The Lexical Availability of “Daily Activities” in Learners of Spanish (SFL)

Abstract

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).