Lorena Bort-Mir - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Lorena Bort-Mir
The EUROCALL Review, Sep 30, 2020
Metacognition can be considered as knowledge about one's own cognitive activities and their regul... more Metacognition can be considered as knowledge about one's own cognitive activities and their regulation during learning processes (Flavell, 1979). Students are, then, involved in metacognitive mental activities when they think about what they have learned, how they have learned it, or how they can relate it to their personal experiences, among other things. Based on this, students who develop these skills should show more appropriate strategies to know what they need to find out or do while learning. Therefore, understanding and controlling these cognitive processes may be one of the most essential skills that teachers should encourage at all academic levels (Anderson, 2002). The Guided Learning Diary (GLD, Bort-Mir, 2016) was developed as a learning diary with several aims: (i) defining the general and specific objectives of the content to be taught, (ii) developing the students' metacognitive skills through strategic questions, and (iii) promoting the development of important competences such as self-criticism, autonomous learning, self-evaluation and capacity for improvement. The GLD also allows a selfevaluation process for teachers, thus facilitating the supervision and improvement both of the contents of the course and the didactic methodology. This tool was developed and applied within the Theatre in English subject at Universitat Jaume I, embedded in the
Complutense journal of English studies, Sep 21, 2020
Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors t... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors to evaluate and communicate in our various environments. Although metaphors encompass a large variety of taxonomies, orientational metaphors are those that rely on spatial position to map concepts into other ones, referring to a relation of valence and verticality. Stated by Kövecses (2010) conceptual metaphors such orientational ones draw 'upward' and 'downward' spatial positions in which 'upward' is usually referred to as having positive connotations, whereby their opposites, 'downwards', are understood as negative. This paper seeks to unveil how the orientational metaphor good is up is employed in a filmic narrative of a language learning application for technological devices named Babbel. The present analysis is developed under the application of FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure, Bort-Mir 2019). In the analyzed narrative, the orientational metaphor good is up is represented in the Babbel TV commercial (2018) as a tool for persuading customers that the best way of escalating positions at work is by learning new languages. This analysis demonstrates how orientational metaphors in multimodal media emerge as a convenient device for marketing campaigns in the context of social status improvement.
Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación, 2019
Metaphor and the Social World, Feb 8, 2022
Multimodal Communication
Research on multimodal communication is complex because multimodal analyses require methods and p... more Research on multimodal communication is complex because multimodal analyses require methods and procedures that offer the possibility of disentangling the layers of meaning conveyed through different channels. We hereby propose an empirical evaluation of the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir, L. (2019). Developing, applying and testing FILMIP: the filmic metaphor identification procedure, Ph.D. dissertation. Universitat Jaume I, Castellón.), a structural method for the identification of metaphorical elements in (filmic) multimodal materials. The paper comprises two studies: (i) A content analysis conducted by independent coders, in which the reliability of FILMIP is assessed. Here, two TV commercials were shown to 21 Spanish participants for later analysis with the use of FILMIP under two questionnaires. (ii) A qualitative analysis based on a percentage agreement index to check agreement among the 21 participants about the metaphorically marked filmic compon...
avances en tecnologias innovacion y desafios de la educacion superior, 2016
La metacognición fue explicada por primera vez como el conocimiento y la regulación de las activi... more La metacognición fue explicada por primera vez como el conocimiento y la regulación de las actividades cognitivas de cada uno en el proceso de aprendizaje (Flavell, 1979; Brown, 1978). Según esta definición, para conseguir la adquisición de conocimientos adecuadamente necesitamos el uso de habilidades metacognitivas, y es en este ámbito en el que nace el DAG (Diario de Aprendizaje Guiado) como una nueva herramienta de enseñanza y aprendizaje que promueve el desarrollo y la evaluación de las estrategias metacognitivas del estudiante, haciendo hincapié en el aprendizaje significativo y auto-regulado. El DAG une el conocimiento metacognitivo y el aprendizaje independiente, transformando la metacognición inconsciente en un proceso consciente el cual facilita el desarrollo de estas habilidades. Este uso explícito de las estrategias metacognitivas hace que los estudiantes aprendan mediante “el compromiso activo y la reflexión sobre la experiencia, construyendo sobre sus conocimientos previos y tomando parte activa en su aprendizaje” (Ayala, 2014: 2). En el presente artículo se propone la herramienta DAG describiendo los pasos a seguir por el docente para su desarrollo y consiguiente uso como método de aprendizaje, haciendo también mención de los beneficios que su uso aporta tanto para el estudiante como para el propio docente. Esta investigación se ha realizado gracias a los fondos del proyecto P1.1A2014-02 de la Universitat Jaume I.
Metaphor and the Social World
Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't ... more Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean. Bob Dylan Every journey has a starting point, a moment when everything starts, a big bang. My big bang goes back to my university years, specifically to one of our sessions from the Shakespeare in Context subject, when our professor projected the movie Shakespeare in Love to the class while he explained the meaning of every single movement of the dances between Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) and young William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes). He made me realize, in that very moment, that what I was watching on the screen was not a mere juxtaposition of events and beautiful 'things', but a whole bulk of meanings created especially for the audience. That 'revelation of truth' really fascinated me. A few years later, that same professor opened my eyes, more profoundly, about filmic meaning-making during a doctoral course called Shakespeare in Films. Every single ray of light, sound, gesture, object, or character that I saw on the screen was there because of a reason. Nothing, he said, is in a movie by chance. I have not been able to watch films or TV naïvely since then. My interest about metaphor started just a few years ago, with my implication within the Research Group on Contrastive and Applied Semantics (GReSCA) at Universitat Jaume I, led by Dr. Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando, where I initiated my PhD. It is in this context where I had the opportunity to learn about the last trends on metaphor research and to be immersed in this immense world of metaphors. The point is that there is a continuum of cases ranging from situations where metaphorical construal is virtually inescapable to situations where this is a possibility which only part of the audience will pick up. In fact, the situation is even more complicated: sometimes audiences, or individual viewers, maydue to a different cultural context, time of access, or is proposed under the study of the genre of TV commercials, I argue that the critique can be generalized to the rest of filmic genres. The current study, with the development of FILMIP, offers, then, a solution to this problematic, presenting a procedure that allows for a multimodal structured-semiotic analysis of filmic texts, revealing all the existing levels of signification and aesthetic configuration of the film under analysis, first dissecting the clip and then articulating and reconstructing the meaning embedded in it with the goal of revealing metaphorical filmic components. Thus, FILMIP not only entails a mere description of the narrative but also the reconstruction of the whole filmic text. This study tackles these research questions through the following chapters: Chapter 1 entails the discussion of the main tenets of metaphor theory, trends and critiques, with a brief description of the existing methods for metaphor identification in language and in pictures. Chapter 2 introduces the cognitivist approach to the study of film theory through an extensive view on filmic meaning-making, traversing the fields of embodied simulation in order to obtain insight into how we make sense of cinema. Filmic metaphoricity and multimodality are both dealt with in the chapter along with a description and my claim on what can be considered a mode.
Journal of English Studies
The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in co... more The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in cognitive linguistics, and metaphor is one of these tropes. Focusing on the genre of TV advertising, a structural method for the identification of metaphorical components used in films in a cross-modal fashion is developed in the present paper. A corpus of 11 TV commercials is analyzed under seven steps that guide analysts from the content description of the multimodal materials to the concrete identification of metaphorical elements. This research presents the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir 2019) as a tool for the identification of metaphorically used filmic components in multimodal filmic materials. More concretely, the paper presents the application of the procedure to two TV commercials from different perfume brands. FILMIP offers a valuable contribution not only to metaphor scholars but also to researchers focused on other fields of study such as multimodal...
The EUROCALL Review, 2020
The research conducted in this study is part of Universitat Jaume I Education and Innovation esea... more The research conducted in this study is part of Universitat Jaume I Education and Innovation esearch Project: 3622/18. Its rationale is also framed within the Universitat Jaume I Research Project UJI-B2018-59
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2020
The purpose of this study is to investigate how viewers who speak different languages interpret c... more The purpose of this study is to investigate how viewers who speak different languages interpret cinematographic metaphors in a filmic advertisement. The study is organized in three parts: First, we offer a theoretical model that predicts the offline mental mechanisms that occur while people interpret filmic metaphors, based on an existing model of visual metaphor processing. Second, we evaluate the model in a think-aloud retrospective task. A TV-commercial is projected individually to 30 Spanish, 30 American, and 30 Persian participants, who are then asked to verbalize their thoughts. The commercial was previously segmented, analyzed using FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure), and marked for metaphoricity by two independent analysts. The collected data is then evaluated in two formal content analyses. In the first one, two independent coders classified all the clauses used by the 90 participants in relation to the steps outlined in the theoretical model. In the second a...
Resena del libro: Visual Metaphor: Structure and process; Gerard J. Steen (ed.); Amsterdam: John ... more Resena del libro: Visual Metaphor: Structure and process; Gerard J. Steen (ed.); Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing; 2018;
Complutense Journal of English Studies
Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors t... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors to evaluate and communicate in our various environments. Although metaphors encompass a large variety of taxonomies, orientational metaphors are those that rely on spatial position to map concepts into other ones, referring to a relation of valence and verticality. Stated by Kövecses (2010) conceptual metaphors such orientational ones draw ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ spatial positions in which ‘upward’ is usually referred to as having positive connotations, whereby their opposites, ‘downwards’, are understood as negative. This paper seeks to unveil how the orientational metaphor good is up is employed in a filmic narrative of a language learning application for technological devices named Babbel. The present analysis is developed under the application of FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure, Bort-Mir 2019). In the analyzed narrative, the orientational metaphor good is up is repres...
Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación
Ariadna, 2016
With the increasing apogee of the digital world and Internet use by older people, one may wonder ... more With the increasing apogee of the digital world and Internet use by older people, one may wonder how adults understand these virtual spaces. The aim of this article is to see to what extent the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor and the Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) may help understand the meaning and structure of a website. In our research we analyze several web pages from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics in order to know if the virtual world makes sense from different types of metaphors and cognitive domains. As linguists, we get two questions. The first one is whether we are able to understand the Internet, something abstract with which we are not born, and the way we surf websites, transferring meaning through conceptual metaphors from the real world we do know to this new online world. Throughout our analysis we can see what types of metaphors are activated in our mind when visiting a website and in which moment they transfer meaning from the real world. The second question is whether website domains (the addresses of web spaces) are conceptually comparable to the cognitive domains that are activated in our minds when we perceive any concept. This assumption can offer a great contribution to marketers and SEO experts since it offers a new vision on how to make a potential client think what companies want (what mental model must be activated) when reading the address of a website. In short, our brief analysis, which is part of a more thorough and extensive research, provides a theory on how online readers configure the meaning of websites through conceptual metaphors, and it also provides a new framework of study which examines how web domains should be established so that the reader is able to know the theme of the web with just reading its address.
Are all students performing metacognition when learning? How can teachers be sure of it? It is be... more Are all students performing metacognition when learning? How can teachers be sure of it? It is believed that successful knowledge acquisition requires the use of metacognitive skills. This is the raison d’être for the ConverStand software, designed to bring unconscious metacognition to a conscious process. This explicit utilization of metacognitive strategies will make students able to develop “more sophisticated and academically oriented” skills. (Veenman et al, 2006, p. 8). Metacognition was first explained in the mid-1970s as the knowledge about and regulation of one’s cognitive activities in learning processes, as thinking about one’s thinking and regulation of that thinking (Flavell, 1979; Brown, 1978). Nowadays, its importance has been stressed by Öz (2014, chap.7, p. 139): “metacognition is an increasingly important cognitive factor in applied linguistics as well as educational, cognitive, and developmental psychology”. It is in this background that the ConverStand software i...
Is the use of ICT overestimated, or is it really an important part of today teaching and learning... more Is the use of ICT overestimated, or is it really an important part of today teaching and learning? If it is important, how can technology make a great impact to the teaching and learning of Literature? This paper tries to answer these questions taking into account all the improvements that technology introduces to education, and analyzing some of the criticism that surrounds this issue as well; we base our research on a qualitative analysis in which we collect the opinions of some students and teachers from some of the Literature classes of the English Studies Degree at Jaume I University about the needs for a correct use of technology in the classroom. This analysis suggests that integrating ICT into Higher Education is necessary for improving the learning process and for better acquiring the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) competencies; the paper concludes that there is a need for revitalizing the teaching and learning of Literature subjects because of the many benefits that...
The EUROCALL Review, Sep 30, 2020
Metacognition can be considered as knowledge about one's own cognitive activities and their regul... more Metacognition can be considered as knowledge about one's own cognitive activities and their regulation during learning processes (Flavell, 1979). Students are, then, involved in metacognitive mental activities when they think about what they have learned, how they have learned it, or how they can relate it to their personal experiences, among other things. Based on this, students who develop these skills should show more appropriate strategies to know what they need to find out or do while learning. Therefore, understanding and controlling these cognitive processes may be one of the most essential skills that teachers should encourage at all academic levels (Anderson, 2002). The Guided Learning Diary (GLD, Bort-Mir, 2016) was developed as a learning diary with several aims: (i) defining the general and specific objectives of the content to be taught, (ii) developing the students' metacognitive skills through strategic questions, and (iii) promoting the development of important competences such as self-criticism, autonomous learning, self-evaluation and capacity for improvement. The GLD also allows a selfevaluation process for teachers, thus facilitating the supervision and improvement both of the contents of the course and the didactic methodology. This tool was developed and applied within the Theatre in English subject at Universitat Jaume I, embedded in the
Complutense journal of English studies, Sep 21, 2020
Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors t... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors to evaluate and communicate in our various environments. Although metaphors encompass a large variety of taxonomies, orientational metaphors are those that rely on spatial position to map concepts into other ones, referring to a relation of valence and verticality. Stated by Kövecses (2010) conceptual metaphors such orientational ones draw 'upward' and 'downward' spatial positions in which 'upward' is usually referred to as having positive connotations, whereby their opposites, 'downwards', are understood as negative. This paper seeks to unveil how the orientational metaphor good is up is employed in a filmic narrative of a language learning application for technological devices named Babbel. The present analysis is developed under the application of FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure, Bort-Mir 2019). In the analyzed narrative, the orientational metaphor good is up is represented in the Babbel TV commercial (2018) as a tool for persuading customers that the best way of escalating positions at work is by learning new languages. This analysis demonstrates how orientational metaphors in multimodal media emerge as a convenient device for marketing campaigns in the context of social status improvement.
Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación, 2019
Metaphor and the Social World, Feb 8, 2022
Multimodal Communication
Research on multimodal communication is complex because multimodal analyses require methods and p... more Research on multimodal communication is complex because multimodal analyses require methods and procedures that offer the possibility of disentangling the layers of meaning conveyed through different channels. We hereby propose an empirical evaluation of the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir, L. (2019). Developing, applying and testing FILMIP: the filmic metaphor identification procedure, Ph.D. dissertation. Universitat Jaume I, Castellón.), a structural method for the identification of metaphorical elements in (filmic) multimodal materials. The paper comprises two studies: (i) A content analysis conducted by independent coders, in which the reliability of FILMIP is assessed. Here, two TV commercials were shown to 21 Spanish participants for later analysis with the use of FILMIP under two questionnaires. (ii) A qualitative analysis based on a percentage agreement index to check agreement among the 21 participants about the metaphorically marked filmic compon...
avances en tecnologias innovacion y desafios de la educacion superior, 2016
La metacognición fue explicada por primera vez como el conocimiento y la regulación de las activi... more La metacognición fue explicada por primera vez como el conocimiento y la regulación de las actividades cognitivas de cada uno en el proceso de aprendizaje (Flavell, 1979; Brown, 1978). Según esta definición, para conseguir la adquisición de conocimientos adecuadamente necesitamos el uso de habilidades metacognitivas, y es en este ámbito en el que nace el DAG (Diario de Aprendizaje Guiado) como una nueva herramienta de enseñanza y aprendizaje que promueve el desarrollo y la evaluación de las estrategias metacognitivas del estudiante, haciendo hincapié en el aprendizaje significativo y auto-regulado. El DAG une el conocimiento metacognitivo y el aprendizaje independiente, transformando la metacognición inconsciente en un proceso consciente el cual facilita el desarrollo de estas habilidades. Este uso explícito de las estrategias metacognitivas hace que los estudiantes aprendan mediante “el compromiso activo y la reflexión sobre la experiencia, construyendo sobre sus conocimientos previos y tomando parte activa en su aprendizaje” (Ayala, 2014: 2). En el presente artículo se propone la herramienta DAG describiendo los pasos a seguir por el docente para su desarrollo y consiguiente uso como método de aprendizaje, haciendo también mención de los beneficios que su uso aporta tanto para el estudiante como para el propio docente. Esta investigación se ha realizado gracias a los fondos del proyecto P1.1A2014-02 de la Universitat Jaume I.
Metaphor and the Social World
Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't ... more Sometimes it's not enough to know what things mean, sometimes you have to know what things don't mean. Bob Dylan Every journey has a starting point, a moment when everything starts, a big bang. My big bang goes back to my university years, specifically to one of our sessions from the Shakespeare in Context subject, when our professor projected the movie Shakespeare in Love to the class while he explained the meaning of every single movement of the dances between Viola de Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow) and young William Shakespeare (Joseph Fiennes). He made me realize, in that very moment, that what I was watching on the screen was not a mere juxtaposition of events and beautiful 'things', but a whole bulk of meanings created especially for the audience. That 'revelation of truth' really fascinated me. A few years later, that same professor opened my eyes, more profoundly, about filmic meaning-making during a doctoral course called Shakespeare in Films. Every single ray of light, sound, gesture, object, or character that I saw on the screen was there because of a reason. Nothing, he said, is in a movie by chance. I have not been able to watch films or TV naïvely since then. My interest about metaphor started just a few years ago, with my implication within the Research Group on Contrastive and Applied Semantics (GReSCA) at Universitat Jaume I, led by Dr. Ignasi Navarro i Ferrando, where I initiated my PhD. It is in this context where I had the opportunity to learn about the last trends on metaphor research and to be immersed in this immense world of metaphors. The point is that there is a continuum of cases ranging from situations where metaphorical construal is virtually inescapable to situations where this is a possibility which only part of the audience will pick up. In fact, the situation is even more complicated: sometimes audiences, or individual viewers, maydue to a different cultural context, time of access, or is proposed under the study of the genre of TV commercials, I argue that the critique can be generalized to the rest of filmic genres. The current study, with the development of FILMIP, offers, then, a solution to this problematic, presenting a procedure that allows for a multimodal structured-semiotic analysis of filmic texts, revealing all the existing levels of signification and aesthetic configuration of the film under analysis, first dissecting the clip and then articulating and reconstructing the meaning embedded in it with the goal of revealing metaphorical filmic components. Thus, FILMIP not only entails a mere description of the narrative but also the reconstruction of the whole filmic text. This study tackles these research questions through the following chapters: Chapter 1 entails the discussion of the main tenets of metaphor theory, trends and critiques, with a brief description of the existing methods for metaphor identification in language and in pictures. Chapter 2 introduces the cognitivist approach to the study of film theory through an extensive view on filmic meaning-making, traversing the fields of embodied simulation in order to obtain insight into how we make sense of cinema. Filmic metaphoricity and multimodality are both dealt with in the chapter along with a description and my claim on what can be considered a mode.
Journal of English Studies
The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in co... more The analysis and identification of figurative language is one of the largest research areas in cognitive linguistics, and metaphor is one of these tropes. Focusing on the genre of TV advertising, a structural method for the identification of metaphorical components used in films in a cross-modal fashion is developed in the present paper. A corpus of 11 TV commercials is analyzed under seven steps that guide analysts from the content description of the multimodal materials to the concrete identification of metaphorical elements. This research presents the Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure (FILMIP, Bort-Mir 2019) as a tool for the identification of metaphorically used filmic components in multimodal filmic materials. More concretely, the paper presents the application of the procedure to two TV commercials from different perfume brands. FILMIP offers a valuable contribution not only to metaphor scholars but also to researchers focused on other fields of study such as multimodal...
The EUROCALL Review, 2020
The research conducted in this study is part of Universitat Jaume I Education and Innovation esea... more The research conducted in this study is part of Universitat Jaume I Education and Innovation esearch Project: 3622/18. Its rationale is also framed within the Universitat Jaume I Research Project UJI-B2018-59
Intercultural Pragmatics, 2020
The purpose of this study is to investigate how viewers who speak different languages interpret c... more The purpose of this study is to investigate how viewers who speak different languages interpret cinematographic metaphors in a filmic advertisement. The study is organized in three parts: First, we offer a theoretical model that predicts the offline mental mechanisms that occur while people interpret filmic metaphors, based on an existing model of visual metaphor processing. Second, we evaluate the model in a think-aloud retrospective task. A TV-commercial is projected individually to 30 Spanish, 30 American, and 30 Persian participants, who are then asked to verbalize their thoughts. The commercial was previously segmented, analyzed using FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure), and marked for metaphoricity by two independent analysts. The collected data is then evaluated in two formal content analyses. In the first one, two independent coders classified all the clauses used by the 90 participants in relation to the steps outlined in the theoretical model. In the second a...
Resena del libro: Visual Metaphor: Structure and process; Gerard J. Steen (ed.); Amsterdam: John ... more Resena del libro: Visual Metaphor: Structure and process; Gerard J. Steen (ed.); Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing; 2018;
Complutense Journal of English Studies
Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors t... more Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) suggested that we use metaphors to evaluate and communicate in our various environments. Although metaphors encompass a large variety of taxonomies, orientational metaphors are those that rely on spatial position to map concepts into other ones, referring to a relation of valence and verticality. Stated by Kövecses (2010) conceptual metaphors such orientational ones draw ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ spatial positions in which ‘upward’ is usually referred to as having positive connotations, whereby their opposites, ‘downwards’, are understood as negative. This paper seeks to unveil how the orientational metaphor good is up is employed in a filmic narrative of a language learning application for technological devices named Babbel. The present analysis is developed under the application of FILMIP (Filmic Metaphor Identification Procedure, Bort-Mir 2019). In the analyzed narrative, the orientational metaphor good is up is repres...
Cultura, Lenguaje y Representación
Ariadna, 2016
With the increasing apogee of the digital world and Internet use by older people, one may wonder ... more With the increasing apogee of the digital world and Internet use by older people, one may wonder how adults understand these virtual spaces. The aim of this article is to see to what extent the Conceptual Theory of Metaphor and the Idealized Cognitive Models (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) may help understand the meaning and structure of a website. In our research we analyze several web pages from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics in order to know if the virtual world makes sense from different types of metaphors and cognitive domains. As linguists, we get two questions. The first one is whether we are able to understand the Internet, something abstract with which we are not born, and the way we surf websites, transferring meaning through conceptual metaphors from the real world we do know to this new online world. Throughout our analysis we can see what types of metaphors are activated in our mind when visiting a website and in which moment they transfer meaning from the real world. The second question is whether website domains (the addresses of web spaces) are conceptually comparable to the cognitive domains that are activated in our minds when we perceive any concept. This assumption can offer a great contribution to marketers and SEO experts since it offers a new vision on how to make a potential client think what companies want (what mental model must be activated) when reading the address of a website. In short, our brief analysis, which is part of a more thorough and extensive research, provides a theory on how online readers configure the meaning of websites through conceptual metaphors, and it also provides a new framework of study which examines how web domains should be established so that the reader is able to know the theme of the web with just reading its address.
Are all students performing metacognition when learning? How can teachers be sure of it? It is be... more Are all students performing metacognition when learning? How can teachers be sure of it? It is believed that successful knowledge acquisition requires the use of metacognitive skills. This is the raison d’être for the ConverStand software, designed to bring unconscious metacognition to a conscious process. This explicit utilization of metacognitive strategies will make students able to develop “more sophisticated and academically oriented” skills. (Veenman et al, 2006, p. 8). Metacognition was first explained in the mid-1970s as the knowledge about and regulation of one’s cognitive activities in learning processes, as thinking about one’s thinking and regulation of that thinking (Flavell, 1979; Brown, 1978). Nowadays, its importance has been stressed by Öz (2014, chap.7, p. 139): “metacognition is an increasingly important cognitive factor in applied linguistics as well as educational, cognitive, and developmental psychology”. It is in this background that the ConverStand software i...
Is the use of ICT overestimated, or is it really an important part of today teaching and learning... more Is the use of ICT overestimated, or is it really an important part of today teaching and learning? If it is important, how can technology make a great impact to the teaching and learning of Literature? This paper tries to answer these questions taking into account all the improvements that technology introduces to education, and analyzing some of the criticism that surrounds this issue as well; we base our research on a qualitative analysis in which we collect the opinions of some students and teachers from some of the Literature classes of the English Studies Degree at Jaume I University about the needs for a correct use of technology in the classroom. This analysis suggests that integrating ICT into Higher Education is necessary for improving the learning process and for better acquiring the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) competencies; the paper concludes that there is a need for revitalizing the teaching and learning of Literature subjects because of the many benefits that...