This paper analyses the influence of the distance learning modality (synchronous/asynchronous) in the learning of anaphora in English and Spanish as foreign languages, based on the results of a course offered to Modern Language students at a Brazilian university in the first semester of 2020. Factors as the level of proficiency, type of task, and degree of motivation were also considered. Two experimental groups and one control group were compared in four written tests. English learners demonstrated a higher prior knowledge of anaphora than Spanish learners and showed the best test results. A positive and moderate correlation was found between the knowledge of anaphora, level of proficiency, and degree of motivation to study the language. Although the experimental groups made progress in the reading tests, the same did not happen in the writing tests. Finally, the difference was not significant between the two experimental groups.

RESUMO Este artigo apresenta uma análise da utilização de diferentes modalidades de ensino no ensino superior, considerando o contexto atual provocado pela COVID-19. O estudo baseia-se em uma revisão da literatura sobre o tema e questionário aplicado a 225 estudantes e professores universitários do Brasil e de Portugal, dos quais 144 tiveram suas aulas presenciais substituídas por aulas a distância. A maioria dos respondentes considera o ensino a distância pior do que o presencial, a comunicação pior, a avaliação mais difícil, a exigência maior e a aprendizagem pior. Além disso, os professores julgam empregar muito mais de seu tempo e dedicação para o ensino a distância, enquanto os alunos parecem dedicar-se menos. Ao serem questionados sobre o futuro do ensino superior, a maioria acredita que a modalidade de ensino mais utilizada será a híbrida. Apesar de o ensino a distância proporcionar diversas vantagens, os participantes sentem falta da interação face a face.

This paper aims to investigate the use of nominal, pronominal, and zero anaphora among native speakers of Brazilian learning Spanish or English. To this purpose, two learner corpora were employed: the Brazilian Learners of Anaphora in English (BRANEN) and the Aprendices Brasileños de Anáfora en Español (BRANES). Participants were undergraduate students with an intermediate-to-advanced proficiency level in the foreign language (English or Spanish) and were randomly assigned into three groups: one had synchronous lessons on the topic, one had asynchronous lessons, and a third one was the control group (which had no lesson). They all completed short narratives in four moments, and their written texts were compiled to investigate how a different instructional mode can better contribute to the learning of this specific discourse mechanism. Third-person human subjects of finite clauses and their antecedents were manually annotated on Recogito. When analysing the pre-test, we found that learners could be less redundant and could use more zero anaphora than pronominal anaphora in English coordinate clauses and Spanish main clauses to continue the topic/subject. The experimental groups practised it during the online course and the asynchronous instructional mode proved to be more effective until the third test (immediately after the course), but the same was not found on the delayed post-test (one month later).

This paper presents two learner corpora built to investigate anaphora across learning environments: the Brazilian Learners of Anaphora in English (BRANEN) and the Aprendices Brasileños de Anáfora en Español (BRANES). Texts were written by language undergraduate students during an online course on anaphora, offered at a Brazilian University in 2020. The corpora provide insights for the analysis of the learning process of anaphora in English and Spanish by Brazilian Portuguese native speakers with intermediate-advanced level in the foreign language. Informants are 30 English and 15 Spanish learners, who were randomly divided into three sub-groups: one group that had two synchronous lessons on anaphora; another that had two asynchronous lessons; and a control group that did not take any lessons. Each participant wrote 100-150 words as a conclusion of a short story. The exercise was performed in four moments: before the course started, after the first lesson, after the second lesson, and a month after the course ended. The texts are available on Sketch Engine, a corpus manager and text analysis software, and contain information about the participants' group and testing moment. The BRANEN corpus was automatically part-ofspeech tagged with the Modified English TreeTagger and has 120 documents, 1,069 sentences, and 1,678 lemmas. For BRANES corpus, the Spanish FreeLing tagset was used, and it consists of 60 documents, 543 sentences, and 1,299 lemmas. The Concordance tool was used to retrieve sentences with pronominal and zero anaphora, which were then manually and independently annotated by two anaphora experts.

This paper presents the designing of an online course to teach anaphora in English and Spanish as foreign languages. Anaphora is a discursive mechanism that contributes to textual cohesion. Instead of repeating the same nouns in their texts, speakers can use different pronouns or even ellipsis to improve communication. Each language has its own anaphoric system, which can be very distinct from null-subject languages, such as Spanish, to non-null-subject languages, such as English. Focusing on this topic, a two-week course was designed and taught in 2020 at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) and at the University of Algarve (Portugal) to language undergraduate students. The first lesson was an introduction to the concepts of cohesion, anaphora, and the pronominal system in the target language. These topics were further explained in the second lesson, which was also about ambiguity. The activities included: educational videos; tools for corpus analysis and coreference resolution; discussion forums; short answer, matching, and multiple-choice exercises; hyperlinks to more videos, texts, and exercises. Students' knowledge of anaphora was assessed in a pre-test and in three post-tests (discussed in another article), and the results were compared between experimental and control groups. The teaching module improved learners' comprehension of written texts and could be adapted to teach anaphora in other languages.