Blended learning is receiving more and more attention due to social changes, technological advances, and the increasing internationality of studies, and research needs to be carried out to explore the possibilities this instruction modality offers to university students. This project aimed to test the feasibility and success of a blended course on research and EFL skills and to determine whether there is an internationally shared criterion when assessing students’ scientific work. To do so, a short module on research skills was designed and implemented with 30 students from the BSc in Optics and Optometry from the Complutense University of Madrid, whose final project, the production of a scientific poster, was assessed by three instructors from different universities. The results show that the content and modality of the teaching were successful in the increase in students’ research and language skills. The assessment of the posters showed heterogeneous evaluations regarding the quality of their visual features and their contents. Therefore, more research is needed on international perspectives about the presentation of results in the academic and scientific genre to pursue the creation and dissemination of homogeneous criteria, and therefore improve students’ performance with an international value.

In this paper, the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to genre is applied to English and Spanish mobile application reviews from Google Play Store. These reviews are shown to be divisible into two optional stages, namely Evaluation and Description, the first part being more subjective and based on the author’s opinion and the second one more objective and focused on describing issues. The frequency of use of the Attitude axis from Appraisal Theory provides support for the distinction of those stages. The combination of the polarity of the contents of each stage together with the number of stars given to the item reviewed creates six patterns for the reviews. However, no noticeable differences between English and Spanish reviews were observed.

La cognición docente analiza las concepciones de los profesores sobre qué significa enseñar, dando énfasis a creencias que afectan la manera de actuar del profesorado en el aula. Aunque es un campo de trabajo plenamente reconocido y establecido en las últimas décadas, todavía son pocos los estudios que analizan las creencias de docentes en formación de inglés como lengua extranjera. Este estudio analiza 17 filosofías de enseñanza de alumnas de la asignatura de “Didáctica del Inglés” en un máster de formación del profesorado del CEU San Pablo, una universidad privada de Madrid. El corpus formado por estos textos se ha analizado de forma cuantitativa y cualitativa. Por un lado, se ha procesado el texto con una herramienta online de gestión de corpus llamada Sketch Engine. Por otro lado, se ha analizado el corpus de forma cualitativa dividiendo los textos en 3 categorías de docentes en formación: con experiencia docente en academias y centros escolares, con experiencia en clases particulares y sin ningún tipo de experiencia. De este modo, se conseguirá conocer mejor las creencias de profesores en formación según el grado de experiencia en cuanto a temas como la definición de enseñanza/aprendizaje, el rol del profesor, el rol del alumno, la metodología de enseñanza y la evaluación.

This chapter explores the evaluative language used in relation to the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory from the perspective of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) in English and Spanish. Given the scarcity of analyses that go beyond the distinction between positive and negative evaluation, this chapter discusses the authors’ approach to events and figures related to the New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory. For that purpose, a corpus of 1,000 tweets about the NWO was annotated and analysed regarding Attitude realisations. The results show that authors use mainly a Judgement approach, which evaluates people socially and morally, in both languages. However, it is less frequent in Spanish, in favour of references to the value of the targeted entities (Appreciation). These evaluations were not found to be argued, but merely asserted.

This study examines the use of effective stance, i.e., the positioning of the speaker or writer regarding the realisation of events, in opinion articles on the Ukrainian refugee crisis published in 2022–2023 in The Guardian (UK) and elDiario (Spain). A corpus of over 20,000 words, including English and Spanish, was annotated for six effective stance categories: Deonticity, Directivity, Inclination, Intentionality, Normativity, and Potentiality. Results reveal significant cross-linguistic differences, with Spanish texts using more Deonticity and Normativity markers, reflecting a focus on collective responsibility. English texts, on the other hand, emphasise Directivity and Potentiality, adopting a more individualistic and persuasive tone. These findings highlight the role of language in shaping public attitudes towards the refugee crisis and global humanitarian issues.