Francisco Ballesteros

Formulating Writer Stance: A Contrastive Study of EFL Learner Corpora

The emergence of English as the predominant foreign language required for academic work in Spain has brought about a shift in the EFL teachers’ priorities regarding the teaching of writing skills. Since the early 1990s, the SPICLE1 writing research team at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid has studied argumentative texts produced by Spanish university writers, American university students and expert writers (signed newspaper editorials) in an attempt to tease apart the multiple factors influencing EFL text, including transfer of L1 features – linguistic (typological) as well as those involving the influence of L1 rhetorical conventions – novice writer aspects, EFL proficiency and educational background. We present two studies which show how these factors may subtly coalesce in order to produce certain discourse effects, especially concerning writer stance, as shown in the second study presented here. The results will be of interest to teachers of ESL and EFL writing and researchers in contrastive rhetoric.

A Contrastive Functional Analysis of Errors in Spanish EFL University Writers’ Argumentative Texts: Corpus-based Study

This article reports on the initial results of the Spanish data from the ICLE Error Tagging Project (Louvain). The corpus consists of 50,000 words of texts (argumentative essays and literature examinations) written by English Philology students at two Madrid universities. The tag categories were: Form (F), Grammar (G), Lexico-grammatical aspects (X), Lexis (L), Word (W), Punctuation (Q), Register (R) and Style (S). All tags were triple checked by various native-speaker raters. The results show that grammar (35%) and lexis (28%) account for two-thirds of the errors, while punctuation accounts for 11%, form 9%, word 7%, lexico-grammatical factors 6% and register and style for 2% and 1%, respectively. The study proposes various areas of investigation which may be useful to others who are working with English-Spanish contrastive data: discourse/pragmatics; semantics; (lexis)/lexico-grammar; syntax; phonetics/writing systems; and non-structural factors (writing conventions).

Treatment of Anxiety Disorders in a Psychology Clinic.

People with anxiety disorders demand psychological attention most often. Therefore, it seems important to identify both the characteristics of the patients who demand help and the clinical variables related to that demand and its treatment. A cohort of 292 patients who requested help at a university clinical facility was studied. The typical profile of the patient was: being female, young, unmarried, with some college education, and having previously received treatment, especially pharmacological one. The three most frequent diagnoses of anxiety, which include 50% of the cases, were: Anxiety Disorder not otherwise specified, Social Phobia, and Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia. Regarding the characteristics of the intervention, the average duration of the assessment was 3.5 sessions (SD = 1.2), and the duration of the treatment was 14 sessions (SD = 11.2). The percentage of discharges was 70.2%. The average cost of treatment was around €840. The results are discussed, underlining the value of empirically supported treatments for anxiety disorders.

Structured I/O streams in Clive: a toolbox approach for wide area network computing

Most distributed applications and tools used in wide area networks and Cloud computing environments use the UNIX I/O framework. In this framework, processes use file descriptors for standard I/O and file access, with the traditional open/close/read/write interface. Although this design has proven to be excellent since the 1970s, it is not appropriate for today wide-area systems because of the implied RPCs and network latency. There are systems relying on message streams that perform well in such environments, but they depart from the toolbox approach embraced by UNIX, making it harder to combine existing programs to solve new tasks. In this paper we describe the design, implementation, and usage of a new I/O framework, built to enable the construction of services in environments with high latency, while preserving the programmability of the system as a whole and making it convenient to combine existing tools and programs. The framework relies on named channels for I/O. Each channel carries a stream of typed data including directory entries, raw bytes, and other application-specific data. Separate commands using the framework may be combined as in UNIX, but still tolerate high latencies as found in distributed and Cloud computing environments, enabling a toolbox approach in such environments.

Empirically supported treatments for panic disorder with agoraphobia in a Spanish psychology clinic.

The aim of this work is to study the sociodemographic and clinical characteristics of patients diagnosed with Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia (PD/Ag), as well as the characteristics of the treatment and its results and cost in a University Psychology Clinic. Fifty patients demanded psychological assistance for PD/Ag; 80% were women, with an average age of 29.22 years (SD = 9.03). Mean number of evaluation sessions was 3.26 (SD = 1.03), and of treatment sessions, 13.39 (SD = 9.237). Of the patients, 83.33% were discharged (that is, questionnaire scores were below the cut-off point indicated by the authors, and no PD/Ag was observed at readministration of the semistructured interview), 5.5% refused treatment, and 11% were dropouts. The average number of treatment sessions of patients who achieved therapeutic success was 15.13 (SD = 8.98). Effect sizes (d) greater than 1 were obtained in all the scales. Changes in all scales were significant (p < .05). The estimated cost of treatment for patients who achieved therapeutic success was 945.12€. The treatment results are at least similar to those of studies of efficacy and effectiveness for PD/Ag. The utility of generalizing treatments developed in research settings to a welfare clinic is discussed.