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...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: trabajo teórico

Temas: prosodia

Resumen:

Based on previous research, this paper aims to provide the first steps towards a model for the teaching of Spanish prosody to Swedish learners by identifying main prosodic characteristics, referred to as Core Prosodic Features (CPFs), for the teaching of Spanish in a Swedish setting. The study addresses salient prosodic features of L1 Spanish in comparison to L1 Swedish, and discusses whether the Swedish L1 features are likely to be transferred into L2 Spanish. Another central issue of the paper is whether such transfer is likely to interfere with communication. Three Prosodic Core Features are identified: (1) focal-accent location, (2) vowel duration patterns, and (3) prosodic patterns in rising boundary tones.

-----------------

El presente trabajo propone establecer una primera etapa en el desarrollo de un modelo para...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: factores afectivos

Resumen:

This study investigated differences in students' foreign language anxiety and foreign language self-efficacy related to skill-specific foreign language tasks (i.e., speaking, listening, reading, and writing) across five levels of university foreign language coursework. A total of 206 participants in 12 university Spanish classrooms (ranging from Beginning Spanish I to Intermediate Spanish II) were surveyed for this study. The findings revealed that students who have higher levels of skill-specific foreign language anxieties provided corresponding lower ratings on skill-specific foreign language self-efficacies. Analyses also revealed that students' ratings for foreign language anxiety for each foreign language-learning skill were not significantly different across the five levels of coursework. However, students' ratings of foreign...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: pragmática

Resumen:

This study examines the development of speaker and listener assessments by second language (L2) learners of Spanish during a semester abroad in Spain. Assessments express the speaker's judgment, attitude, or affect towards what is said and perform the crucial functions of closing a topic and displaying shared understanding with an interlocutor. The results indicate that learners increased their use of listener assessments, as well as their use of specific structures and lexical items in speaker assessments. Participation in everyday conversation as well as explicit instruction represented ways that students could learn to make assessments. The article concludes with suggestions for teaching assessments in the Spanish L2 classroom.

------------------

Este estudio analiza la adquisición de evaluaciones de hablante y oyente...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: revisión bibliográfica

Temas: pragmática

Resumen:

Texto completo

The development of learners' pragmatic competence is considered one of several components of communicative competence and represents an important goal in Spanish language teaching and learning.

We offer a short literature review of theoretical and practical advances in pragmatics and Spanish language teaching,

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: pragmática

Resumen:

The present study investigates the way in which second-language Spanish learners conceptualize impolite behavior in intercultural interactions while abroad. The data were collected through a prompt that asks participants to write a narration of an impolite situation that occurred while they were studying abroad in Spain or Latin America. Fifty impoliteness events were analyzed for perceived offense type. The results show that learners perceived greater offense to their "quality face" and "social identity face." Sociocultural and linguistic competence characteristics with respect to the perceived offenses are then discussed. As a result of the analysis, this study concludes with pedagogical recommendations for the teaching of impoliteness in the classroom.

-----------------

El presente estudio investiga la manera en que...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: pragmática

Resumen:

This article presents the results of a study focused on the management of the speech act of giving advice and its linguistic realizations by Spanish second-language learners and heritage learners enrolled on two advanced courses of Professional Spanish. We analyzed how two groups of students gave advice in three discourse completion tasks with different scenarios. Results indicate that both groups relied on a few basic structures with limited consideration of the proposed contexts, and highlight the need for a pragmalinguistic approach in Spanish for Health Care courses. We then propose a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the role of critical reflection, increases language competence beyond medical terminology, and focuses on an understanding of cultural parameters guiding health care interactions.

-------------------

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: traducción

Resumen:

Rooted in socio-constructivism, the present article investigates the effects of type of collaborative translation on Spanish L2 development, triangulating data from task performance, learning outcomes, and learners' perceptions. Thirteen dyads of college students participated in a within-subjects repeated-measures experimental study, translating authentic texts in two ways: collaborating from the get-go and after working alone first. Results showed that while participants translated more lexical items accurately when working together from the get-go, both types of collaborative translation propelled similar learning gains in lexis and grammar. Of the two, only lexical learning was retained after one week. Participants, contrary to results, reported a clear preference for working alone first, which they perceived as more conducive to...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: estudio empírico

Temas: comprensión oral

Resumen:

Repeated listening—listening to a passage several times for content and information—is considered an effective strategy to improve listening comprehension, but so far, no study has reported how much understanding increases with each repetition. This study is exploratory in nature and analyzes quantitatively how much 48 students with different degrees of listening ability understand after each repeated listening. The study shows that although the amount of total comprehension relates to learners' listening ability (low, medium, high), comprehension gains—new information understood after the first and second repetition—do not relate to learners' listening ability. The data indicate that understanding increased at a similar rate after the first repetition, 14% more, and after the second repetition, 9.3% more, in the three groups. These...

Ver ficha completa

Tipo: artículo

Metodología: trabajo teórico

Temas: traducción

Resumen:

Translation for language learning has reemerged during recent years as an additional asset for foreign language instruction. In this time, the professional practice and training of translation has moved to a technological paradigm in which virtually all translation activities are computer mediated and this complex activity is conceptualized as human-computer interaction. Translation is therefore now inseparable from the physical computer, translation technologies, tools and resources found online and the interconnectedness provided by the Internet. This article reviews these technologies in the context of Spanish language learning. For these purposes, three main areas of interest are discussed and placed in the context of language learning. First of all, the role of machine translation (MT) both as an assistance in reading and writing...

Ver ficha completa