PRESENTATION

 

PRESENTATION

 

PRESENTACIÓN

 

 

Wilson Orozco*

* Director/Editor Íkala, revista de lenguaje y cultura. Escuela de Idiomas, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. Correspondence concerning this presentation should be addressed to Wilson Orozco calle 67 No. 53 – 108, Of. 11-202, Medellín, Colombia.

 

2012 was a great year for Íkala: classification for the first time in the A2 category in Publindex indicates that Íkala is improving thanks to the growing number of articles which mainly give voice to empirical studies, the quality of peer reviewers and the edition of the first general index in 16 years.

But challenges for Íkala in the near future continue: an ongoing commitment to being indexed in the most prestigious databases in the world is definitely a must. And there is more to come: the entire editorial process is now being done in Open Journal System, an online platform which gives the opportunity of interconnecting editor, reviewers and authors at the same time in a process which will give more transparency to the process. Authors can check the status of their submissions at any time and have a final layout version so they can help in deciding what the final look of the article will be, etc. Obviously all of this implies more participation for all those involved in the editorial process.

As Íkala strictly applies all APA norms, from now on the names of the sections will be: Empirical Studies, Literature Reviews, Theoretical Articles, Methodological Articles, Case Studies, Book Reviews and Brief Reports.

I would like to thank Anna Leversee's enormous help for her copyediting in English (this Presentation included!) and Jonathan Orrego, an undergraduate student in foreign languages, for his help while doing lots of editorial assistance tasks.

It is a pleasure for me to present Volume 18, issue 1 of Íkala which continues to be a reference for language and culture in the academic world.

In Empirical Studies, Chilean authors Miguel Farías, Katica Obilinovic and Roxana Orrego present an interesting study concerning the implications of redundancy in learning for retention and transference of idiomatic expressions in English. Results indicate that in retention, the two groups tested presented the usual cognitive overload, but in transference, variations were found according to the vocabulary used.

Nancy Magdaleno and Carolina Gutiérrez-Rivas analyze the comments made to a virtual newspaper article. They found a high frequency of direct requests with an exhortative function and an underlying rejection because of the lack of cost-benefit among readers. Searle's concepts shed light on this study in the sense that speech acts are not unidimensional.

Issacar Nguendjo Tiogang in Cameroon studies the production of students of Spanish at the University of Dschang. Studies suggest that for having an efficient outcome in learning a language, obstacles must be identified. This is what the author does in relation to francophone students from Bantu background studying Spanish. Obviously these new findings will improve the learning and teaching of this language as it becomes a more widespread language around the world. in expansion.

Myriam Cabrales and Jaime Cáceres, through a study done at Universidad de San Buenaventura in Cartagena (Colombia) with undergraduate students of languages, find out that a curriculum by itself will not encourage autonomy and that explicit measures have to be implemented if it is to be reached. This article clearly provides additional advances in the world of second language learning.

Ji Son Jang gives a review of the voseo both in Hispanoamerica and in Colombia. Certain studies say that the voseo in Colombia would disappear but experience has shown the opposite. Jang's study precisely concentrates on the attitudes and beliefs of college students concerning the use of vos. Findings show that the voseo is connected with the pride of being paisa and that pride is at the same time related to the negative attitudes shown towards people from  Bogotá (Colombia).

In Literature Reviews, Yamith Fandiño makes a complete report of what teachers need to know in order to teach English as a Foreign Language in Colombia. Not only a general knowledge must be offered to train teachers, but aspects such as their beliefs and attitudes have to be taken into account. New proposals and perspectives are offered in this article to Colombian teacher education programs.

And finally in Book Reviews, Martha Pulido makes a complete survey of the collection of essays titled Translating dialects and languages of minorities. Challenges and solutions by editor Federico Federici (2011). Pulido makes clear what the essence of the book is: there's a challenge in translation and it consists in how to translate a local language and setting to a world audience. But once this has been ''solved'' there comes the issue of the standardization these translations suffer once they pass through the process of edition and publication. Much of the original is lost, obviously. Clearly the solution has to do with reflecting on this issue and that the translator recognizes that a single pattern of translation cannot be followed.

Alejandro Arroyave makes a review of the book Texto base-Texto meta: un modelo funcional de análisis pretraslativo by Christiane Nord where he makes a detailed description of the basics of the translation process which, as he says, could be of great help for students of translation all over the world.

Welcome to the first issue of Íkala for 2013.