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Teaching and learning advanced Spanish for English-speaking students

University of British Columbia

The main purpose of this thesis is to compare and contrast Spanish and English in order to locate morphological, lexical and syntactic correspondences and differences, to find out how those represent pedagogical advantages and disadvantages, and to consider how those findings help in the teaching and learning of Spanish. This work is directed to advanced-level instructors, translators and students. I have applied contrastive analysis as a research method. The results are presented in the following chapters: Indo-European Origins (2.1); Comparative Morphology of Nominal, Verbal, Adjectival, Adverbial and Prepositional Phrases (2.2), Word Order and Syntax (2.3), Lexical Anglicisms (2.4) and Spanish Difficulties (2.5). The general conclusions found were: There are learning advantages for English-speaking students because Spanish shares with English basic linguistic characteristics deriving from their Indo-European formation. Lexical, morphological and syntactic structures are similar. Both languages employ basic components, rules, units and restrictions, similar functions and bases for learning. The divergences result from distinct and diverse influences at work in both languages, as well as differences in their historic, cultural, religious and social development. Structural correspondences can be arranged in hierarchical importance for pedagogical purposes for people teaching, translating or learning Spanish. The greater the difference between the languages, the greater is the difficulty in learning.

Text

2010-01-20

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/18745

Hispanic Studies

University of British Columbia

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