El inadecuado acercamiento a la adquisición del léxico y la estructura oracional en los textos de enseñanza del español como segunda lengua

Date

2015-12

Authors

Sainz, Julia M.

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Abstract

There are many Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theories that have tried to explain the process by which learners acquire a Second Language (L2). Many textbooks in the United States such as Vistas: Introducción a la Lengua Española (2012), Buen viaje! Level 2 (2005), Conexiones: Comunicación y Cultura (2013), among others claim that they base their teaching methodologies, direct or indirectly, on these theories, specifically, the “Monitor Model” and the “Associative Cognitive CREED Theory.” The Monitor Model argues that “acquisition” and “learning” are different concepts, meaning that one is a subconscious process and the other conscious. The Associative Theory does not make a difference between these two concepts. This theory claims that the same learning process occurs through both the acquisition of a language and the acquisition of general knowledge. The textbooks that are specialized in the acquisition of Spanish as L2 are based on discrete explicit grammar presentations that may not necessarily contribute to the learning of L2. In order to support this claim, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the descriptive grammar points that appear in textbooks may hinder the acquisition of Spanish as L2 and what kind of grammatical knowledge is actually required, explicit or implicit, in the process of learning a L2. Moreover, the pedagogical aftermath of the mentioned SLA theories will be analyzed from the perspective of the learning process. The approach used to explore and analyze these premises was a comparison of two textbooks used in a variety of American universities and a professor’s manual used in México to teach Spanish as L2 to indigenous people. We will compare these textbooks in order to determine to what extend they match the findings in SLA research. Neither the textbooks nor the manual examined claim that the student is going to produce the language; however, they do claim that the student will have an understanding of the Spanish grammar. For example, !Arriba!: Comunicación y cultura (2015) and Mosaicos: Spanish as a World Language (2015) state that the “grammar questions [will] drive deep, contextual knowledge acquisition and understanding” (iii). The focus of SLA theories is to explain the “how” but not the “what,” they aim to explain how we acquire language, but not what grammar is required to acquire the target language. As a result of our analysis of the textbooks, we find that the grammar is presented in an inadequate manner and, which has a negative impact on the development of the students’ oral and writing skills.

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Keywords

Textos Español como Segunda Lengua, Inadecuada Presentación del Léxico, Inadecuada Gramática en Libros de Texto

Citation

Sainz, J. M. (2015). <i>El inadecuado acercamiento a la adquisición del léxico y la estructura oracional en los textos de enseñanza del español como segunda lengua</i> (Unpublished thesis). Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas.

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