Tipo: artículo

Metodología: trabajo teórico

Temas: gramática pedagógica

Resumen:

In this paper we focus on the relationship between Spanish compounding and derivation on the one hand, and anaphoric relations involving null and overt subjects, on the other, in order to argue that a pedagogical grammar of Spanish for non-native speakers should take into consideration: (i) universal approaches to the analysis of Spanish which also depict its specific structural properties; (ii) psycholinguistic proposals on how Spanish morphosyntactic structures are acquired and processed; and (iii) empirical research that provides information about the learnability principles and the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of Spanish grammar. This threefold approach draws from developments that have taken place in this century. First, linguistic theory has refined the "universal" principles and parameters approach developed to...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: español para fines específicos

Resumen:

Existing medical Spanish curricula have improved language skills, but are incompatible with resident-physician schedules, and do not always integrate cultural education. A 2009 survey at our institution revealed that residents saw Spanish-speaking patients regularly and wanted a medical Spanish curriculum designed for them. Our objective was to improve medical Spanish and cultural competency among resident physicians at our institution. Kramsch's (1998) principle of combining language and cultural instruction, Gardner's (1983) theory of multiple intelligences, and the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages 5Cs provided a framework for the self-directed curriculum, which consisted of nine-month long modules with online and in-person grammar, vocabulary, listening comprehension and conversation practice. We conducted pre...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: revisión bibliográfica

Temas: cognición y procesamiento

Resumen:

Both educators and researchers alike are usually confounded by the differential performances of L2 learners who are exposed to the same L2 information in the classroom setting. Current second language acquisition (SLA) research employing concurrent data elicitation procedures (e.g., think-aloud protocols to gather online data on learners' cognitive processes employed during their interaction with the L2 data) are revealing that one potential explanation may lie in how deeply L2 learners process the L2 information, usually referred to as depth of processing. Depth of processing is defined as the relative amount of cognitive effort, level of analysis, elaboration of intake together with the usage of prior knowledge, hypothesis testing and rule formation employed in encoding and decoding some grammatical or lexical item in the input (...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: fraseología

Resumen:

A growing body of evidence suggests that second or foreign language learners stand a lot to gain from mastering a variety of multiword units, such as idiomatic expressions and collocations. Although most of the research on this formulaic dimension of language and its relevance for language learners has so far dealt with English, there are solid grounds for believing that formulaicity is part and parcel of natural languages in general, and that pedagogues should therefore give due attention to multiword units also in other target languages than English, such as Spanish. Contemporary textbooks for language learning have started to include a focus on lexical phrases generally and on collocations in particular, albeit mostly through decontextualized exercises where learners are required in one way or another to match words that form...

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Tipo: libro

Temas: manuales

Resumen:

The Routledge Handbook of Hispanic Applied Linguistics provides a comprehensive overview of Hispanic applied linguistics, allowing students to understand the field from a variety of perspectives and offering insight into the ever-growing number of professional opportunies afforded to Spanish language program graduates. The goal of this book is to re-contextualize the notion of applied linguistics as simply the application of theoretical linguistic concepts to practical settings and to consider it as its own field that addresses language-based issues and problems in a real-world context. The book is organized into five parts: 1) perspectives on learning Spanish 2) issues and environments in Spanish teaching 3) Spanish in the professions 4) the discourses of Spanish and 5) social and political contexts for Spanish. The book's all-...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: revisión bibliográfica

Temas: corpus

Resumen:

This article presents a state-of-the-art discussion of second language (L2) Spanish corpus-based research on lexical competence. While L2 Spanish learner corpus research (LCR) is still in its infancy, we will review the major findings of relevant studies on the production of several lexical aspects: copula choice with ser/estar; overt/null pronoun distribution; collocations and lexico-syntactic verbal competence. Due to the highly contextualised nature of learner corpus data, many of these studies show that learners do not always behave differently from natives in terms of frequency of use, though they may differ in terms of discursive and pragmatic uses. The article ends with some theoretical and methodological caveats about L2 Spanish learner corpus research. An argument is made for the need to conduct L2 corpus-based research which...

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Tipo: libro

Temas: español para fines específicos

Resumen:

Learner-centered practical strategies, models, and resources for the development of world languages for specific purposes curriculum.

The world today is changing, and college-level language departments are rethinking and revamping their vision and curricular offerings as a result. The field of world languages for specific purposes (WLSP) presents a solution to these challenges, helping students develop language skills and intercultural competencies as they focus on content-based professional areas such as business, law, and medicine. As demand for these courses grows, teachers and administrators seek research-based information on how to develop and teach WLSP curricula. This book bridges theory and practice, inviting scholars, educators, students, and professionals of all areas of world language specialization to...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: pragmática

Resumen:

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This article examines vague lexical features in unplanned, naturally occurring spoken discourse among speakers of Peninsular Spanish. It focuses on vague multi-word expressions that are part of a larger category of General Extenders (GEs, Overstreet Citation1999). Drawing on a subset of data from the Corpus Oral de Referencia del Español Contemporáneo (COREC), the article describes GEs in terms of form and frequency, and illustrates the use of the three most frequent GEs vis-à-vis discursive and pragmatic functions in spoken discourse. Based on GEs' many and pivotal interactional functions as well as their frequency in attested interactions, this article proposes that language learners...

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: enseñanza/aprendizaje de vocabulario

Resumen:

This article presents the results of a research project investigating how a student's ability to successfully learn vocabulary of four word classes (nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs) is affected by the activity through which it is practised. Two-hundred and ninety-two B1 SL students of Spanish were presented with one of three different activities requiring different involvement loads: (1) choosing the appropriate definition; (2) filling in gaps in sentences; and (3) writing sentences that include target words. The analysis shows that participants recalled and recognised more nouns and fewer adverbs—the only non-inflected word class. Additionally, sentence-writing is the activity through which learning new words is the easiest; and the least effective is the definition-choosing activity.

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Tipo: artículo

Metodología: trabajo teórico

Temas: prosodia

Resumen:

Spanish and Finnish have a similar, syllable-timed, rhythm but very different stress and intonation patterns. Based on the "Frequency Code," whereby meanings of confidence and aggressiveness are associated with low pitch, and those of submission and smallness with high pitch, we establish a taxonomy of the functions and meanings of intonation with examples in Spanish and Finnish. These functions can be grammatical, attitudinal, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic. To teach intonation to Finnish L2 Spanish students of an advanced level, we raise their awareness through the comparison of the intonational patterns of the two languages and through inductive reasoning. Our proposal fosters a multimodal approach based on the imitation of native speech, on the visual representation of prosody through software like Praat, and on the use of...

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