Publicacions de projectes de recerca del Plan Nacional
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Publicacions resultants de projectes de recerca del Plan Nacional.
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- ItemOpen AccessA strongly unsplittable multi-coupon system with off-line verification and selectively-revocable anonymity(Elsevier, 2026) Sebé Feixas, Francesc; Valls Marsal, MagdaThis paper firstly reports a security flaw and a way to fix it detected in a multi-coupon system presented by Liu et al. in a paper published in 2017. That proposal provides selectively-revocable anonymity in the sense that the anonymity of customers is guaranteed unless they act dishonestly by redeeming a multi-coupon more times than allowed. Nevertheless, that system lacks two important security properties of multi-coupons: unlinkability and unsplittability. After that, we propose a novel multi-coupon construction which takes Brands off-line e-coin system as a building block. In this way, the multi-coupon system inherits the selective-revocability property of the mentioned e-coin system without the need to develop new ad-hoc cryptography. Furthermore, the proposed system is also proven to be unlinkable and strongly unsplittable. Its design makes use of a novel extension of the RSA blind signature protocol which endows it with conditional secret recovery.
- ItemEmbargoAre English for tourism textbooks ELF-informed?(Oxford University Press, 2025-05-10) Calvet Terré, Júlia; Llurda, EnricThe current role of English as global lingua franca has heightened the need for a reconceptualization of how the language is taught and learnt. Most interactions in English today occur in lingua franca settings with multilingual speakers from a wide variety of contexts. Nonetheless, most ELT textbooks solely focus on a native-speaker model both in terms of language and culture. A great number of studies have focused on the extent to which the linguistic and cultural perspectives brought about by ELF and World Englishes research have permeated into textbooks; however, rather less attention has been paid on how they have been incorporated in English for Specific Purposes (henceforth, ESP) textbooks. To this end, this study explores the extent to which an ELF-aware perspective is present in seven English for tourism textbooks. On the whole, the results show a prevalence of Inner-circle linguistic and cultural content.
- ItemOpen AccessLanguage Teacher Nativeness/Nonnativeness : A Systematic Review(Springer Nature, 2025-01-07) Llurda, Enric; Calvet Terré, JúliaSome major shifts regarding the way languages have been taught have taken place during the last decades. Yet, the ingrained and self-evident assumption that native speaker competence is the universal linguistic target for acquisition, use, and instruction in ELT has remained practically untouched (Llurda, 2018a; Rudolph et al., 2015). Phillipson (1992) claimed the existence of a “native speaker fallacy,” by which native speaker teachers were broadly (and erroneously) regarded as superior to non-native ones. This concept was later reformulated by Holliday (2005), who coined the term “native-speakerism.” Such ideology promotes the idea that native English-speaking teachers (henceforth, NESTs, or NSTs when we refer to teachers of any language, without singling out ELT ones) are the ideal teachers to help students reach the elusive goal of near-native competence and in turn relegates nonnative English-speaking teachers (henceforth, NNESTs, or NNSTs when we refer to teachers of any language) to having an inferior status despite constituting no less than 80% of ELT educators (Moussu & Llurda, 2008). This is made evident in the bias existing in the ELT professional environment, resulting in “unfair employment discrimination” (Selvi, 2011) as visible in the instances of discrimination suffered by NNESTs, some of which have been reported in empirical studies (Clark & Paran, 2007; Lowe & Kiczkowiak, 2016; Mahboob & Golden, 2013; Selvi, 2010).
- ItemEmbargoChallenging Monolingualism, Native-Speakerism, and Standard Language Ideology in Language Teacher Training(Routledge, 2026-03-23) Llurda, Enric; Calvet Terré, JúliaMonolingualism, native-speakerism and standard language ideology have been identified as dominant ideologies in language teaching with severe effects on second language teacher identities. Such ideologies offer alleged certainties but also detach teachers from the actual uses and value of language in multilingual and multidialectal contexts. As a consequence, educators might feel constrained by rigid linguistic norms, hindering their capacity to re-evaluate their approaches to accommodate the diverse linguistic realities and communicative needs of English learners in an increasingly interconnected and multilingual global landscape. This chapter intends first to offer a broad perspective of how these ideologies have shaped language teaching and how they have clashed with research-based observations of multilingual and multidialectal communicative settings. We will give an overview of the relevant literature, ranging from foundational texts to more recent ones challenging the ‘ideal’ monolingual native speaker, and we will show how the above ideologies are still found in a rather pervasive way in the language teacher profession. This will be followed by an account of recent research conducted in teacher training environments aimed at showing ways to successfully gear future language teachers towards a new vision of language that contemplates diversity and hybridization as fundamental pillars on which teachers’ identities need to be based.
- ItemOpen AccessThe weight of a review: Assessing Booking.com’s new scoring system(Sage, 2025) Mellinas, Juan Pedro; Di Nolfo, Chiara; Martín Fuentes, EvaThis study examines Booking.com’s January 2025 update to its review scoring system, which shifts from an arithmetic mean of all guest reviews over the past 3 years to a weighted algorithm. The new system prioritizes recent reviews while reducing the impact of older ones. Using a sample of 100 Spanish hotels and 74,882 reviews, we identify the weighting scheme: 85% for reviews from the last 12-month period, 10% for previous year, and 5% for the year before that. Our findings indicate a minimal overall impact on hotel ratings, with most properties undergoing a variation of less than 0.1 points out of 10. While the updated system provides a more dynamic reflection of current service quality, it also introduces risks, such as increased vulnerability to fraudulent reviews and short-term fluctuations. This change poses challenges for academic studies on hotel reputation and highlights the need for greater transparency in algorithmic scoring systems.
