Miriam Fernandez de Caleya

The issue of motivation continues to play a major role in the area of EFL/ESL learning due to the fact that a student´s motivation and attitudes towards learning a foreign language often result to be the predictors of further success or failure. The current investigation aims at exploring the motivation patterns of EFL engineering students at the Technical University in Madrid towards learning the English language. The topic seems to be especially relevant due to the fact that English course at this university (English for Professional and Academic Purposes) has recently become a compulsory subject for every engineering specialty.

The study investigated students’ motivation in terms of three motivational constructs:  instrumental motivation, integrative motivation and personal motivation based on Gardner’s (1985) and Cooper and Fishman’s (1977) works. On the other hand, learners´ attitudes towards the use of English in the social and educational contexts, the English language and the culture of the English speaking countries have been identified.
The researchers have utilized a motivational questionnaire based on a Likert scale that was administered to 72 university students from second to fifth year, belonging to two different Engineering Schools: the Higher Technical School of Industrial Engineering (ETSII) and the University School of Technical Industrial Engineering (EUIT). The findings show that the motivation patterns dominant among Spanish engineering students are extrinsic in their nature. Instrumental reasons for learning English language, including utilitarian and academic ones, are the most frequently mentioned. Most of the students have indicated the necessity of learning a foreign language to become a well prepared professional, as well as to have more possibilities to get a better job in the future.
Personal reasons, such as travelling or communication, are also regarded as important motives by the respondents. Meanwhile, the integrative reasons are considered to be the least important ones. The results provide the evidence that learning English as a part of culture has actually had the slightest impact in the students’ motivation. On the other hand, data for the students’ attitudes reveal the fact that most of students have positive attitudes towards the social value and educational status of English. Besides, the findings show the students’ positive orientation toward the English language. At last, the results indicate that a high number of the students show their interest in a number of aspects of the English speaking culture, such as music, movies and science issues.
Finally, some pedagogical implications, based on these findings, are discussed in the paper.

Key words:  Motivation, engineering, learning English, professional careers.

Few English teachers nowadays would reject the necessity of teaching vocabulary, wherever it possible, in context. By context we understand not only the immediate semantic environment of any given lexical item, but the whole text surrounding (co-text) as well as the situation in which the discourse is produced (context). By bringing a discourse dimension into vocabulary teaching, we do not pretend to substitute neither traditional nor more recent, communicative approaches. On the contrary, our challenge is to combine already existing approaches in teaching lexis with a discourse-oriented one. Our research is based mainly on the latest developments of Text Linguistics and Discourse Analysis in the field of lexical cohesion: studying vocabulary above sentence level. We propose that lexical cohesion as a significant feature of textuality could be successfully exploited by language teachers. By introducing vocabulary work on a discourse level, we pretend to provide the language students...

La implementación de una webquest en un curso de Inglés para Fines Académicos y Profesionales, impartido en la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) en 2011, demostró ser una actividad altamente motivadora en el ámbito de la ingeniería. Los alumnos valoraron positivamente el planteamiento claro y estructurado de los problemas a resolver, los recursos disponibles on-line, así como los criterios de evaluación considerados por el profesor a la hora de la corrección.

Resumen: la implementación de una webquest en un curso de Inglés para Fines Académicos y Profesionales, impartido en la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) en 2011, demostró ser una actividad altamente motivadora en el ámbito de la ingeniería. Los alumnos valoraron positivamente el planteamiento claro y estructurado de los problemas a resolver, los recursos disponibles online, así como los criterios de evaluación considerados por el profesor a la hora de la corrección.
Palabras clave: Webquest. Enseñanza híbrida. Evaluación. Ingeniería.

Literature has been an essential part of the language curriculum for a long time, but until recently it has not been given much emphasis in the EFL/ESL classroom. Even though, many teachers nowadays still feel reluctant to include literary blocks into the language curriculum. This assumption could be partially based on the reductive interpretation of the language process learning. The fact, however, is that literature elements could be highly beneficial for the foreign language development. Literature is an authentic material; hence, most of its works are not created for the specific purpose of teaching a foreign language. Therefore, learners are exposed to genuine and undistorted language. When working with literary texts, students have also to cope with language intended for native speakers, gaining additional familiarity with many different linguistic uses, forms and conventions. In addition, literature provides exposure to the culture of its speakers by examining universal human experience within the context of a particular setting and the consciousness of a particular society. Linguistically, literature has the potential of serving as the central focus of the unit of study in the classroom. A number of different activities, based on the main language skills, may be developed around the reading of a literary work. While reading a text, students get involved into the story, eager to find out what happens next. They feel close to certain characters and share their emotional responses. The approach suggested in this research looks for engaging language students in genre studies around reading and writing workshops. Our proposal is focused on Lewis Carol’s Alice in Wonderland as one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. The proposal includes different exercises designed both to help students to develop linguistic skills and different language areas, and also to offer them a direct contact with the target language culture. All these things promote better understanding of students´ own identity and the complexity of the world around them.