Jornada de capacitación docente en San Martín, Buenos Aires, sobre la enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua ExtranjeraFinalizado

El Programa de Lenguas de la UNSAM invita a la jornada The truth about materials: What the textbooks are not telling you, a cargo de la doctora Viviana Cortés, de la Georgia State University (GSU).

La actividad se dictará en inglés.

Se entregarán certificados de asistencia a quienes se inscriban y se acrediten.

Viviana Cortés is Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics and English as a Second Language (ESL) at Georgia State University (GSU) in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States of America. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from Northern Arizona University (NAU) in 2002.

The truth about materials: What your textbook is not telling you

EFL Teachers feel very often frustrated because they are not sure if the language used in the textbooks that they are required to use in their teaching contexts reflect the real language that people use in English speaking countries.

For many years, materials designers have relied on intuition or on previous work conducted in the field of discourse analysis to make decisions on what they should include in the textbooks they design. Nowadays, with the advancements of computers and the use of language corpora to investigate language use, materials designers can rely on empirically-based findings to make more informed decisions.

Following the contrastive analysis tradition (Boxer & Pickering, 1995; Carter, 1998; Gilmore, 2004), this presentation introduces the results of a study that analyzed a corpus of textbooks comparing the language in those textbooks and corpus-based research findings. The comparison focuses on the use of formulaic language as presented in textbooks published in the seventies, eighties, nineties and in the new millennium. The textbooks were selected from those used at different Binational Centers and other teaching institutions around the world.

The results of the study showed various developments in the language presented to students through the four decades represented in the corpus. Only 30% of the expressions that frequently occur in every day conversation as demonstrated by corpus-based studies of this register could be identified in the textbook corpus and just 7% of those expressions were suggested by textbook writers as useful expressions.

The presentation includes a detailed description of the type of expressions found in textbooks and those that should have been included because of their saliency in the language, as well as suggestions for the application of corpus-based findings to the design of materials for the teaching of general English and English for academic writing.

Día y horario: Miércoles 29 de mayo de 13:30 a 17:00

Acreditación: 13:30 h

Lugar: Aula 402, 4.º piso, Edificio Volta (Av. Presidente Roque Sáenz Peña 832, CABA)

Inscripción, aquí.