PRESENTATION

 

PRESENTATION

 

PRESENTACIÓN

 

PRÉSENTATION

 

 

Claudia Gómez Palacio*

* Directora/Editora Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura Escuela de Idiomas Universidad de Antioquia UdeA Calle 70 No. 52-21, Medellín, Colombia

 

 

We know how important Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura is for our readers, authors, and supportive colleagues who regularly visit our website and follow our printed version. Therefore, as Director and Editor of this journal, I apologize for this belated volume that starts with issue 19(1), and I hope you enjoy the articles and use them in your research and studies. Unfortunately, certain circumstances prevented our administration from releasing the journal earlier.

To present this issue, I would like to introduce ''Ciudad en Tensión,'' the cover, by urban artist Cristóbal Isaza. Isaza participated in our ''call for pieces of art'' last year, which invited artists to share their pictures, paintings, sculptures and other works of art in photo format to enrich the valuable content of the journal. Isaza is a local artist who paints the inner part of the city and he describes his work as ''spiritual liberation, streets of confinement, and horizons of dreams''. This artist looks at the city as an ''organism that generates tension.'' We invite other artists to share their pieces of art with us as well.

Assessing the so Called Marked Inflectional Features of Nigerian English: A Second Language Acquisition Theory Account by Boluwaji Oshodi is the first empirical study. In this article, Dr. Oshodi compares the oral and written productions of Nigerian and Malaysian students to demonstrate that the '' so called marked inflectional features of Nigerian English '' are consequences of the problems with lexical retrieval, which are common among L2 English speakers, rather than particular variations of the English language spoken in Nigeria according to Kirkpatrick (2011).

The second empirical study is Leer y Escribir en la Universidad: El Caso de la Institución Universitaria de Envigado by José Ignacio Henao Salazar, David A. Londoño-Vásquez, and Ladis Yuceima Frias-Cano. In this article, the authors present three research projects that were carried out at the Universidad de Envigado with students from undergraduate programs in Law and Psychology. The three projects emphasize literacy skills, and the results show that interventions on '' Text Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Pragma-Dialectic Argumentation'' may help students improve their levels of oral and written production.

Projet d'Échange Culturel entre l'Université du Quindío et l'Université d'Antioquia: espace d'immersion en français langue étrangère by Neira Loaiza Villalba and Doris Colorado López is the first methodological article published in this issue. The article presents a French immersion experience in which undergraduate students of French as a foreign language from two public universities in Colombia share the target language and the cultures of the department of Quindío and the city of Medellín while touring both places. Results show that with these types of immersion activities, students not only improve their communicative and sociocultural competences, but also improve their abilities to use information and communication technology tools. On a side note, we encourage authors who publish articles in French to send us their contributions.

Linguistic Hegemony of the English Language in Nigeria by Abolaji Samuel Mustapha critically discusses the exaggerated reports about the linguistic hegemony of the English language and its impact on Nigeria's local languages. As a solution to '' promote local languages '', Dr. Mustapha gives some recommendations that highlight the importance of speaking Nigeria's official local languages in some places such as schools, airports, and state, national, and international offices,. The author also considers '' universities, polytechnics, and colleges '', and people in charge of promoting local languages should support these languages through scholarships for conducting research on the topic, as offered in many institutions outside of Nigeria.

De las idiosincrasias a las normas. Un camino intermedio, is an article whose main focus is the ''concept of translation tendency''. Juan José Martínez Sierra, author of the article, states that his work will not only mainly focus on norms and idiosyncrasy, but will also focus on ways the concept regulates translation. In addition, he intends to clarify the concept, and also examines Toury's theory.

In their article El Programa Nacional de Bilingüismo: Un Estudio Exploratorio en el Departamento de Antioquia, Colombia, Doris Correa, Jaime Usma, and Juan Carlos Montoya examine stakeholders' points of view about the implementation of Colombia's National Bilingual Program. Correa, Usma, and Montoya highlight that in spite of the fact that stakeholders had limited information about the program, they expressed a great deal regarding the actions the government had to carry out to ensure the program's success.

Finally, I would like to express my great appreciation to all the administrators who have always supported my team and me during the process of this publication: Dr. John Jairo Giraldo Ortíz, Yudy Andrea Jiménez, Sandra Lora, Claudia Cadavid, and Juan David Rodas, my immediate boss. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Professor Daniele Muzialek, Alberto Ortiz from Agencia de Traducción y Servicios Lingüísticos, Escuela de Idiomas, and Mauricio Hincapié from Museo Universitario Universidad de Antioquia. To my closest colleagues and members of the editorial and scientific committee, thank you very much for your valuable comments and input.

I hope you enjoy the issue, and please let us know your thoughts! Your comments and suggestions are much appreciated and will improve our publication!