The Chilean curriculum for writing education includes five paradigms: "cultural," "macro-linguistic," "micro-linguistic," "procedural," and "communicative." The implementation of such a poly-paradigmatic curriculum can occur in multiple ways. Therefore, we analyzed classroom practices with two…

Instant messaging applications integrated in smartphones have favored the emergence of new digital writing systems, which are characterized by the use of specific spellings called textisms. This study analyses the relationship between the use of textisms and spelling mistakes in academic texts. The methodology applied was descriptive, based on a…

Learning to compose texts adequate for different purposes is crucial for becoming literate. We examined developmental changes in the rhetorical structure of written texts produced by Spanish children throughout the early years of elementary school in the light of descriptive writing purposes. Children had also performed tasks to test…

The objective of this research is to determine the competences of students of Basic Spanish Language II (Let. 012) in the comprehension of the superstructure and macrostructure of expository texts, in two college Campuses; the UASD San Francisco de Macorís Campus, and the UASD Bonao Campus for the semester 2015-2. The theory is based on the…

The goal of the present study was to examine the efficacy of learning a text structure strategy (TSS) for improving reading comprehension and recall for second language (L2) learners, as well as to test for transfer of the strategy to the native language (L1). University L2 learners of English completed a five-session course on using the TSS to…

This dissertation is a variationist account of two non-standard relative clause (RC) structures in Spanish: resumptive pronouns (RPs) and prepositional-phrase (PP) chopping. Previous typological studies considered RP explanations based on difficulty of processing (Hawkins, 1994), while Spanish-specific quantitative studies proposed a number of…

This dissertation focuses on the apparent linguistic discontinuity reflected in notarial texts from the twelfth to the thirteenth century in the Iberian Peninsula. Particular attention is given to the historical development of Spanish personal a (the direct object animacy marker), which can be used to trace the communicative continuity that must…