Open Collections

How textbooks published in Europe and in the United States explain the Spanish subjunctive : a comparative study

University of British Columbia

The present Master’s thesis aims to be a comparative study of two corpora regarding textbooks used to teach Spanish as an additional language. Corpus 1 includes 20 textbooks that are used in Italy and Spain (10 textbooks for each country), while Corpus 2 includes 20 textbooks that are used in the United States and Canada. My investigation analyzes how course-book authors decide to explain the complex grammatical topic of the Spanish subjunctive. The research questions that drive my investigation are related to three different aspects of the explanation. The first regards what features textbook writers emphasize, the second concerns the use of visual elements and layout, and the third one analyses the use (or lack) of context in order to present the target construction. Results show that textbook writers in Europe address a different kind of student population than those of the US and Canada. Therefore, the approaches that are reflected in the corpora present more differences than similarities. This Master’s thesis ends with a suggestion for textbook writers in the United States, Canada, Italy, and Spain, and for future studies.

Text

2018-07-03

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/66384

Hispanic Studies

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/