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This paper reports an evaluation carried out from 1999 to 2003 in 55 schools in the Basque Autonomous Community involving more than 10,000 secondary school students. The variables measured include achievement in Spanish, metacognitive skills, learning strategies and variables related to the students' family environment. The measurements were made at three different times in the last year of primary, and second and fourth years of secondary school. The main aim of this research study is to conduct a longitudinal study of the students' achievement using a measuring unit which can be used for the three measurements for all the students. The data reported in this paper focus on proficiency in the Spanish language. Data were analysed using a hierarchical linear model (HLM) with three levels: (1) the three students' measures at three different points in time; (2) individual variables related to the students; and (3) the variables related to the schools. The paper presents a model of change in achievement in Spanish by examining the influence of background variables including socioeconomic status (SES) of the family and the school, gender, and type of school (private or public). The results indicate that there is a linear increase of scores in Spanish along the school grades. D model students with Basque as the language of instruction obtain lower results than the rest of the students. Other variables such as gender, SES (family and school) and metacognition also have a significant effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates cross-linguistic variation of metadiscourse in the results and discussion chapters of engineering master's theses written in English and Spanish. The analysis is based on a corpus of 200 master's thesis results and discussion chapters: 100 written by L1 English students and 100 written by L1 Spanish students. Using Hyland's (2005a) interpersonal model of metadiscourse, the results and discussion chapters were compared to examine the influence of lingua-cultural contexts of writing on student writer's employment of metadiscoursal resources. Findings of the comparative analysis reveal significant cross-linguistic differences for overall frequency of metadiscourse as well as for most (sub-)categories. The analysis suggests that interpersonal features of writing are inexorably linked to the specific lingua-cultural contexts in which texts are produced and consumed, even within the same discipline and (part-)genre. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications for L2 writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the relationship between the awareness of linguistic prestige and the security or insecurity in the use of minoritised languages? Is formal linguistic insecurity (as initially described by Labov) the same as the speakers' perception of linguistic insecurity? Which are the variables related to the various types of linguistic insecurity in bilingual environments? How does schooling affect this phenomenon? This paper attempts to provide an answer to these questions, based on the results of a research project on linguistic insecurity (LI) carried out in a social context, the Valencian Autonomous Community (Spain), where there are two official languages (Spanish and Catalan) competing against each other, but with a very different degree of social recognition. The choice of an academic environment for this study is justified by the importance that the LI phenomenon may have within the context of language learning in multilingual contexts.1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous works in English have revealed that disfluencies follow regular patterns and that incorporating them into the language model of a speech recognizer leads to lower perplexities and sometimes to a better performance. Although work on disfluency modeling has been applied outside the English community (e.g., in Japanese), as far as we know there is no specific work dealing with disfluencies in Spanish. In this paper, we follow a data driven approach in exploring the potential benefit of modeling disfluencies in a speech recognizer in Spanish. Two databases of human-computer and human-human dialogs are considered, which allow the absolute and relative frequencies of disfluencies in the two situations to be compared. The rate of disfluencies in human-human dialogs is found to be very close to that found for similar databases in English. Due to setup factors, the rate of disfluencies found in human-computer dialogs was remarkably higher than that reported for similar databases in English. In any case, from the point of view of speech recognition, the high frequencies of disfluencies and the distinct features of the acoustic events related to them support the need for explicit acoustic models. The regularities observed in the distribution of filled pauses and speech repairs reveal that including them in the language model of the speech recognizer may be also helpful. The extent to which the number of events depends on utterance length and on the speaker is also explored. Statistics are shown that follow previous studies for English, and a sizeable space is devoted to comparing our results with them. Finally, various possible cues for the automatic detection of speech repairs—a key issue from the point of view of speech understanding—are explored: silent pauses, filled pauses, lengthenings, cut off words and discourse markers. As previously observed for English, none of them was found to be reliable by itself. More information, especially at the acoustic-prosodic level, is no doubt needed to reliably detect speech repairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]