The Lexical Availability of “Daily Activities” in Learners of Spanish (SFL)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4312/vestnik.13.537-551Keywords:
Spanish as a foreign language, lexical availability, learners of Spanish, semantic categories, daily activitiesAbstract
The objective of the present work, which focuses on the teaching and learning of Spanish vocabulary, is to present the lexical availability of Slovene students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) in the semantic category “daily activities”.
The quantitative and qualitative differences and similarities of lexical availability output in this semantic category, as obtained by two groups of informants of different levels of SFL, are compared: 100 high school students (approximate level B1) and 100 university students (approximate level B2 +). The results obtained from this sample are compared with those of a study carried out by Sánchez-Saus Laserna (2011), which presents a sample of 322 SFL informants of different mother tongues in the same semantic category. This category, which is not one of those traditionally used in the studies of lexical availability, has been chosen since the lack of other grammatical categories than nouns is one of the main problems that has been attributed to the studies of lexical availability, which makes it impossible to closely reflect the vocabulary that SFL students know. Likewise, it is intended to check if the associations correspond to the grammatical category of the stimulus (in this case the verbs), since other semantic categories are indicated by the nouns. We intend to check the validity of the following hypotheses:
1) The production of lexical availability of high school students with less knowledge (B1) of Spanish is lower than that of university students (B2 +).
2) There is a qualitative similarity between the results of the two groups of Slovene SFL students.
3) For the most part, the associations correspond to the same grammatical category indicated by the cue words of the semantic category; in this case the verbs.
4) There is quantitative and qualitative similarity between the results of the present study and those of Sánchez-Saus Laserna (2011).
Downloads
References
CARCEDO GONZÁLEZ, Alberto (2000) Disponibilidad léxica en español como lengua extranjera: el caso finlandés (estudio del nivel preuniversitario y cotejo con tres fases de adquisición). Turku: Universidad de Turku.
GOUGENHEIM, George/Michéa RENÉ/Aurélien SAUVAGEOT (1964) L’elaboration de Français fondamental (I Degré). Paris: Didier.
IZQUIERDO GIL, M.ª del Carmen (2005) La selección del léxico en la enseñanza del español como lengua extranjera. Málaga: ASELE.
LEWIS, Michael (1993) The Lexical Approach. London: Language Teaching Publications.
LÓPEZ MORALES, Humberto (1999) Léxico disponible de Puerto Rico. Madrid: Arco Libros.
McCARTHY, Michael (1999) What constitutes a basic vocabulary for spoken communication? Studies in English and Linguistics, I, 233–249.
SAMPER HERNÁNDEZ, Marta (2002) Disponibilidad léxica en alumnos de español como lengua extranjera. Málaga: ASELE, Colección Monografías nº 4.
SAMPER PADILLA, José Antonio (1998) Criterios de edición del léxico disponible: sugerencias. Lingüística 10: 311–333.
SÁNCHEZ SAUS-LASERNA, Marta (2011) Bases semánticas para el estudio de los centros de interés del léxico disponible. Disponibilidad léxica de informantes extranjeros en las universidades andaluzas. Tesis doctoral inédita. Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz.
ŠIFRAR KALAN, Marjana (2009) Disponibilidad léxica en español como lengua extranjera: el cotejo de las investigaciones en Eslovenia, Salamanca y Finlandia. Verba hispanica 17, 165–182.
ŠIFRAR KALAN, Marjana (2012) Análisis comparativo de la disponibilidad léxica en español como lengua extranjera (ELE) y lengua materna (ELM). Marco ELE: revista de dídáctica español como lengua extranjera, 15, 1–19.
ŠIFRAR KALAN, Marjana. Disponibilidad léxica en diferentes niveles de español/lengua extranjera. Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, ISSN 0137-2475, 2014, št 1, letn. 41, 63–85.
TOMÉ CORNEJO, Carmela (2015) Léxico disponible. Procesamiento y aplicación a la enseñanza de ELE. Tesis doctoral inédita. Universidad de Salamanca.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2021 Marjana Šifrar Kalan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors are confirming that they are the authors of the submitting article, which will be published (print and online) in journal Journal for Foreign Languages by Znanstvena založba Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts, Aškerčeva 2, 1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia). Author’s name will be evident in the article in journal. All decisions regarding layout and distribution of the work are in hands of the publisher.
- Authors guarantee that the work is their own original creation and does not infringe any statutory or common-law copyright or any proprietary right of any third party. In case of claims by third parties, authors commit their self to defend the interests of the publisher, and shall cover any potential costs.
- Authors retain copyright and grant the publisher right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.