5.1. Criticality

According to Banegas and Villacañas de Castro (Reference Banegas and Villacañas de Castro2016), criticality in ELT refers to the promotion of both critical pedagogies and critical thinking to empower learners and educators in their contexts and situated social practices. Under this broad term, the seven studies reviewed in this section show that critical pedagogies may be linked to post-method pedagogies in ELT (Kumaravadivelu, Reference Kubanyiova and Crookes2003). Post-method pedagogies seek to help create ELT approaches and practices that respond to the particularities, practicalities, and possibilities found in specific contexts by those who enact language teaching and learning processes.

Post-method pedagogies usually gain traction in pre-service ELTE and among experienced educators in Argentina. By means of a survey, Soto (Reference Sollier2014) investigated a group of student-teachers’ perceptions of post-method pedagogy in ELT. Findings showed that even when the student-teachers valued a prescriptivist approach to grammar teaching, they believed that local and context-responsive pedagogies should be incorporated in ELT through teacher-made materials. Moving beyond ELTE programmes, Tavella and Fernández (Reference Suárez, Tuero and Natal2017) carried out a survey among university ESP tutors to gain insights regarding their professional practices as manifested in course design, materials, and activities. The authors conclude that, inadvertently, the tutors’ practices have shifted and exhibit features of post-method pedagogies as they have developed courses that include topics, input material, and activities that respond to the particularities and practicalities of the context in which they teach. The authors also noted higher levels of reflection and self-evaluation among the ESP tutors, and a sharper focus on learners’ present and future professional needs.

At the intersection of critical pedagogy and critical thinking skills, four studies examined the development of higher-order thinking skills among student-teachers. Basabe and Germani (Reference Basabe and Germani2014) examined the impact of critical pedagogy and critical literacy through discussions on literary texts with student-teachers. Drawing on data collected through focus groups, classroom observation, and interviews with the student-teachers, the authors concluded that there was an increase in teamwork among the student teachers and that they developed higher levels of reflection and confidence to discuss controversial topics such as non-binary sexualities. However, the student-teachers still exhibited a tendency to use description over evaluative comments to discuss a literary piece. Aware of the necessity of imbuing ELT with higher-order thinking skills, Sollier (Reference Sergi2015) analysed student-teachers’ writing of learning objectives in lesson plans. By conducting content analysis, the author reported that student-teachers showed a tendency to include lower-order thinking skills aims, and when they included aims to promote critical thinking, these were not anchored in activities that would scaffold higher-order thinking skills development. With a focus on helping student-teachers become aware of criticality, Caielli and Williams (Reference Busso, López, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2018) analysed a group of student-teachers’ perceptions of their learners by means of critical discourse analysis (CDA). The authors analysed how student-teachers described learners from a vulnerable socio-economic context. They concluded that studies of this nature can help teacher educators guide student-teachers by making them aware of their linguistic choices when referring to learners and educational settings embedded in contexts under difficult circumstances. As part of a larger exploratory-interpretive research project on language teacher cognition (Borg, Reference Borg2006), Regueira, Del Potro, and Di Virgilio (Reference Porto, Montemayor-Borsinger and López-Barrios2018) examined the perceptions of a group of student-teachers towards the use of English and L1 Spanish in their practicum experience. Results showed that through formative interaction with teacher educators and peers, the student-teachers developed a critical approach to language teaching, which allowed them to see the affordance of including learners’ L1 (Spanish) as another tool for English language learning.

Critical thinking skills and critical issues can be developed and addressed among graduated teachers. Martino (Reference Martínez and Picchio2014) employed a qualitative research framework to study how teachers’ perceptions on gender affect learning among primary school learners. While the teachers indicated that a topic such as sports was more welcomed among boys, they acknowledged that choice of topics should be inclusive and gender-neutral. In secondary education, Valsecchi, Sacchi, Salcedo, Baldocchi, and Roccia (Reference Valenti, Galimberti, Anglada, Sapag, Banegas and Soto2016) utilised a sequential research strategy (survey followed by semi-structured interviews) to gather EFL teachers’ beliefs about different aspects of ELT in one Argentinian city. Results yielded teachers’ particular interest in reflecting on the critical roles of culture, technology, and writing skills in the EFL lesson. The authors believed that studies in the field of language teacher cognition can shed light on teacher education programmes and professional development opportunities to promote critical and informed reflections between external theories (content knowledge) and teachers’ beliefs and personal theories drawn on personal trajectories as learners and teachers.

From a different angle but still connected to criticality in ELTE, Montserrat and Mórtola (Reference Mickan and Wallace2018) employed document analysis to examine the history and present of linguistic policies of foreign language teaching in Argentina. The authors argue that the hegemony of EFL in primary and secondary education has been favoured by central and regional policy makers in the country. Such policies, they show, have been enacted at the expense of other modern foreign and heritage languages in Argentina, and therefore, the so-called plurilingualism and linguistic diversity promoted in official documents is marginalised or simply absent in practice.

A common concern across these studies is the need to implement context-responsive pedagogies that value local social practices and provide educators with pedagogical resources to enable learners to develop their critical thinking skills. In addition, the studies above illustrate that critical thinking and critical pedagogies in relation to potential topics and cognitive development in ELT should be considered among both student-teachers and experienced teachers regardless of the level of education they may teach. More importantly, these studies should be seen as a warning sign: ELT needs to engage in pedagogies that do more than superficial language learning. EFL should be seen as another opportunity in the curriculum for the development of critical citizenship, plurilingualism, and empowerment; this highly complex conceptual shift should start in initial teacher preparation.

5.2. Identity

With the exception of Mulone (Reference Moyetta, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2017), studies into teacher identity concentrated on student-teachers’ trajectories employing narrative inquiry (Barkhuizen, Reference Barkhuizen, McKinley and Rose2020) within one academic year. Despite this difference, the studies reviewed in this section adopt a qualitative research paradigm to explore how the authors (researchers examining their own practice or interviewing present and past student-teachers) have made an imprint on (future) teachers’ sense of professional identity.

Inscribed in narrative inquiry, Sarasa (Reference Sapag, Boldrini, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Waigandt2014, Reference Sarasa2017) carried out small-scale studies with her own pre-service student-teachers to understand their trajectories while attending the author's module on communication. Through student-teachers’ reflections materialised into narrative and poem writing, the author concluded that her own practices allowed them to reflect on and develop their own present and future professional selves thanks to the autonomy and reflection dimensions featured in the module. In a similar vein, Sarasa and Solís (Reference Sarasa2017) explored the storied construction of future teachers’ professional identity as expressed in multiple narratives and journal entries co-composed with ten student-teachers at a state university. The authors reported that the narratives co-constructed with their student-teachers permitted the understanding of student-teachers’ re-negotiation of present and future professional and personal identities through their university-based trajectories.

De Laurentis (Reference De Francesco, Lauría, Roseti, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2015) reconstructed a narrative experience carried out with her student-teachers to explore the impact of culture as a tool to comprehend reality and narrativity as a natural form to organise experience in their identity construction. In this sense, the student-teachers developed awareness of their own perceptions of culture together with meta-analysis of narrative inquiry in their own development as future teachers. In turn, Mulone (Reference Moyetta, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2017) conducted research into EFL teachers’ own professional identity after graduation. Data obtained from a survey and interviews revealed that as teachers gained experience and reflected on their lived experiences at university, they evolved from a limited and stereotyped perspective of EFL teacher identity to a more complex, broad, and realistic view. The participating teachers believed that their language teacher identity should not ignore wider educational imperatives and key issues and should also include social dimensions such as gender equality or wellbeing.

The five papers reviewed in this section share a similar concern: the centrality of ELTE programmes in teachers’ personal and professional trajectories and how ELTE practices exert an enormous influence on becoming EFL teachers. However, the area of teacher identity in ELTE could benefit from longitudinal studies which examine how specific aspects of ELTE programmes exercise their influence and enter into dialogue with external factors on (future) teachers’ identity.

5.3. Feedback

Feedback is a dominant focus within the studies that examine ELTE, particularly in pre-service programmes. The studies reviewed in this section reveal the authors’ interest in understanding student-teachers’ perceptions and characteristics of effective feedback, and how feedback influences their performance in the practicum and academic writing.

Regarding feedback during the practicum experience, papers examined student-teachers’ perceptions (Percara, Reference Panzachi Heredia, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2015) and lesson plans (Rodríguez, Castro, García Álvarez, Scilipoti, & Tacconi, Reference Byram2015) and teacher educators’ perceptions and post-observation feedback (Percara, Reference Panzachi Heredia, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2015; San Martín, Faletti, & Helale, Reference Salcedo, Sacchi, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Soto2016). The results from these four studies showed that while teacher educators valued and exhibited formative, guided, and indirect feedback to encourage student-teachers’ reflection and self-discovery on lesson planning and delivery, student-teachers preferred direct formative feedback as it provided them with acute and expert information about their performance. Teacher educators’ feedback was found to help student-teachers develop self-awareness of strengths and room for improvement and manage to identify potential courses of action.

In relation to feedback on academic writing, López Casoli and Berardo (Reference López Casoli, Berardo and Riestra2018) analysed student-teachers’ and teacher educators’ perceptions of written feedback in essays and other genres that employ academic/formal English. Similar to the studies on feedback during the practicum, student-teachers and teacher educators held divergent views regarding the benefits of direct and indirect written feedback. While the former was preferred by student-teachers to improve accuracy, the latter was employed by teacher educators to raise student-teachers’ language awareness and noticing.

While these papers adopted a qualitative perspective and focused on perceptions and practices, future studies should extend research on feedback to areas such as linguistic and textual accuracy in the case of academic writing and local knowledge generation in the case of feedback during the practicum experience.

5.4 Teacher educators’ practices

While almost all the studies reviewed in the previous subsections investigated aspects of teacher educators’ practices or were conducted by teacher educators in their own modules, a few papers reported on teacher educators’ interest in improving their own or others’ overall practices. Such a focus seems to acknowledge the influential role that teacher educators’ practices have in shaping future teachers’ professional lives. It also recognises the need to investigate ways in which teacher educators’ declarative knowledge of ELT methods and approaches are reflected in their own teaching.

Marconi (Reference Mahmoudi and Mahmoudi2016) analysed her own teacher educator's practices with a group of student-teachers at a university ELTE programme to find ways of improving her teaching and the student-teachers’ overall experience. Through an interventionist model which combined her pedagogical and research interests, she designed lesson plans for a group of secondary school learners, which were reviewed by the student-teachers before implementation. Drawing on data collected by means of questionnaires, the experience allowed the student-teachers to become aware of aims, activity sequencing and pedagogical adaptations to suit different learners’ needs.

Yuni and Díaz (Reference Warschauer, Zheng and Park2015) studied how three different tertiary ELTE programmes supported their student-teachers to exercise their agency in making pedagogical decisions. Following a qualitative research approach, the authors carried out interviews and classroom observations with teacher educators. The authors found three dominating models of teacher educators’ practices: transmission, co-construction, and eclecticism, in which the teacher educators refrained from direct instruction.

Basabe (Reference Basabe, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2016) studied the teaching of literature in an ELTE programme at a state university. To this effect, he interviewed teacher educators in charge of literature modules and found that even when the ELTE programme sought to promote three literature teaching models, cultural, linguistic, and personal growth (Carter & Long, Reference Cardini, Soliz, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano1991), primacy was given to linguistic and cultural models.

As a preliminary conclusion, we may advance that Argentina can offer varied contributions in the field of pre-service ELTE at undergraduate level. With some exceptions, the papers reviewed above investigate the relationship between teacher educators, particularly those in charge of the practicum and ELT pedagogy modules, and student-teachers in relation to criticality, identity, feedback, and meaningful and formative practices that go beyond instrumental learning. As in the previous review on Argentina (Porto et al., Reference Porto and Byram2016), these studies confirm teacher educators’ interest in reflecting, revisiting, and enhancing their practices as they grow aware of the impact these have on student-teachers’ professional development.

7.1. Strategies and learner autonomy

Another set of six studies focuses on vocabulary learning strategies that contribute to learner autonomy (Gu, Reference Grundnig, Himelfarb, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2020). The studies are discussed below according to the research methods employed.

With the aim of exploring vocabulary learning strategies among different learners, three research projects used surveys, thus becoming studies based on self-reporting. For example, for comparative purposes, learners from state secondary schools and a university-based secondary school (San Martín & Helale, Reference San Martín, Altamirano, Villanueva de Debat, Banegas, López Barrios, Porto and Soto2017), and teenage learners from a bilingual school and a language school (Alcázar & Altamirano, Reference Alcázar, Altamirano, Barbeito, López-Barrios and Pasquale2017) completed surveys to indicate their preferred strategies for vocabulary learning. In both cases, no significant differences were found as all the learners exhibited a limited number of strategies for vocabulary retention in particular. In another study based on self-reporting, Insirillo and Ortiz (Reference Innocentini, Forte and Feraco2018) identified the frequency of use and the variety of strategies employed by higher education learners attending an ESP course. Results revealed a scarce number of highly used vocabulary strategies. While these studies provide helpful hints with direct pedagogical implications, there should be further efforts for data triangulation and evidence of learners’ actual behaviour.

Closer to experimental designs, three studies dealt with the direct instruction of specific vocabulary learning strategies with higher education learners. Gava, Dalla Costa, and Kofman (Reference Gastaldi, Grimaldi, Mónaco, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2016) provided explicit instruction of strategies for learning collocations and idiomatic expressions. Drawing on surveys and pre- and post-tests, the authors concluded that learners developed autonomy to understand and use collocations and idiomatic expressions. In a similar vein, González de Gatti and Sánchez (Reference González de Gatti, Orta González, Sánchez, Padilla Sabaté and Riestra2016) provided a group of student-teachers with direct instruction of affixes as a strategy for solving gap-filling exercises. According to the data gathered by means of pre- and post-tests, student-teachers improved their performance at the levels of word formation and reading comprehension skills. Another study (González de Gatti, Orta González, & Sánchez, Reference González Carrera, Sosa, Cardozo, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Waigandt2016) focused on strategies for vocabulary retention included an experimental group and a control group. The experimental group received explicit instruction in the use of concordancers to find examples of words belonging to the same semantic field. The authors concluded that the experimental group outperformed the control group in activities which required learners to employ words sharing the same semantic field. Similarly, through the inclusion of control and experimental groups, Valenti and Galimberti (Reference Valcarce, Fernández, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2015) carried out a longitudinal study to analyse the effect of the development of metacognitive strategies sometimes aided with ICT on ESP students’ efficiency and autonomy. The authors established a correlation between the development of metacognitive strategies and a better performance as the students of the experimental group outperformed those of the control group in the first stage of this research work. The experimental group also revealed a higher degree of accuracy accompanied by a higher degree of explicitness by the end of the academic year.

While in the previous review (Porto et al., Reference Porto and Byram2016) papers featured research on learning strategies for language skills development, grammar, and lexis, the papers between 2014 and 2018 not only focused on vocabulary learning but also signalled that interest in learning strategies was mostly circumscribed to one large group of researchers established at one specific university. We hope that researchers engage in longitudinal studies to measure the sustainability of their practices and learners’ (perceived) performance.

7.2. Beliefs and attitudes

In this section, three studies related to learners’ beliefs and attitudes are reported. The two first studies in this area refer to secondary school learners, the last one to university students. Barbeito, Placci, Ponce, and Galfioni (Reference Barbeito, Placci, Ponce, Galfioni, Maldonado, Bono and Sigal2016) investigated pupils’ beliefs regarding learning English in the secondary school context. A total of 1,600 fifth-year (16–17 year olds) learners of state and private schools completed a questionnaire consisting of a Likert scale and open questions related to the role of grammar, motivation, learning strategies, materials and use of technology, time devoted to English teaching, use of the target language in class, and discipline. Findings indicated that learners preferred both a deductive and an inductive approach to grammar teaching, that they attributed a key role to grammar in the learning process, and stated the importance of appealing content topics. Additionally, learners expressed they would use learning strategies if they were taught, that they expected teachers to cover most of the coursebook contents and to use other materials, that more class hours would be necessary, and that teachers made little use of the L2 in class. In the other study, San Martín, Altamirano, and Villanueva de Debat (Reference San Martín, Faletti, Helale, Padilla Sabaté and Riestra2016) examined the vocabulary learning beliefs and perceptions of adult and teenage learners in two educational settings: formal (schools) and non-formal education (language schools). The first involved 81 beginning EFL learners from three different institutions, whereas the second included 29 adult learners. The study aimed at finding similarities and/or differences between the two. Data were gathered through a structured questionnaire tapping into the learners’ vocabulary learning strategies, their beliefs about vocabulary learning and the perception of their own vocabulary learning. Irrespective of the age and learning context, results revealed many similarities in both groups, which led authors to consider the social construction of beliefs, for example, the role of aptitude in vocabulary learning, as an influential factor. Results of this study could have an impact on teachers’ vocabulary teaching practices, e.g., by reflecting on the way learners view their vocabulary learning process.

Piquer, Ponce, and Padula (Reference Pico, Sleibe Rahe de Paradelo, Romano and Amado2017) investigated the development of beliefs about the relationship between language and culture in the context of a plurilingual and pluricultural pre-bachelor degree course at a state university. The research aimed at finding out how these beliefs evolved as a group of nine students advanced in their study of English and French. To this end, two open-ended questionnaires were implemented, one at the beginning of the first academic year and another at the end of the second year. A content analysis of the data indicated that subjects’ initial beliefs conceived culture as the customs of native speakers, and that the target culture became explicit in class through the experiences of visitors to the L2 countries. Results suggested that the intercultural approach followed in class had a degree of impact on the initial beliefs, but the causes of the stability of deeply ingrained beliefs should be the object of further investigation.

The previous review by Porto et al. (Reference Porto and Byram2016) expressed the need to involve larger populations in the study of beliefs and attitudes. This is now noticeable in the study by Barbeito et al. (Reference Barbeito, Placci, Ponce, Galfioni, Maldonado, Bono and Sigal2016) which involved 1,600 pupils in both public and private secondary schools, and in San Martín, Altamirano and Villanueva de Debat's (Reference San Martín, Faletti, Helale, Padilla Sabaté and Riestra2016) study of 130 learners in different types of secondary schools as well as in adult education. The geographical distribution of these studies is still the same as in the previous review; again, studies tapping into beliefs and attitudes of learners in other locations and different sociocultural settings would be welcome.

7.3. Affectivity

Three studies addressed the age factor and the affective dimension. We begin with González (Reference González de Gatti, Sánchez, Orta, Romano and Amado2018), Fernández, Marchegiani, Picelille, and Raspa (Reference Fernández, Tavella, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2015) and Fernández and Raspa (Reference Fernández, Marchegiani, Picelille, Raspa, Leceta and Cúneo2016), who studied a population usually under-represented locally, namely senior learners in university settings. González (Reference González de Gatti, Sánchez, Orta, Romano and Amado2018) explored the motivations to study English and related affective factors of a group of 60 adult learners taking part in a university program for adult learning in different disciplines in an exploratory study in the city of Buenos Aires using a questionnaire. Findings showed that a desire for personal growth and a pleasurable setting for learning were significant aspects for this age group. Focusing on university students in their mid and late adulthood (40–65 years of age) learning English, Fernández et al. (Reference Fernández, Tavella, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2015) studied their learning styles, preferences, and motivations as well as the profile and role of the English teacher of this population. Undertaken in 2013–2014 and using a mixed methods design with questionnaires, 80 adult students and 40 cross-curricular teachers of English participated, and findings showed that these adult learners were autonomous, committed to their process of continuing education or lifelong learning, and their affective filter tended to be high. Negative emotional and motivational factors such as anxiety, alienation, embarrassment, or self-consciousness, among others, interfered with the reception and processing of comprehensible input. Consequently, teachers needed to take on an important role as facilitators. In a subsequent study, Fernández and Raspa (Reference Fernández, Marchegiani, Picelille, Raspa, Leceta and Cúneo2016) explored in greater depth the learning preferences of 30 adult students in the same context. They implemented a lesson that consisted of different tasks that catered for each of Gardner's (Reference Ferrara, Gastaldi and Grimaldi1983) Multiple Intelligences. After reading a short story, students were asked to visualise it, reflect on it in writing, retell it orally, debate a theme, conceptualise it using mind maps or similar formats, collaboratively write a dialogue among the characters, read aloud a scene and act it out, and do inferencing tasks. These student outcomes became the data types, followed by a questionnaire. Findings revealed the diversity of student preferences in this age group, pointing to the need to offer classroom tasks centred not only on verbal-linguistic intelligence but also on the intrapersonal, interpersonal and logical-mathematical intelligences.

In a different context, Soto and Waigandt (Reference Soto, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Soto2018) investigated the academic emotions that affect learner performance in oral presentations in a higher education setting. Participants in their exploratory study were ESP undergraduates at Bioengineering and Bioinformatics programmes, who performed oral presentations in pairs or small groups and completed a self-report instrument. Students completed an online questionnaire that comprised 26 questions exploring students’ emotions before, during and after giving their oral presentations. Findings showed that the achievement and epistemic emotions prevailed, with some social emotions also arising. The researchers explored implications, mainly related to the need to foster learner awareness about the fact that emotions can be consciously managed, controlled, shaped, and transformed, as well as teacher awareness of the need to teach strategies to this aim.

In sum, while research in this area is very scarce, it addresses significant topics that resonate with the global research agenda and comprise age factors, particularly the needs and affects of adult learners ranging from 40 to 65, and the role of emotions in world language education (Dewaele, Reference de-Matteis, Granato and Negrín2018; Bigelow, Reference Bigelow2019), including academic environments.

Comparing the number of papers of the 2007–2013 review (Porto et al., Reference Porto and Byram2016) with this one, little has changed in the area of learner differences: the same number of papers are found in strategies and learner autonomy (seven) and in beliefs and attitudes (three), and there is a minor difference in motivation, preferences, and emotions (three and four). By the nature of this line of inquiry, more case studies would be welcome to observe the extent to which contextual factors found in other geographical and cultural settings exhibit similarities and differences with trends observed in Argentina.

8.1. Reading, listening, and speaking

Reading researchers are interested in discovering the factors that improve the reading performance of their students. Vázquez and González (Reference Varela, Verdelli, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2015) examined the extent to which the redundancy effect influenced the L2 reading comprehension skills of two groups of learners whose ages and English language proficiency differed widely. There were 59 participants, of whom 24 were teenagers with low-intermediate proficiency and 35 were advanced EFL majors. Each group was divided into two sets. One was exposed to a single mode of instruction (reading alone) while the other was presented with a dual format (reading and listening simultaneously). Results revealed that students presented with the single mode of instruction outperformed the other group in the reading comprehension task, independently of their command of the language. Furthermore, when comparing results obtained in both read-only groups (low-intermediate and advanced), the students with higher proficiency obtained better results.

Regarding listening, in an action research project, Spataro (Reference Soto, Waigandt, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Waigandt2015) explored how five listening sessions were designed on Moodle 2.3 based on the review of possible activities that aid perception skills and the ways in which ICTs have been used to design online listening activities. Participants were 15 voluntary, intermediate EFL majors. Data were collected from students’ records of the online activities, personal journals after each session, a final questionnaire and pre- and post-IELTS (International English Language Testing Scheme) listening tests. Findings showed that the self-access perception activities designed with different ICT tools were successful. Comparison of the average marks of the pre- and post-tests showed that there was a slight improvement in performance.

Turning to speaking, in a multi-case study, Laucírica (Reference Kumaravadivelu2016) investigated the impact of two-month direct teaching and practice of communicative strategies in a pre-sessional EFL course for newcomers to an ELTE programme, which was later replicated with 4th year ELTE at tertiary level. In both cases, the corpus comprised recorded oral productions and class observations. Findings showed gains in fluency and confidence but no gains in declarative knowledge. It should be noted that the teaching and practice centred on formulaic phrases (see Pérez & Zinkgraf, Reference Percara2017; Rodeghiero, Reference Roccia, Sacchi and Somale2017; Valcarce & Fernández, 2017, who studied formulaic phrases in writing) and explicitly encouraged students to interact on the basis of the values of respect, cooperation, kindness, and solidarity, which are the values upon which intercultural citizenship education builds. In this sense, the study addressed the challenges of language education to contribute to the development of democratic societies and the evolution of individuals and societies – a goal of education (UNESCO, Reference Tavella, Fernández, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2015; Council of Europe, Reference Coudannes Aguirre and Andelique2018).

8.2. Writing

Here, research can be classified into the following themes: genre-related issues (Ginevra, Reference Gava and Dalla Costa2014; Cangialosi, Reference Canavosio, Salinas, Basso, Ávalos, Gargiulo, Rodríguez and Villanueva de Debat2016; López Casoli & Selesán, Reference López Casoli, Borgnia and Perduca2016; Calvo & Ríus, Reference Caielli and Williams2017; Oliva & de Maussion, Reference Natal, Suárez, Tuero, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017; López Casoli & Borgnia, Reference López Casoli, Berardo and Perduca2018), contrastive rhetorics (Pico & Sleibe Rahe de Paradelo, Reference Perticone, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2017), student writing using digital technologies (Dalla Costa & Gava, 2016, Reference Dalla Costa, Gava, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Soto2017; Gava & Dalla Costa, Reference Gava, Anglada, Anglada, Sapag, Banegas and Soto2018), note taking (Vázquez & González, Reference Vázquez and González2018), feedback (López Casoli & Berardo, Reference Lightbown and Spada2017; Machado & Lucas, Reference López, Viejobueno, Barbeito, López-Barrios and Pasquale2017; Machado, Lucas, & Berardo, Reference Machado, Lucas and Riestra2017), and formulaic sequences (Pérez & Zinkgraf, Reference Percara2017; Rodeghiero, Reference Roccia, Sacchi and Somale2017; Valcarce & Fernández, 2017).

Beginning with genre-related topics, in a descriptive study underpinned by systemic functional linguistics and genre pedagogy, Ginevra (Reference Gava and Dalla Costa2014) explored the difficulties college students experienced in the writing of argumentations in English. The corpus was formed by 38 argumentative texts produced by future teachers and translators of English. The texts were divided in clauses and were analysed quantitatively in terms of projection and expansion relations. The lexico-grammatical features of four elements of the genre were analysed, namely theoretical frame, thesis, arguments, and thesis re-instantiation. Findings showed that even though the texts displayed these elements in different degrees, the students were not able to manipulate the discursive resources to reflect upon the material and symbolic objects proposed to them. Similar difficulties were observed by Cangialosi (Reference Canavosio, Salinas, Basso, Ávalos, Gargiulo, Rodríguez and Villanueva de Debat2016), who explored interruptions in the flow of information in students’ writings that affected communication. Participants were ten 2nd year ELTE student-teachers who wrote an article on one specific topic. The researcher undertook three levels of analysis, namely macrotheme-macronew (text level); hypertheme-hypernew (paragraph level); and theme-rheme (clause level). Findings showed that even though most compositions presented many problems at the level of organisation of information, students attempted to keep a thematic progression as well as a line of development, either through comparison or parallelism in each paragraph of their compositions. As mentioned before, these difficulties at the level of organisation and macrostructure were also pinpointed by reading researchers (González, Otero, & Rocca, Reference González, Albini, Rocca, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2014) and in this sense, the importance of selective feedback (see Machado et al., Reference Machado, Lucas and Riestra2017 reported later) is to be highlighted.

Framed within systemic functional linguistics (Halliday, Reference Gu and Webb2004) and genre theories (Rose & Martin, Reference Romano, Martínez, Ávalos, Gargiulo, Rodríguez and Villanueva de Debat2012), Calvo and Ríus (Reference Caielli and Williams2017) and Oliva and de Maussion (Reference Natal, Suárez, Tuero, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017) studied texts (description of places) produced by new university students enrolled in university English programmes before and after explicit teaching of the genre description. Calvo and Ríus (Reference Caielli and Williams2017) focused on the use of cohesive devices (reference, ellipsis, substitution, and lexical cohesion) and their findings showed that writing performance improved very slightly after the explicit teaching of specific genre conventions. Specifically, the students used cohesive devices more frequently and they displayed a greater variety of devices but sometimes this use was incorrect. In turn, with the same corpus, Oliva and de Maussion (Reference Natal, Suárez, Tuero, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017) analysed the use of verb processes, forms and tenses to discover only very modest improvements mainly in verb forms and tenses. In both cases, the researchers concluded that more nuanced and sustained instruction might have been necessary. López Casoli and Selesán (Reference López Casoli, Borgnia and Perduca2016) studied the use of connectors with ELTE. They compared connector usage in two different types of texts within the exposition genre (compare-contrast and cause-effect). Results showed that genre influenced the appropriateness and type of connectors used. Finally, López Casoli and Borgnia (Reference López Casoli, Berardo and Perduca2018) investigated the types of connectives used in two sorts of academic texts (narrative and cause and effect) by ELTE students. The study concentrated on the influence of the text type on the amount and type of connectives used and on their suitability. For this, a corpus consisting of both types of texts written as a home assignment was compiled. A similar number of samples was obtained (41 narrative, 32 cause-effect) and their average length was found to be similar. The quantitative analysis indicated that writers used twice as many connectives in cause-effect as in narrative essays, that connectives of result/inference were the most frequent for both kinds of texts, and that cause/effect essays displayed the greatest variety of connectives used. Results confirmed the hypothesis that the kind of essay may determine the quantity and type of connectives used. A high incidence of erroneous use of connectives was also found in the corpus so that the findings point to the need of associating text types and their typical connectives.

Within contrastive rhetoric, Pico and Sleibe Rahe de Paradelo (Reference Perticone, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2017) carried out an action-research with 17 advanced language students in English programmes to determine whether awareness of contrastive rhetorics can improve the writing performance of argumentative texts in L2. Data comprised interviews and argumentative texts produced by the students before and after explicit instruction. Findings showed that explicit instruction in contrastive rhetorics significantly improved argumentative writing in L2 mainly at the macrostructural level, with increased metalinguistic awareness but little improvement in the appropriation of the grammatical features of the genre, the implication being that more contextualised grammatical instruction is needed in this setting.

Dalla Costa and Gava (2016, Reference Dalla Costa, Gava, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Soto2017) and Gava and Dalla Costa (Reference Gava, Anglada, Anglada, Sapag, Banegas and Soto2018) have investigated college student writing using digital technologies for a number of years. In a quasi-experimental, mixed methods study using questionnaires, surveys and essay writing assignments, they researched the impact of an online discussion forum (ODF) as a pre-writing activity on the productions and perceptions of 32 ELTE students enrolled in an English language course in their 2nd year at a national university. Their findings showed that the cognitive and social opportunities afforded by digital technologies favoured the collaborative construction of knowledge through online dialogue and the application of higher order thinking skills, which became evident in the students’ contributions to the ODF, their opinions about the online activity, and their productions in the writing task.

Considering that systematic note-taking instruction seemed to be almost non-existing, Vázquez and González (Reference Vázquez and González2018) proposed a framework for direct note-taking instruction and analysed its impact on the recall of information when listening to lectures in a foreign language, taking into account the quality of the recalled ideas (main and secondary). Participants were 38 secondary school students in their 4th year with a pre-intermediate level of English, who completed a pre-questionnaire about their experiences with note taking. Then, they took a pre-test, in which they listened to a short lecture, took notes, and wrote a free-recall task without access to their notes. Four lessons on note-taking instruction followed and students took a post-test resembling the pre-test. For analysis, the researchers quantified the idea units, main and secondary, in the lectures and in the recalled texts by the students and compared results. Findings showed that students remembered both more main and secondary ideas after receiving instruction on note taking.

Focusing on feedback, Machado et al. (Reference Machado, Lucas and Riestra2017) studied the influence of different kinds of feedback on writing with 1st year ELTE with different levels of linguistic competence. In a first quantitative investigation, their aim was to shed light on how students interpreted teacher feedback and elaborated on it to then examine if this feedback contributed to the rewriting process. Findings were inconclusive as only half the students were able to identify their errors and correct them. On a second, qualitative stage, the researchers compared comprehensive feedback (i.e. the teacher corrected all errors) and selective feedback (the teacher focused on a selection of errors; in this case, ideas, cohesion, and coherence). Students produced an essay and were divided into two groups, each of which received either kind of feedback. Findings showed that those who received selective feedback produced better organised second drafts. A post survey revealed that students valued selective feedback as they said they had more difficulties with content, cohesion, and coherence. It should be noted that this finding aligns with the research on reading (González et al., Reference González, Albini, Rocca, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2014) and writing (Ginevra, Reference Gava and Dalla Costa2014; Cangialosi, Reference Canavosio, Salinas, Basso, Ávalos, Gargiulo, Rodríguez and Villanueva de Debat2016) reported earlier, which also pointed out these difficulties. Machado et al.'s (Reference Machado, Lucas and Riestra2017) contribution resides in their highlighting of the importance of providing selective feedback – a recommendation that can be complemented by Pico and Sleibe Rahe de Paradelo's (Reference Perticone, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2017) finding reported before concerning the usefulness of explicit instruction in contrastive rhetorics to improve L2 writing at the macrostructural level.

López Casoli and Berardo (Reference Lightbown and Spada2017) analysed written indirect teacher feedback, in particular questions intended to guide students, taken from 36 narrative pieces produced by advanced ELTE students. Findings showed that students addressed 64% of the teacher questions with 84% accuracy. The researchers highlighted that feedback, in order to be effective, had to be unambiguous and moderate in quantity as students tended to feel overwhelmed when there were too many questions or these were unclear, in which case they opted for not editing those sections. In the same context and with the same participants and corpus, Machado and Lucas (Reference López, Viejobueno, Barbeito, López-Barrios and Pasquale2017) analysed the impact of indirect teacher feedback, this time focusing on commentaries, imperatives, statements, exclamations, metalanguage, symbols, and combined comments. Findings showed that the most effective forms were imperatives, statements, commentaries, and metalanguage while exclamations and symbols were less effective, in general left unedited by students.

In another line of research, Valcarce and Fernández (2017), Rodeghiero (Reference Roccia, Sacchi and Somale2017) and Pérez and Zinkgraf (Reference Percara2017) studied formulaic sequences (FS), as these play a pivotal role in language learning and teaching because they enable L2 learners to use the language fluently and productively. They used biographies from a vocabulary-focused perspective. Valcarce and Fernández (2017) investigated which FS a group of 79 1st year students of the Teacher and Translation Training Courses mastered and how accurately they employed them with the aim of identifying their language needs in relation to formulaicity and biography writing. Using corpus analysis, findings showed that students produced non-native combinations, which suggests that their formulaic competence was underway but also that as language learners, they were equipped with compensation strategies, which they employed when they were urged to convey meaning and their formulaic knowledge was limited. In a case study in a state secondary school context, Rodeghiero (Reference Roccia, Sacchi and Somale2017) explored the effects of explicit instruction of two FS, at the age of and from an early age, on biography writing with 24 students attending their 3rd year. The study employed a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test, an intervention with form-focused instruction, and a post-test. Both tests involved the writing of a biography on the same theme. Results showed that, even at a beginner level and in a foreign language context with very limited exposure to the L2, explicit instruction was beneficial for these particular students’ learning of FS as observed in the post-test biographies. The researcher concluded that further research is necessary to examine the effects of explicit instruction of FS on the acquisition of more target FSs, differing in factors such as frequency or register or over time, and in more spontaneous written and oral production, with a larger number of participants. As this report shows, only one study reviewed here (Laucírica, Reference Kumaravadivelu2016) focused on explicit instruction of FS to improve oral skills and this area is clearly under-researched. Finally, Pérez and Zinkgraf (Reference Percara2017) characterised advanced EFL university learners’ use of FS lexically expressing a cause-effect relation in the writing of essays. The students were in either ELTE or Translation programmes. Of all those who took the module English IV between the years 2008 and 2014, 237 learners gave their written consent for their first written essay to be included in the corpus. Using comparative corpus analysis (native and learner corpora) in relation to the nouns effect, impact, and influence as appearing in the corpus of written essays, learners seemed to be sensitive to native speaker preferences as shown in the relative frequency of the FS involving these three nouns. However, closer analysis of the concordance lines obtained shed light on different degrees of unawareness as regards collocates (verbs accompanying the nouns) and the typical modality and aspect that modify these FS. The researchers concluded that there was still a wide distance for learners to cover on their way towards native-like choices and recommended continuous, cyclical and recurrent exposure to target forms in order to reach higher levels of proficiency in terms of formulaicity and naturalness.

Overall, research on skills in general English courses shows that research on listening and speaking is almost non-existent in Argentina and research on reading is scarce, although this last one is prominent in EAP/ESP settings. There is, however, a strong, varied and well-developed body of work on the writing skill, studied in different contexts and consistent with the variety and breadth of current research in this area in other parts of the world. The investigation of reading and writing in digital environments (Warschauer, Zheng, & Park, Reference Walsh and Mann2013), an area that was poorly investigated a few years ago (see Porto et al., Reference Porto and Byram2016), is now beginning to gain momentum. However, one limitation that we mentioned in our previous review article (Porto et al., Reference Porto and Byram2016) is observed here too, namely the lack of research in specific areas such as the cultural dimension of reading (Porto & Byram, Reference Porto2017) and the connection between reading and writing (Warschauer et al., Reference Walsh and Mann2013).

9.1. Vocabulary

Papers in this section have two main research foci: descriptive and experimental. The first concentrates on the characteristics of the vocabulary dealt with in class (Sapag & Boldrini, Reference San Martín, Helale, Barbeito, López-Barrios and Pasquale2017) or used by the learners in their production (Zinkgraf & Verdú, Reference Yuni and Díaz2015; Zinkgraf, Rodríguez, Castro, & Verdú, Reference Zinkgraf, Verdú, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2015; Grundnig & Himelfarb, Reference González, Otero and Rocca2017). The experimental studies test the effectiveness of teaching procedures on students’ lexical development (González de Gatti, Sánchez, & Orta, Reference González de Gatti, Sánchez, Padilla Sabaté and Riestra2017; Zinkgraf & Verdú, Reference Zinkgraf, Verdú, Anglada, Sapag, Banegas and Soto2017).

Sapag and Boldrini (Reference San Martín, Helale, Barbeito, López-Barrios and Pasquale2017) looked into the authenticity of the vocabulary content of elementary level EFL lessons observed in secondary school and language school contexts. In these lessons, less than a third of the lexis was taught at the learners’ request, indicating that a part of the vocabulary treated in class purposefully responded to a need from learners to express personal meanings or fill an individually motivated comprehension gap. Moreover, authors found that most of the learner-selected words were relevant to the topic and activity dealt with. In this sense, they contended that the vocabulary was authenticated by the learners because it fulfilled a relevant and meaningful productive or receptive communicative purpose.

Zinkgraf et al. (Reference Zinkgraf, Verdú, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2015) studied the use of discourse-organising FS by advanced EFL majors. To this end, authors analysed a corpus of 237 academic essays from several cohorts of the programme in search of the formulaic sequences used to organise learners’ discourse and compared it with native speaker occurrences in the British National Corpus (BNC). Findings showed that students’ pattern of use and frequency rate of some FS such as ‘as a result of’ or ‘on the other hand’ coincided with those found in the BNC, whereas other constructions deviated from the instances contained in that corpus. Moreover, authors found learners seemed to prefer connectors as discourse-organisers rather than linking FS. The same learner corpus was used by Zinkgraf and Verdú (Reference Yuni and Díaz2015) to study the frequency of use of FS with the word ‘fact’ by both advanced EFL learners and competent users of English. Findings revealed a degree of overuse of certain FS compared with expert use, and the presence of non-target like FS.

In a similar vein, Grundnig and Himelfarb (Reference González, Otero and Rocca2017) developed a vocabulary teaching procedure aimed at undergraduate students of Tourism at a national university. The proposal drew on two corpora studies, one of vocabulary in research article abstracts from the field of tourism, and one of students’ use of lexis in oral presentations. The first analysis revealed the proportion of general, academic and technical vocabulary which served as a basis for the analysis of the learner corpus. In this way, they compared students’ lexical performance with the lexical content of the abstracts in order to determine the students’ frequency and quality of use of tourism vocabulary. Findings from the learner corpus indicated high use of general vocabulary and low use of academic vocabulary, whereas the proportion of technical vocabulary was similar to that found in the abstracts. These kinds of studies are infrequent in the national context and should be extended to more areas, as work in the description of learner corpora could have important pedagogical implications.

Zinkgraf and Verdú (Reference Zinkgraf, Verdú, Anglada, Sapag, Banegas and Soto2017) reported on an experimental study in which 13 advanced ELTE students were explicitly taught a series of FS extracted from course materials to assess the impact of instruction on their production of target-like samples of the FS in both controlled and spontaneous use. Results indicated that, in controlled use, learners occasionally resorted to variations of the FS, whereas in spontaneous use some subjects correctly produced the form of the FS but failed to employ them to express the intended meaning or used them in an unsuitable context. In their study, González de Gatti et al. (Reference González de Gatti, Sánchez, Padilla Sabaté and Riestra2017) set out to test the effectiveness of instructing advanced ELTE students in the use of a vocabulary learning strategy (VLS) consisting of keeping a record of word information related to synforms, i.e., words with similar formal characteristics but with different meanings, as in ‘affect’/‘effect’. Results indicated a better performance of the experimental group, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the procedure.

9.2. Phonology and grammar

This section analyses papers related to the acquisition of phonology and grammar. The four studies related to the acquisition of pronunciation followed an experimental design. The two first set out to test how non-native speakers (NNS) of English of limited proficiency perceived segmental and suprasegmental features in the speech of a native speaker (NS) (Panzachi Heredia, Reference Osborn2017) and of a fluent NNS (Vázquez & González, Reference Vázquez and González2016). The next studies (Castellano, Garay, & García, Reference Cascone, Meoño Ortiz and Rezzano2015; Perticone, Reference Pérez, Zinkgraf, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2017) concentrated on learners’ awareness of their own pronunciation.

In her study, Panzachi Heredia (Reference Osborn2017) examined the impact of nuclear stress placement on intelligibility and comprehensibility. A group of 29 upper-intermediate ELTE students were divided into three experimental groups corresponding to three versions of a recorded text: one with correct accentuation (A), one in which accents were placed on words not carrying new or contrasting information (B), and one with no nuclear stress (C). Members of the three experimental groups were further grouped according to their listening performance. Findings showed that target-like accent placements (A) allowed faster comprehension than the two other versions (B, C) of the lecture, and that listening comprehension skills accounted for a comparatively higher performance. Consequently, accentuation was found to have an impact on comprehensibility especially for the subjects with weaker listening skills. In a related study, Vázquez and González (Reference Vázquez and González2016) investigated the influence of two variables (sounds and sentence stress and their influence on comprehensibility). The novelty of this study is that it involved NNS listeners, as similar studies involve NSs as judges. Two groups of pre-intermediate teenage EFL learners rated the comprehensibility of two recorded passages – one with faulty pronunciation of sounds and one with inappropriate use of sentence stress – and engaged in a free written recall of the main points and a true/false comprehension activity. Results revealed that both variables tended to affect comprehension to a similar extent, and thus contradict findings from studies with NSs judging NNS’ output, as in the latter, inaccuracies in suprasegmentals tended to affect comprehensibility more than sounds.

In the first study of learners’ own awareness of their pronunciation performance Perticone (Reference Pérez, Zinkgraf, Fernández Beschtedt, Castro, Formiga and Risso Patrón2017) explored the feasibility of ear training to raise awareness of advanced ELTE students’ ability to detect L2 pronunciation features. Both the production of the palate-alveolar affricates and the perception of falling-rising pitch accents were selected for analysis and samples of both features were intensified or altered using speech synthesis in order to train learners’ perception skills. To this end, samples of 20 students’ oral production were collected over a period of one academic year. Pre- and post-test results showed moderately positive effects of the procedure on the recognition of the selected features. The second study (Castellano et al., Reference Cascone, Meoño Ortiz and Rezzano2015) aimed to assess the impact of monitoring strategies on intermediate ELTE students. To this end, a group of ten students recorded themselves reading selections from the course materials and self-assessed their performance using a grid designed for self, peer and teacher assessment. For this longitudinal research, the recordings were subsequently assessed by a peer and one of the instructors. Subjects received the three assessments and were asked to work on the feedback. Improved test grades indicated positive gains in terms of learner performance, and comments in reflexive journals revealed that subjects found the experience highly beneficial.

One paper dealt with aspects of EFL learner grammar. In a descriptive study, López and Viejobueno (Reference López Casoli and Selesán2017) analysed the realisation of non-canonic syntactic structures (extraposition and clefting) in a corpus of argumentative essays written by advanced EFL majors. Students were taught these constructions in a prior seminar on syntax so that they were expected to have developed an awareness for the correctness and suitability of these constructions. Results indicated prominent use of extraposition (e.g., to do this would be pointless / it would be pointless to do this) and very scant use of clefting (e.g., It was a sweater that I bought / What I bought was a sweater). The authors hypothesised that the simpler structure of extraposition could account for its frequent use to the detriment of the more complex clefting patterns, and that the underuse of this structure could be an avoidance strategy.

In comparison with the previous review, the number of papers on vocabulary and phonology has not changed, but there is a noticeable decrease in studies of learners’ morphosyntactic development, which may point to a shift of interest after intense engagement around the topic. The recommendation made in the previous review still holds for the present one: there is a paucity of studies of learners of lower proficiency and in school contexts. This should be addressed to raise awareness of the effect of the conditions under which school learners develop L2 competence, so as to design suitable materials and teacher development initiatives for said contexts.

10.1. Reading

Reading researchers in ESP/EAP are interested in discovering the factors that impinge on reading with the aim of enabling students’ access to research published in English. This body of work is considerable and addresses non-English majors with some degree of specialist knowledge but limited L2 proficiency. The nine papers in this section are grouped in three categories. Firstly, studies that determine a specific difficulty resulting from the linguistic features of specialist discourse both at the more local (lexico-grammatical) or global (textual) levels, or the influence of learner variables that constrain comprehension. Secondly, those of an explanatory nature that consist of testing a hypothesis or studying the effect of certain variables on reading performance. Thirdly, papers reporting the design and implementation of a course or teaching experience.

The papers by Cascone, Meoño Ortiz, and Rezzano (Reference Carter and Long2014), Delmas, Roseti, González, De Francesco, and Regueira (Reference Delfederico, Weht, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2015), González, Albini, and Rocca (Reference González and Albini2017), and González et al. (Reference González, Albini, Rocca, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2014) conform the first group. Cascone et al. (Reference Carter and Long2014) examined ESP students’ ability to establish a cause-effect (CE) relationship on different functional levels (textual, logical and experiential) in a popular science text. A total of 48 students were asked to carry out two reading tasks to identify CE relationships. Results indicated a higher number of CE relationships were identified at the experiential level compared with those at the logical level. In their study, Delmas et al. (Reference Delfederico, Weht, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2015) posited that the type of rhetorical organisation of a specialist text (1: expositive and 2: debate (a) with consecutive or (b) alternate organisation) impinges on the quantity and quality of information that can be immediately retrieved. Students were divided in groups according to a reader profile established by a standardised test to measure their English lexico-grammatical knowledge and their skill in L1 reading. After completing reading tasks involving texts with the three argumentative sequences, results demonstrated that students recalled more information from the texts with the first two types of argumentative sequences and less from the texts of the alternate organisation type. This indicates that more emphasis is needed on this type of rhetorical organisation when designing instructional practices. Drawing on genre analysis, information processing, and systemic functional linguistics, González et al. (Reference González and Albini2017) investigated the linguistic resources used in the conclusions of abstracts in research articles (RA) of humanities and arts. A linguistic analysis showed that conjunctions, logical metaphors or no particular resources were employed to state conclusions in RA. To test which of the three better aided ESP students’ understanding, an instrument was created consisting of three versions of one abstract from both disciplines: one containing a conjunction, one with an ideational metaphor, and one in which the conclusions section was not specifically marked as such. Three random groups of students from the intermediate level course read two abstracts and formulated both a general hypothesis based on the bibliographic references and a specific one based on the abstract. Data analysis showed that conclusions introduced by a logical metaphor best focused readers’ attention on that section of the abstract than those that did not make use of a particular marker. Regarding the effect of learner variables on reading comprehension, González et al. (Reference González, Albini, Rocca, Moyetta, Raffo and Rezzano2014) examined the influence of the students’ self-reported English proficiency on their university experience by means of two reading tasks. Data were obtained from two intact groups of humanities students on an intermediate level ESP course. Prompted by the noticeable differences found in the performance of both tasks by both groups, authors checked the results against the information concerning both learner variables and found a possible explanation for the discrepancy.

The second group includes the experimental studies by González and Albini (Reference González, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Waigandt2018), Bron, De Francesco, and Roseti (Reference Bron, De Francesco, Roseti, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2016), and González Carrera, Sosa, and Cardozo (Reference Gómez Calvillo, Moyetta, Negrelli, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017). González and Albini (Reference González, Banegas, López-Barrios, Porto and Waigandt2018) explored the impact of familiarising students with the mini genre of research article abstracts. This is necessary, the authors contended, because the genre circulates outside the students’ field of experience so that they may be unaware of its functions and characteristics. Two groups of an intermediate level ESP course tested their degree of access to the main ideas in three versions of an abstract from the field of applied linguistics according to its rhetorical organisation: canonic, and two variants of non-canonic organisation. Results of the pre-test indicated that those students who analysed the non-canonic version retrieved the least information, thus demonstrating the impact of type of rhetorical organisation on comprehension. After a pedagogic intervention, the post-test showed that instruction led to improved student performance. Nevertheless, the complexity English nominal constructions pose to Spanish-speaking ESP students led Bron et al. (Reference Bron, De Francesco, Roseti, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2016) to address the comprehension difficulty of such constructions at a semantic-pragmatic level and to explore the effectiveness of their explicit instruction. To this end, the authors elaborated a pedagogic intervention based on a classification of three types of nominal constructions and tried it for two months with a group of university ESP students. The test administered after the intervention indicated a low performance of around the 50% mark in the experimental group and similar results for the control group, which suggested that the length of the intervention may not have been enough to produce a significant difference. In an intervention study carried out with engineering undergraduates, González Carrera et al. (Reference Gómez Calvillo, Moyetta, Negrelli, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017) examined the effect of providing marginal L1 glosses in reading texts on learning and retaining vocabulary over time, and its impact on reading comprehension. About 200 students in their first level of English attended lessons specifically designed to this aim. Results from vocabulary and reading comprehension tests using an unglossed text indicated that although no statistically significant mean difference could be observed, the experiment revealed a higher level of reading comprehension than that of the previous year, when students had not been introduced to the glossing technique.

Reports of experiences in the teaching of ESP/EAP reading build the third group. Innocentini, Forte, and Feraco (Reference Innocentini and Forte2017) report on an innovative type of reading comprehension task that required responding to hypothetical reasons why a specific text could be useful to fulfil a real-life purpose for students’ future professional needs. These problem-solving tasks were implemented in an ESP course for agricultural students with the purpose of fostering critical thinking as well as their strategic and communicative competence. The tasks proved successful in the attainment of the intended aims of going beyond the mere extraction of information from a text. Martínez and Picchio (Reference Marconi2014) described the design and implementation of a course for low English proficiency social science masters aiming at the development of academic reading skills. The course had a duration of 40 hours and materials consisted of a corpus of scientific articles chosen partly by the instructors and partly by the participants. The final assessment, a home assignment involving the search and description of research articles in line with the participants’ MA thesis projects, was successfully completed by most of the participants.

Both the previous review and this one report a similar number of papers related to research in ESP/EAP reading, and the interest in both the description and reading practices of academic genres, notably abstracts, expands to different academic disciplines. We expect further growth in this area in the coming years, given the influence of Systemic Functional Linguistics in Applied Linguistics research in Argentina.

10.2. Genre and linguistic analysis

Researchers interested in this dimension explicitly said they aimed to enable their students to improve comprehension and production skills in the specific genres that are frequent in their particular disciplines. Four studies described academic genres in different disciplines (Busso & López, Reference Byram2017; Cardini & Soliz, Reference Cardinali and Waicekawsky2017; Delfederico & Weht, Reference De Laurentis2017; Moyetta, Reference Montserrat and Mórtola2017) and two analysed lexical characteristics (Dúcculi, Muñoz, & Beck, Reference Dewaele2015; Cardinali & Waicekawsky, Reference Carbonetti, González, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017).

Busso and López (Reference Byram2017), Delfederico and Weht (Reference De Laurentis2017), Cardini and Soliz (Reference Cardinali and Waicekawsky2017) and Moyetta (Reference Montserrat and Mórtola2017) listed and classified the academic and professional genres in English that exist in Chemistry, Economic Sciences, Medicine, and Industrial Design. In all cases, the authors carried out document analysis using the bibliography lists of the obligatory subjects in the specific courses of studies. They first listed the documents in English, classified them in genres and then characterised those genres using genre and textual linguistics theories as well as multilevel typologies. Findings showed the prevalence of key genres in each discipline: university book, research article in journal, best practices handbook and farmacopea (Chemistry and Pharmacy), university book, journal article, research project, abstract, medical essay (Medicine) and university book and research article (Industrial Design).

Two papers focused on lexical analysis of specialised discourse (Dúcculi et al., Reference Dewaele2015; Cardinali & Waicekawsky, Reference Carbonetti, González, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017). Motivated by the need to compile a specific word list for the field of ecology, Dúcculi et al. (Reference Dewaele2015) set out to compile a corpus of research articles of that discipline. After a general analysis of the corpus, high frequency and high range words were identified and recategorised according to semantic and pragmatic criteria. Then, the total number of words (types) as well as their frequency (tokens) and range (number of texts in which words appear) were identified and the relation between types and tokens was computed as well. Words were then classified according to three categories (general, academic and grammatical), and the coverage of each category in the corpus was determined. A considerable number of high frequency and high range words were identified as general and academic lexis. Since they were all recognised as belonging to the specialised field of ecology, authors posited the unsuitability of this classification and proposed a reclassification into technical and nontechnical words, according to contextual constraints, which could yield more usable data for the design of ESP/EAP curricula and materials. Cardinali and Waicekawsky (Reference Carbonetti, González, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017) carried out a study with qualitative methodology aimed at identifying specific lexis in the field of geology to compile a corpus of specific vocabulary to aid in materials design. Using the theoretical framework provided by the system of appraisal as discussed in Cardinali and Waicekawsky (Reference Carbonetti, González, Gastaldi and Grimaldi2017) that proposes tools for the identification, analysis, and interpretation of the resources that create evaluative prosodies, the researchers analysed the Introduction and Discussion of two research articles in English (applied linguistics and psychology) with the purpose of identifying the prosodies that are construed in these segments in order to compare them and describe their use in different fields. Findings indicated that researchers construed evaluations and established prosodies strategically in relation to the arguments that were presented in the segments in agreement with their rhetorical function and the construal of the researcher's identity.

Overall, all the studies in this section point to the need to familiarise students with the academic genres they will be encountering when they enter their academic communities, with particular attention to genre characteristics at the contextual, functional, semantic/lexical, and formal levels. Compared with the findings in Porto et al. (Reference Porto and Byram2016), a broader spectrum of disciplines and text types is covered in the present review, thus contributing to the description of English specialized discourse with a view to facilitating teaching and learning as well as communication among academics in international communities.