The graduate program in Teaching English at the University of Costa Rica offers yearly English courses to satisfy the language learning needs at different departments, research centers, or similar institutions. The objective of this article was to analyze the extent to which a group of student teachers fulfilled the roles of the instructors in the Task Based Language Teaching method used in the graduate program.  The study used a mixed-methods approach and the subjects were three instructors during their teaching practicum. The roles of the instructors were assessed by the practicum supervisors, fellow students in the practicum, the students in the course, and the instructors themselves through rubrics, observation sheets, surveys, and teaching journals. The results from the different instruments using different scales pointed to the instructors fulfilling the roles of sequencing tasks and motivating the learners a majority of the times. The roles of preparing the learners for tasks and raising consciousness were fulfilled to a lesser extent, which indicated that the instructors needed to work further on these areas. The study concluded with recommendations for improving the roles that revealed weaknesses, notably aimed to provide a manageable numbers of vocabulary items and grammar structures in the pretask, as well as to provide prompt feedback, and to elicit students’ knowledge for the development of lessons.

The University of Costa Rica seeks to prepare students for understanding academic texts in English by requiring reading comprehension courses in numerous degree programs. In this context, this paper aimed to assess the effectiveness of graphic organizers as a strategy to promote reading comprehension by focusing on the identification of rhetorical functions in argumentative texts. The paper followed an explanatory-sequential design within a mixed-methods approach with a group of 20 students at the Western Branch of UCR. To apply the strategy, three argumentative texts and their corresponding graphic organizers were used. The data consisted of performance scores and of answers to questionnaires. After the cycle of applications, the results showed a gradual improvement in the identification of rhetorical functions, particularly of arguments and counterarguments. Support for the author’s arguments, rebuttals to counterarguments, and the author’s overall claim were slightly more difficult to identify. The participants found graphic organizers helpful to better understand the parts of an argument in a text and its overall organization. At the same time, they found that the lack of explicit discourse markers and of familiarity with the content made understanding the connections between rhetorical functions difficult in spite of the help provided by the organizers. The study concluded that repeated implementation of graphic organizers has a positive impact on reading comprehension by helping students to read more strategically. However, accompanying strategies such as summarizing and discriminating main ideas from supporting details are necessary to complement the work with graphic organizers and improve their effectiveness.

The evolution of the writing skill is closely linked to ICT, increasing the need to make its teaching a meaningful experience in the digital age. The aim of this study was to analyze students’ experiences in a writing task developed on Edublogs to identify elements of task design contributing to a meaningful experience online. The participants were 27 English Teaching students in a first-year composition course at the University of Costa Rica during the first semester of 2021. The study followed a Classroom Action Research design. The students wrote five blog entries. However, only the last entry, a reflection, was analyzed for the study. An open coding method was implemented, through which four categories that impact instructional design of writing tasks were identified: personal connection, engagement, ICT, and applicability. The study concludes with a series of recommendations that can positively impact students’ performance in writing courses supported by ICT.

No abstract

Several studies have demonstrated the positive impact of Consciousness-Raising tasks (CRTs) on the teaching of grammar, especially in foreign or second language learning. However, few studies have examined their effectiveness for the development of writing skills. With this in mind, the goal of this project is to explore the impact of CRTs on three aspects of writing in expository essays: text structure, cohesion, and coherence. To accomplish this goal, the study followed a mixed-method approach with a component of Classroom Action Research. The study was conducted in an English as Foreign Language class with a group of 12 eleventh-grade students at the International Baccalaureate Program at Palmares Bilingual High school, in Alajuela, Costa Rica. The data consisted of two sets of essays, classroom observations, and questionnaires to the students and the cooperating teacher. After comparing results from the first and second essays, the most noticeable improvement in the students’ writing was in text structure and cohesion, whereas coherence showed the lowest improvement. This points to a limitation of CRTs for addressing aspects of writing involving a larger number of rules and more abstract concepts, such as coherence, instead of a smaller number of rules, like cohesion. In conclusion, the authors suggest enquiring about the use of CRTs with simple topics involving decisions tied to explicit rules versus more complex topics involving abstract thinking and decisions not always linked to rules. Lastly, the authors recommend exploring strategies to make consciousness-raising a collaborative process as a way to mitigate task complexity