Papers by Alexandra I García Marrugo, FHEA
Linguistics and the Human Sciences, 2011
The turn of the century marked an escalation of the violence of the Colombian conflict by both Ma... more The turn of the century marked an escalation of the violence of the Colombian conflict by both Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. However, popular perception of each group contrasts sharply with the statistics on responsibility for criminal acts. Since the press is one of the main sources of information on the conflict for the general population, analyzing the way in which it reconstructs these events may provide some insights into this phenomenon. Thus, as an initial step in this process, two pieces of news on violent acts perpetrated by each group reported in ‘El Tiempo’, the leading Colombian newspaper, in December 1998 are analysed. Within a Systemic Functional Linguistics framework, it will contrast who the participants are in each text and how they are nominated, what types of processes they carry out, and how explicitly causation is attributed. The analysis shows how despite having the same context, the experiential meanings realized in the lexicogrammatical se...
Zona proxima, May 17, 2022
zona próxima a l e x a n d r a g a r c í a master of arts in language teaching and learninguniver... more zona próxima a l e x a n d r a g a r c í a master of arts in language teaching and learninguniversity of liverpool. coordinator of foreign languages for the international business program at the universidad del norte. lecturer at the diploma in english language teaching and the masters in education.
SCANA: Supporting Students’ Academic Language Development at The University of Sydney, 2023
In 2021, the Learning Hub at The University of Sydney launched the Student Communication and Need... more In 2021, the Learning Hub at The University of Sydney launched the Student Communication and Needs Analysis (SCANA). This program of support consists of a screening language task and associated support interventions in first year units of study (UoS). The self-marking online screening tool developed by the Language Testing Research Centre at The University of Melbourne classifies students into three bands, with Band 1 identifying students at risk of academic failure due to insufficient language proficiency. All students in selected UoS are encouraged to take SCANA and offered academic language support according to their needs. Students identified in Band 1 are advised to attend discipline-specific support targeting the language issues associated with written assignments. These students are also informed about other offerings, such as one-on-one consultations, generic academic workshops, peer-facilitated programs, and self-access resources. Students in Bands 2 and 3 are also offered ...
Discourse & Society, 2013
This article examines the linguistic patterns associated with the forms of representation of Marx... more This article examines the linguistic patterns associated with the forms of representation of Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, the main illegal actors in the internal Colombian conflict, on the reporting in the Colombian press of their violent actions. The analysis is based on a 300,000+ word specialised corpus of hard news reports on the conflict from four major Colombian newspapers. The analytical tools used are Van Leeuwen’s network for the representation of social actors and an adaptation of Hasan’s cline of dynamism. In addition, the epistemic modality of ownership of the crimes reported is examined. The results reveal remarkable differences in the reporting of the actions of both groups.
ABSTRACT Throughout the last thirty years, Critical Discourse Analysis has built a consistent bod... more ABSTRACT Throughout the last thirty years, Critical Discourse Analysis has built a consistent body of research demonstrating ideological bias in discourses of major social relevance including, but not limited to, media, political, legal, educational, and corporate discourse. However, this discipline has been criticised with the argument that its interpretation of texts is more the result of the analyst’s own biases rather than of the application of structured theoretical tools. It is this author’s belief that this issue can be addressed with the implementation of analytical tools that allow the CDA analyst to identify linguistic patterns either in individual texts or a larger corpus that may indicate more clearly an ideological bias. This paper shows the application of the concept of instantial weight (Butt, 2008) to two news reports from the newspaper El Colombiano dealing with the internal conflict, more specifically violent acts against civilians committed by Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. The instantial weight of the selected participants (the guerrillas and paramilitaries in this case) is determined by assigning a numerical value to each instance depending on a set of lexicogrammatical features from all four language metafunctions. The results clearly show marked differences in the construal of the illegal actors in the conflict in the selected texts. The identification of these patterns in a larger corpus may provide strong evidence of a particular ideology about the conflict, that of the paramilitaries as minor agents of violence, being promoted by this newspaper. 21
Language, Context and Text, 2021
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics
The increasing availability of corpora (large electronic collections of texts) and the developmen... more The increasing availability of corpora (large electronic collections of texts) and the development of specialized software that retrieves linguistic data from corpora has had a tremendous impact on linguistics as a discipline. Whether a methodology or an approach to linguistic enquiry, corpus linguistics enables researchers to identify language patterns in representative samples of authentic texts. Unlike in intuition-based approaches, corpus techniques (e.g., frequencies, keywords, collocation analysis, concordancing) provide real evidence to either confirm or discard a linguistic hypothesis. It is the power of evidence, we believe, that has made virtually all linguistic subdisciplines embrace corpus methods (McEnery, Xiao, & Tono, 2006). From lexicography to stylistics to forensic linguistics to language learning and teaching, corpus-based approaches are becoming increasingly common worldwide. In Australia, however, there is still much potential for growth in this field, especially in the area of education. It is our purpose with this issue to draw attention to the possibilities that corpus linguistics offers to those interested in language and education. In this editorial, we will briefly review the history of corpus linguistics in Australia and then focus on Australian corpus-based studies in the field of education, including both descriptive and applied research. To conclude, we introduce the articles in this issue, which contribute to filling gaps in discursive and applied studies.
Language, Context and Text
Given the pressing issues that affect nursing education (e.g. higher attrition and plagiarism rat... more Given the pressing issues that affect nursing education (e.g. higher attrition and plagiarism rates), this study aims to obtain initial insight on whether nursing textbooks meet the demands of their context of situation. These demands could be listed as: construing biomedical knowledge, establishing a pattern of evidence-based nursing practice and promoting the values of person-centred care. For this analysis, I draw on aspects of parameters of context developed by Hasan (2004), Butt (2004) and Matthiessen (2015), and relate them to their semantic and lexicogrammatical realisation across different metafunctions using corpus-based techniques and detailed manual analysis of short extracts. The results may suggest that nursing textbooks may be meeting the demands of nursing as a research-based discipline but failing to model empathetic communication.
Functional Linguistics
The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pai... more The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pain’, this study maps the lexicogrammatical resources available to Spanish speakers in the register of hard news to construe death and killing. Based primarily on a 250,000+ corpus of news reports of violent actions by illegal armed groups in the internal conflict from four major Colombian newspapers, it distinguishes between congruent and metaphorical construals of death, accounting for the different roles of the participants involved in these different types of constructions. In addition, it offers a topological perspective of the intersection of the more delicate distinction of process types and the system of Agency. The second objective is to apply these findings to contrast the construal of violence by the actors in the conflict, Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. The results of the analysis show how the deployment of lexicogrammatical resources construes different semi...
Latin American Journal of Content and Language Integrated Learning, 2008
This paper illustrates how a detailed analysis of lexical choices can evince the author's ideolog... more This paper illustrates how a detailed analysis of lexical choices can evince the author's ideological message in seemingly expository texts. The activity described, part of the contentbased course English V: Technology, Environment, and Progress in the International Relations Program at the Universidad del Norte, leads students to the realization of their tendency to accept every written text as an objective depiction of reality without questioning the writer's purpose or intentions. Furthermore, the comparison of two texts dealing with the same topic but written from opposing points of view helps the students understand how language can be manipulated for particular purposes.
Revista signos, 2013
This paper examines the systemic functional description of Spanish Nuclear Transitivity as propos... more This paper examines the systemic functional description of Spanish Nuclear Transitivity as proposed by Lavid, Arús and Zamorano (2010) and proposes two modifications to their system network. The first is to reevaluate their concept of 'causation', which is limited to 'lexical ergativity' (He broke the window/The window broke). It is argued that causation can be realized with a range of structures that include analytical (He made the boy run) and synthetic (He chased the boy) versions. Furthermore, lexical ergativity is subdivided into 'Instigation' (He broke the window) and 'Initiation' (He rolled the ball). These options are considered more 'delicate' choices of the 'effective voice' subsystem. The second modification is the inclusion of the ER-participant (Actor, Carrier, Sayer, Behaver, Senser) explicitness system, which is exclusive to Spanish. This set of options allow the speaker to present crucial participants in Agent•Process•Medium and Medium•Process configurations obliquely. Although the different realizations of this system ('se' passives, periphrastic passives, impersonal 'se' and impersonal 3 person plural), have been widely discussed in the literature from both systemic and non-systemic perspectives, these had not been mapped into the system network of Spanish Transitivity.
Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 2018
This paper reports on the experience of transforming the face-to-face workshop ‘Writing a Literat... more This paper reports on the experience of transforming the face-to-face workshop ‘Writing a Literature Review’ (WLR) into an online version. This genre-based pedagogy workshop guides HDR students through the process of finding, synthesising and evaluating sources and structuring this content effectively to build a coherent argument. The paper focuses on the pedagogical and technological challenges and opportunities arising from this process from the perspective of an experienced academic literacy educator with limited expertise in developing online materials. It discusses the shift from an inductive to a deductive instructional approach and explores the affordances of the selected software: Camtasia and Smart Sparrow, to create more student-centred activities. It also describes how an interdisciplinary collaborative approach was implemented to address the need for training and evaluating usability and accessibility. Finally, it argues that starting the process of creating online mater...
Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 2020
Much linguistic description in Australia, including work on Indigenous languages, is based on emp... more Much linguistic description in Australia, including work on Indigenous languages, is based on empirical language data, although it does not necessarily apply classic corpus linguistic techniques to such data. For reason of scope, we focus here on the history of corpus linguistics in relation to large computer corpora of Australian English, and will not delve into the history of corpus-based language description in general.
Desde el jardín de Freud, 2020
La legitimación de la violencia: ideologías latentes en el conflicto colombiano desde una perspec... more La legitimación de la violencia: ideologías latentes en el conflicto colombiano desde una perspectiva discursiva El rechazo a los acuerdos con las farc contrasta notoriamente con la reacción popular ante el proceso de desmovilización de las auc ape-nas una década antes. Propongo entonces examinar la construcción discursiva del conflicto con el fin de exponer las ideologías latentes que legitiman el uso de la violencia. Para ello, examino la naturaleza de la ideología y su inextricable relación con el lenguaje; luego, presento evidencia empírica de la construc-ción discursiva del paramilitarismo como agente menor del conflicto, y conecto esta percepción con un análisis de la naturaleza del conflicto colombiano desde una perspectiva sociológica. The rejection of the peace accords with farc sharply contrasts with the popular reaction to the demobilization process of the auc a decade earlier. In this paper I examine the discourse of the conflict with the purpose of exposing the latent ideologies that legitimate the use of violence. For this purpose, first, I examine the nature of ideology and its inextricable relation with language; then, I present empirical evidence of the discursive construal of paramilitarism as a minor agent in the conflict, and I link the resultant perception with an analysis of the nature of the Colombian conflict from a sociological perspective.
Language, Context and Text, 2019
Given the pressing issues that affect nursing education (e.g. higher attrition and plagiarism rat... more Given the pressing issues that affect nursing education (e.g. higher attrition and plagiarism rates), this study aims to obtain initial insight on whether nursing textbooks meet the demands of their context of situation. These demands could be listed as: construing biomedical knowledge, establishing a pattern of evidence-based nursing practice and promoting the values of person-centred care. For this analysis, I draw on aspects of parameters of context developed by Hasan (2004), Butt (2004) and Matthiessen (2015), and relate them to their semantic and lexicogrammatical realisation across different metafunctions using corpus-based techniques and detailed manual analysis of short extracts. The results may suggest that nursing textbooks may be meeting the demands of nursing as a research-based discipline but failing to model empathetic communication.
This paper reports on the experience of transforming the face-to-face workshop 'Writing a Literat... more This paper reports on the experience of transforming the face-to-face workshop 'Writing a Literature Review' (WLR) into an online version. This genre-based pedagogy workshop guides HDR students through the process of finding , synthesising and evaluating sources and structuring this content effectively to build a coherent argument. The paper focuses on the pedagogical and technological challenges and opportunities arising from this process from the perspective of an experienced academic literacy educator with limited expertise in developing online materials. It discusses the shift from an inductive to a deductive instructional approach and explores the affordances of the selected software: Camtasia and Smart Sparrow, to create more student-centred activities. It also describes how an interdisciplinary collaborative approach was implemented to address the need for training and evaluating usability and accessibility. Finally, it argues that starting the process of creating online materials has benefits for all stakeholders, not just the virtual audience.
The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday's 1998 paper 'On the grammar of pai... more The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday's 1998 paper 'On the grammar of pain', this study maps the lexicogrammatical resources available to Spanish speakers in the register of hard news to construe death and killing. Based primarily on a 250,000+ corpus of news reports of violent actions by illegal armed groups in the internal conflict from four major Colombian newspapers, it distinguishes between congruent and metaphorical construals of death, accounting for the different roles of the participants involved in these different types of constructions. In addition, it offers a topological perspective of the intersection of the more delicate distinction of process types and the system of Agency. The second objective is to apply these findings to contrast the construal of violence by the actors in the conflict, Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. The results of the analysis show how the deployment of lexicogrammatical resources construes different semiotic spaces, highlighting the role of one group while diminishing the responsibility of the other.
This paper illustrates how a detailed analysis of lexical choices can evince the author’s ideolog... more This paper illustrates how a detailed analysis of lexical choices can evince the author’s ideological message in seemingly expository texts. The activity described, part of the content-based course English V: Technology, Environment, and Progress in the International Relations Program at the Universidad del Norte, leads students to the realization of their tendency to accept every written text as an objective depiction of reality without questioning the writer’s purpose or intentions. Furthermore, the comparison of two texts dealing with the same topic but written from opposing points of view helps the students understand how language can be manipulated for particular purposes.
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Papers by Alexandra I García Marrugo, FHEA