Level of students’ competence
The student identifies the characteristics that sounds provide the language with, broadly understands the nature of words and their meanings, the elements in sentences, and the main differences between spoken and written texts.
Introduction
This course will provide you with the basis to understand the elements that constitute a language. What is a sound? What is a word? What about a phrase or a sentence? What is a text? What is discourse? These are the main questions that you will deal with
throughout our time together.
It is not easy to try to explore these issues, but keep in mind that even experts argue about them, and that there is neither a definite nor a simple answer for most of these questions yet. So, it is certainly not
the intention of this course to deepen into each of these concepts. Instead, the objective is to approach them in a simple but not superficial way, giving room for as much reflection as possible.
Definitely, trying to define the concept of 'language' itself will be one of the first challenges. Actually, trying to understand what each of the elements is exactly will be a challenge every time. But remember, this
is not meant to be an impossible task to do. In the end, you will see that you already had an approximate idea of these concepts, although you might bump into a couple of surprises.
Course designers
Patricia
Núñez Mercado
Universidad Veracruzana
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Carlos
Núñez Mercado
Universidad Veracruzana
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Patricia Núñez Mercado
Holds a BA in English, a BA in French and a TEFL MA. She is a full-time teacher at the School of Languages of the University of Veracruz in the BA in English, the online BA in TEFL, the TEFL MA, and the Foreign Language Department. She is currently studying the PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Southampton. She was the coordinator of the English teachers’ academy from 2005 to 2011, the head of department of the English BA from 2011 to 2013, and the coordinator of the tutorial system of the same BA programme from 2013 to 2015. She has supervised students’ research projects in all programmes mentioned above. She belonged to the Standardized Exams committee of the English BA from 2002 to 2012, and the EXAVER designers’ committee in 2015. She has also taught teacher training courses and workshops for the School of Languages academic staff and has participated in the certification and redesign committees of the BA and MA programmes. She holds a C2 level language certification by the University of Cambridge and is a member of the CENEVAL committee for the BA in ELT certification exam. She is a member of the Research Group Language Learning and Teaching Processes (UV-CA-407) and her research interests are literacy in higher education, English language learning and teaching, and research processes. She has participated in numerous national and international conferences, both as a presenter and attendee, and has published several book chapters, journal articles and coordinated a book.
Carlos Núñez Mercado
Teaches at the BA in English Language and the online BA in ELT of the University of Veracruz in Mexico. He holds an MA in TELF and has over 5 years’ experience teaching EFL students both in high school and higher education levels. He also holds a C2 level language certification by the University of Cambridge, and has experience teaching preparation courses for Cambridge examinations. He participated in the online BA in ELT certification process by COAPEHUM, and is currently member of the redesign committee of this BA. He has supervised students’ research projects of the aforementioned BA programmes; his research interests focus on teaching the linguistic and communicative skills, ICT in ELT, and the use of corpus in cohesive devices. He is a member of the Research Group Language Learning and Teaching Processes (UV-CA-407). He has presented a number of papers at national and international conferences, and published a book on the use of cohesive devices in the speaking skills.
Work schedule
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