, auditory stimuli have been found to reinforce what is verbally implied and to aid in the transmission of weak implicatures about the female participants depicted in the ads under analysis in this piece of research.

The incongruity-resolution model is one of the most popular theories that propose an explanation for the strategies underlying humorous texts. In this paper, a taxonomy of incongruity-resolution Cases is proposed according to a relevance-theoretic stance. Then, the extent to which these Cases are exhaustive enough to cover the whole range of possible incongruity-resolution patterns is checked with a corpus of jokes. Furthermore, an analysis is carried out concerning the implications of matching certain kinds of jokes with specific Cases of the taxonomy. Some conclusions on their pragmatic quality and their overall humorous effects are also drawn. This research was supported by FFI2015-64540-C2-1-P Project (Genhumid), a coordinate project funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

According to relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995), information (a set of assumptions in its terminology) is relevant if it satisfies two conditions; firstly, it should generate a substantial amount of interest (positive cognitive effects in its terminology); and secondly, its processing should demand as little mental effort as possible. In my opinion, this pair of conditions should be supplemented with the notions of contextual constraint and non-intended non-propositional effect. As will be argued in this paper, this RT extension is particularly appropriate for the analysis of Internet-mediated communication, since nowadays we are witnessing a turn into what has been labeled phatic Internet, massive exchanges of messages with little informational relevance but enormous impact on users’ feelings of connectivity and sociability, among others. The aim of this paper is to apply this proposal of extension to mobile instant messaging (specifically WhatsApp) and explore some of the constraints and non-propositional effects that play a role in the eventual relevance of WhatsApp interactions, which typically generate relevance from these non-propositional effects and not from the prototypical object of pragmatic research, namely the propositional content of the messages in the shape of explicatures and/or implicatures. This research was supported by EMO-FUNDETT research project, a coordinate project awarded by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (FFI2013-47792-C2-1-P).

[EN] Over the few years, computer based language testing has become prevailing worldwide. The number of institutions the use computers as the main means of delivery has increased dramatically. Many students face each day tests for well-known high-stakes decisions which imply the knowledge and ability to use technology to provide evidence of language mastery. However, this situation is not the same everywhere. While countries like the United States or the United Kingdom are spearheads of this tendency, others like Spain, lag way behind. This paper addresses the needs of use of computer based language testing in the new Spanish educational system. To do so, this paper introduces the current situation in Spain, then proceeds to do a SWOT analysis emphasizing the lacks and opportunities for language based assessments and concludes by stating the positive issues involving them., The authors would like to thank the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for funding the research project (with co-finance by ERDF) within the framework of the National R + D + I (2011-2014) "Guidance, proposals and teaching for English section in the entrance examination to the University" (Reference FFI2011-22442). The researchers would also thank the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports because without the grant for the Senior Researchers Mobility this paper would probably have not been possible.

In this paper, the language policy proposals included in the election programmes of the political parties and coalitions which obtained representation in the Valencian Parliament after the 2011 May elections are analysed. Their consistency and coherence is studied from a sociolinguistic perspective. From a critical discourse analysis perspective, these sets of proposals are compared to the language perception which appears in them. The comparison of the proposals of the different groups represented in the Parliament complements the study of the past and present Valencian language policy. Although the real possibilities to access the government of the different parties are not analysed, by including the parties which now represent the government and the opposition, the maximum and minimum threshold for language policy development in the mid-term are established. To analyse the Valencian language policy, it is necessary to consider Spanish, the other official language and common to the rest of the Spanish state, and see whether there are direct or implicit references to it. Regarding the educational environment, the presence of English and its importance in the school curricula in a generalised discourse context which advocates for its learning can be determining in the design and use of the teaching languages in the Valencian educational system.

Collaborative learning has acquired a new dimension with the widespread use of information and communication technologies (McCafferty, Jacobs and Dasilva Iddings, 2006). The main advantages of using technology for language learning are a greater exposure to authentic language, access to a wide range of sources of information and to different varieties of language, opportunities for interaction and communication and more intensive learner participation (Carrió Pastor, 2009a, 2009b). The practical case presented in this study shows the collaborative learning experience in two English for business subjects, taught at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The activity was intended to simulate a real-life situation, in which members of business organizations are required to collaborate on projects in geographically distant locations. It has provided many opportunities for written interaction through a chat, in which students had to refine their communicative skills in English in order to collaborate successfully in the assignment set. The survey conducted after the assignment revealed that students felt more motivated and found the online collaboration an enriching context in learning business English.

Metadiscourse is usually studied in terms of a cross-cultural exploration of interpersonality, mainly in academic English, but we believe that this approach could be applied to other genres. The main purpose of this study is to compare some metadiscourse features used in digital business communications. More specifically, we focus on the interactional metadiscourse devices categorised as boosters. We analysed and compared a corpus of one hundred emails written by two groups of non-native speakers of English working in an export company and using English to communicate in a business environment. One group was composed of workers from Spain and the other was composed of workers from China. Our aim was to analyse the differences in the use of boosters and the causes of variation in their use, which may be related to the need to employ assertiveness or politeness in business contexts.

[EN] Ubiquitous language learning and testing has become a new challenging trend. Budget constraints in Europe and the rest of the world have made this way of delivery very attractive for materials designers as well as language testing organizations. Ubiquitoustesting has a very especial interest in low and medium stakes language testing in which mobile devices are supposed to serve both for delivering tests as well as for pre-test training. However, although the number of publications in language teaching increases rapidly, language testing through mobiles devices has had a limited interest in research. Purpose of Study: This research under the OPENPAU project intends to address the two main issues mentioned before emphasizing the design aspects. To do so, this paper presents the principles under which the mobile applications were designed, the mobile tool and the interface design. Sources of Evidence: To do this study we used the description of the ergonomics, and we also considered the students needs and how those needs were incorporated in the interface design of the platform. Analysis and results: The study indicates that interface design is linked to issues of needs, technical constraints, purpose and budget. Overall, the paper evidences the tablet PC s have a tremendous potential to implement high-stakes tests in Spain at the moment dues to their versatility and limited cost.

Research on language teaching of lingua francas like Spanish or English emphasize the need to consider cultural diversity and intercultural communication competence, as learners are more likely to interact with non-native speakers of different nationalities. In English for Specific Purposes for engineers, concepts such as intercultural teams, international meetings, geographical mobility, worldwide negotiations, and globalization are associated to the professional profiles of graduates and reveal the need to include intercultural communicative competence in their courses. This study uses inductive content analysis to identify the perceptions and attitudes of ESP students towards intercultural competence based on a corpus of self-assessment essays.

This paper describes our on-going research into first and foreign language use in Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) classrooms. First, we compiled a corpus for indirect observation of twenty YouTube videos featuring primary and secondary school CLIL lessons taught in five European countries. Second, data were gathered through direct observation of four secondary school groups of CLIL Technology classes taught at the IES Benicalap (Valencia, Spain). The results provide insight into when and how first and foreign languages (in this case, English) were used in these CLIL classrooms, especially in regard to instruction, class management and feedback.

The creation of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has evidenced the need for the development of language policies at universities. University-based language centres have made a great contribution to the development of language learning since their emergence and have played a major role in the development and implementation of language policies and language education. In addition to teaching and training Language Centres have another important function as university students are now required to prove their language competence at different stages during their university studies for mobility, graduating, entrance to master programmes, etc., as well as for better job opportunities in the international market. This new function of language centres can be defined as the need for the development of more reliable systems for the accreditation or certification of language competence which will provide a basis for comparability of levels of assessment at European level. As a consequence, national language associations throughout Europe are immersed in a process for the design of a common model for the accreditation of language competence in higher education institutions that allows for comparability in achievement across languages and institutions, but which at the same time, allows for degrees of variation and the possibility to reflect the specific needs and aims of the different institutions. In the present work we describe the evolution of the accreditation process in Europe, with special attention to the model developed by the Spanish Association of Higher Education Language Centres (ACLES).

This paper introduces a pedagogical proposal for the development of writing skills based on the analysis of multi-genre structures (AMS). The objective of this AMS model is to help teachers design genres that may be used in the language classroom. This genre analysis can be performed with software tools for corpus analysis. This study is based on a previous model of genre analysis designed to determine the forms of the macrostructure, microstructure, and the format of the target genre ( Casan-Pitarch, 2015 ) and focuses on ESP students at tertiary education. The AMS model is expected to help students improve their writing skills and gain specific knowledge on professional and academic genres.

The market economy, which is the driving force behind recent changes in the working dynamics of businesses and institutions, is compelling stakeholders in education to facilitate the acquisition of communicative competency in a second or foreign language as a means of preparing the workforce for mobile or virtual work. The CoMoViWo project, financed by the European Union's Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA), aims to improve the employability of graduates by developing literacy training for virtual communication. The innovative aspect of this project is the fusion of communication, technology and multiculturality in association with business enterprises. The present study focuses on the first phase of the project, whose aim is to obtain information concerning the real needs detected in mobility and virtual communication in the workplace. After a preliminary study of the literature it was found that one of the most common instruments for carrying out needs analyses was the questionnaire. Therefore, the questionnaire was taken as a tool for the present study. As a result of the fieldwork carried out in the elaboration and filtering of the items in the questionnaire, the validity of the instrument was verified. The questionnaires were then piloted in the different companies involved in the project. Analysis of the results provided the necessary feedback for the design of the prototype of intensive modules to improve the use of a foreign language in a virtual and mobile context in the workplace, which is the ultimate objective of the present project.

In this paper I explore cross-linguistic rhetorical variation in the Literature Review chapters of 30 computer science doctoral theses written by English L1 (EngL1), Spanish L1 (SpaL1) and English L2 (EngL2) writers. Using Kwan's (2006) genre-analytical framework (Move 1: Establishing one part of the territory of one's own research; Move 2: Creating a niche; Move 3: Occupying the research niche), I particularly examine how writers present their research in Move 3 (M3). The results show the functional importance of M3 strategies in the computer science PhD thesis Literature Reviews. The texts in English present a higher number of occurrences and a wider range of M3 strategies than the SpaL1 texts. However, the SpaL1 texts are more homogeneous in terms of rhetorical distribution. Variation is also found in the linguistic mechanisms that the writers of the three groups use to make themselves visible and promote their work. National writing styles, discipline conventions and language barriers to effective interpersonal communication seem to have an influence on these writers. EAP courses and specific genre-based writing instruction could help junior scholars to successfully manage M3 strategies.