Recursos

This study reports on the trends in children’s use of taps by 15 Costa Rican Spanish-speaking monolingual children between ages 3;0 and 5;6. Data were obtained through audio-recordings of the children’s naturalistic speech, yielding 1080 target-words. 80% of the taps were correct, but the remaining 20% evidenced either omissions of the tap (14%) or substitution of the tap for [l], [n], [t], [d], [j], [tS], [D], or for a voiceless assibilated rhotic. A main finding in this study was the consistent omission of the tap in infinitive verb forms before a consonant initial enclitic pronoun. This omission type is interesting in that it appears to be directly related to the complexity involved in nominal enclitics, as children do not always omit the tap in similar phonetic contexts (i.e., /Cr/ clusters). Although this last pattern has been reported for adult Costa Rican Spanish, it has never been reported in child speech.

The Spanish rhotics, namely the simple vibrant or tap and especially the multiple vibrant or trill are acquired late in Spanish as a mother tongue. This study describes two patterns in the acquisition of both rhotics in spontaneous speech by a group of 34 children from the Western region of Costa Rica, with ages between 3 and 5;6, and which constitute a reflection of the adult input. Regarding the acquisition of the trill, among the six different phonetic realizations found in the 843 words analyzed, the trill was realized as such only in 2% of the words, whereas an assibilated rhotic was used instead in 45% of the words alnalized. With regards to the words containing the phoneme (a total of 1108), it was found that in 92% of verb forms made up of an infinitive verb form followed by a personal enclitic (e.g., comérselo ‘eat.refelxive.dative’), the simple vibrant was omitted (e.g., coméselo). The assibilation pattern found to substitute the trill as well as the omission of the simple vibrant in verb constructions of the type infinitive + enclitic have been reported for the casual speech by adults from the Central Costa Rican Valley. In other words, the study evidences a clear reflection of the patterns found in the adult Spanish dialect to which these children are exposed; this is interpreted as resulting from the complexity involved in the articulation of the Spanish rhotic sounds: this is true for child speech as well as for adult speech

Between the years 2014 and 2015 researchers started to work as supervisors in the teaching practicum. From that point on, every year they noticed that the student-teachers struggle regarding how to assess English at the elementary school level. Since students from the Bachelor “Elementary Education with a minor in English” already take an evaluation course, researching the reasons for that weakness was key to better support our students. That is why this article presents the results of the qualitative research carried out in 2016 aiming to explore the need for designing an evaluation course taught in English and tailored to the students enrolled in the Bachelor “Elementary Education with a minor in English” at the University of Costa Rica, Western Campus. Through the use of an exploratory and phenomenological design, the researchers interviewed thirteen studentteachers, nine former students from this bachelor, an experienced elementary school teacher, and two authorities from the Ministry of Public Education of Costa Rica (MEP) to obtain their perspectives about the course ED0196 “Evaluation of the Learning Process in Early Childhood and Primary Education.” Also, the syllabus of the course was analyzed based on what students must know to assess a foreign language. Data showed that although students learn about many instruments and assessment criteria, many of them are not tailored to assess English as a Foreign Language but other core subjects. Based on the findings, the researchers concluded that the course ED0196 does not meet the needs of these students, and therefore, the university needs to design a course specifically tailored for them.