Yesterday we started with the biweekly research seminar mainly for arText team pre- and post-doctoral researchers. The seminars aim to be a meeting point to share progress, put ideas in common, establish links between the team members, follow up on the various ongoing projects and disseminate areas of scientific interest. In short, these seminars aim to be a collaborative space to highlight plain language and areas of interest in this discipline.

Carlos José Blandón Ruiz has defended his TFM entitled “ArText como recurso didáctico para la redacción de textos expositivos” at the Universidad Panamericana de Nicaragua. In his work, he has used arText as a didactic resource to develop the writing skills of a group of high school students. The director of the TFM was Dr. Margarita Míxter Moreno.

Thank you, Carlos, for bringing arText to Nicaragua and for exploring new applications of the system!

Recently, the Ministry of Universities has awarded a María Zambrano grant for the attraction of international talent to Sabela Fernández Silva, assistant professor at the Instituto de Literatura y Ciencias del Lenguaje of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. On January 1st she will join the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas of the UNED to work on the development of new functionalities of arText for 2 years.

Congratulations! We are very happy to be able to expand our team.

Recently, the Ministry of Universities has granted Laia Vidal, professor at the Facultad de Traducción y Ciencias del Lenguaje of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and researcher of the IULATERM group, a Margarita Salas postdoctoral grant. On January 1st she will join the Departamento de Filologías Extranjeras y sus Lingüísticas of UNED to work on the development of new functionalities of arText for 2 years.

Congratulations, Laia! We are glad that you are part of our team.

Jia Chen is carrying out her doctoral thesis in the framework of the arText project thanks to the PhD program in Education of the Facultad de Formación de Profesorado y Educación of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). The topic of her thesis is: “Teaching Chinese university students to write administrative texts in Spanish with the help of arText”. The directors are: Juan Antonio Núñez, coordinator of the Centro de Escritura at UAM, and Iria da Cunha, head of the arText project.

Currently, three doctoral theses related to arText are in progress.

The team of the TIC-eADMIN project, in which arText is currently being developed, met virtually to allow the international members to attend. These are Maite Taboada, from the Simon Fraser University, and Gerardo Sierra, from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. From Spain, Juan A. Núñez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid), and Iria da Cunha, M. Ángeles Escobar, Susana Viñuales and Sara Pistola (from UNED) also assisted.

Jadranka Gladic will carry out her doctoral thesis within the framework of the arText project thanks to the “Programa de doctorado en filología. Estudios lingüísticos y literarios” of the Facultad de Filología of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED). The topic of her thesis is: “El Trabajo de Fin de Grado en Derecho Administrativo: un análisis comparativo entre España y Chile”.

Congratulations and welcome to the team, Jadranka!

The presentation “Textual genres presenting writing difficulties in the field of tourism: a semiautomatic corpus-based linguistic analysis” has been accepted in the 21st Conference on Language for specific purposes 2017 (LSP 2017), which will take place in Bergen (Norway) from 28 to 30 June, 2017.