PRESENTATION

DOI: 10.17533/udea.ikala.v20n2a01

Presentation

John Jairo Giraldo Ortiz

Director Escuela de Idiomas Universidad de Antioquia U. de A. Calle 70 N°. 52–21, Medellín, Colombia john.giraldo@udea.edu.co

Ikala's second number of volume 20 presents six research articles submitted by authors from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (Chile), Universidad de Alicante, and Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain), Universidade Federal do Rio Grande (Brazil), and Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia).

Loyal to its philosophy, Íkala continues to include a wide range of articles from Language to Culture subject fields. In this number the reader will find interesting articles analyzing issues such as the semiotic potential for mediation in classroom, socio–cultural factors influencing the work of novice English teachers in public schools, the use of genre theory for improving writing proficiency skills in explanations, polymorphism treatment on general monolingual dictionaries, aesthetic experience promotion among Mathematics and Literature training teachers, and the translation of culinary references in animation.

Modos semióticos en el discurso pedagógico de historia: potencial semiótico para la mediación en el aula escolar, by Dominique Manghi and Carolina Badillo, is the first article. These authors carried out a research from the Systemic Functional Linguistics and Appraisal Theory to explore the semiotic options in three case studies. The corpus consists of the audiovisual record of three introductory lessons of History, in the 1st year of Secondary School, within the same curriculum unit: World War II. After a Multimodal Discourse Analysis, findings indicate that each teacher chose different combinations of semiotic media and modes to teach the same content with varying degrees of subjectivity.

Docentes noveles de inglés en shock: ¿Qué factores lo generan?, by Merylein Higuita and Ana Elsy Díaz, is the second article. The authors show the factors leading to shock in the novice English teacher during his/her first four years of work at public educational institutions in the city of Medellin. The study has been carried out according to the qualitative paradigm, in an interpretative classic ethnographic framework. The findings show, for example, that the novice English teacher's shock is mainly caused by the violent context that impacts public educational institutions; the lack of strategies to manage students' inappropriate behavior, poor knowledge of linguistic and labor policies, and so on.

The use of genre theory for improving writing proficiency skills in explanations, by María Martínez Lirola, is the third article. It shows that using the Theory of Genre as a framework to teach academic writing helps students to improve their level of literacy. Findings suggest that exposing students to varied text types proper models, paying special attention to explanations, and asking them to write texts based on these models, improve students' texts from a grammatical and a textual point of view.

The fourth article is O tratamento do polimorfismo em dicionários gerais monolíngues de orientação semasiológica, by Myriam Lucía Chancí. This article presents an analysis of the treatment given to polymorphism in noun entries in semasiologicallyoriented general monolingual dictionaries in the Hispanic lexicographical tradition. The findings indicate that the dictionaries analyzed are not based on a microstructural information program to treat and organize information relating to spelling variants strategically.

Aproximación histórica al concepto de lógica: avances parciales de una investigación que promueve la experiencia estética de maestros en formación de matemáticas y literatura, by Rubén Darío Henao and Mónica Moreno, is the fifth article in this issue. It proposes the development of aesthetic reasonableness in designing and staging a teaching strategy based on the analysis of fictional stories and research articles. The preliminary findings of this strategy show that literature and mathematics teachers are unaware of the logical and creative possibilities that can be experienced and identified through literary and scientific texts.

Food for thought: the translation of culinary references in animation, by Pilar González– Vera, is the sixth and last research article in this issue. This paper focuses on the analysis of the role of food and its translation in the process of globalization. It analyses the relationship between food and culture in animated films, including a study of the translation techniques applied in the dubbed versions of the films under analysis, and their relationship to the process of domestication and foreignization in order to assess the social implications in texts aimed at a young audience.

At this moment, I am about to be the former Director of the School of Languages; therefore, let me dedicate some lines of this issue to make my farewell and express my gratitude. On one hand, I sincerely thank all our peer colleagues for their continuous academic support to Íkala during these years. Indeed, their contributions have made Íkala well known among teaching, translation, terminology, linguistics, and literature experts around the world. On the other hand, I want to thank professor Claudia Gómez, Director to this journal, not only for the invitation to write this presentation, but also for the great job she has done in Íkala since 2013. Likewise, it is fair to thank professor Wilson Orozco, Director of Íkala during the period 2009–2013. Both, professors Orozco and Gómez, knew to take Íkala to an important position in Publindex, the main Colombian bibliographic index for ranking scientific and technical publications, as well as other international ranking systems. My best wishes to Íkala and all of you.