Alejandro Curado Fuentes

The use of corpora and IT in a comparative evaluation approach to oral business English

This paper presents a method for the assessment of oral fluency in Business English according to a two corpora-based lexical approach. The original query for our research is the possibility of estimating the level of oral skills among Business English (BE) learners by contrasting their word use in oral presentations with corpus data frequencies. Use of Information Technology (IT) resources and electronic BE corpora is thus measured in the evaluative approach to identify significant performance changes between learners who have used such electronic resources and learners who have not.

Developing adaptive systems at early stages of children's foreign language development

This paper describes the integration of hypermedia adaptive systems for foreign language learners at an early age Our research project is concerned with exploring the relationship between language learning and information technology according to six different phases: a preliminary study of the plausible adaptive system; the development of lessons based on hypermedia and learners’ needs; the examination of language learners’ profiles; the definition of an adapted interface; the integration of the systems in schools; and the evaluation of the use of such systems. While the last three stages are still under way, we have already obtained some significant feedback from preliminary observation and approaches, which chiefly reveal the importance of accounting for interrelated factors at an early age, such as specific learning strategies, skills, and graphical design.

A corpus-based assessment of reading comprehension in English for Tourism studies

This paper describes the follow-up of two groups of ten learners each in an English for Tourism course in Spain. The first group carried out a series of lab activities based on a corpus of short advertising texts, while the second group of students lacked this access to corpus-based work. The written test that both groups took (after the corpus activities) contributes to unveiling some key aspects concerning learners’ reading comprehension strategies, for instance, their capability to integrate content knowledge or schemata with a socio-cultural level in the texts, and their use of pictures and letter size to characterize text type. Such elements significantly varied from one group of students to another. The findings may imply conclusions related to particular university contexts that should be demanded in ESP (English for Specific Purposes): a continuous and intensive formation based on varied activities, and tasks to be developed autonomously and collaboratively, under the supervision of the language instructor. Corpus-based work can fit in adequately in this context, especially when specific language tasks responding to real needs and preferences in the academic and professional milieu are developed.