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This paper presents a proposal on how to select suitable vocabulary items to teach Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) based on the triangulation or complementation of three sources of lexical information: (1) the available lexicon in native Spanish speakers, (2) the most frequent vocabulary in Spanish and (3) the specific notions of the Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes. Previously, an analysis of the lexical needs of a sample of SFL students has been carried out, whose results have been collated with the abovementioned sources of vocabulary. The found shortcomings have been evaluated in order to observe how they are covered by each of these three sources. It has been proven that each source covers different lexical needs (with a similarity of 12.5% in the covered needs and a lexical compatibility of the sources of 24%), so the viability of the triangulation is justified. The resulting proposal offers a lexical compilation in different levels that combines the benefits of several well-established selection criteria and overcomes the limitations arising from using them individually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quick development of Linguistics during the 20th century has not fully reached high school in Spain. In this paper we present some linguistic concepts and ideas that could be taught at secondary school and that could in turn improve the teaching of Spanish as a first language, were they included in educational syllabuses. Firstly, the idea that language is a complex internal system that is part of our cognition and, if only because of this, worth studying. Secondly, the importance of a scientific approach to linguistic data: data organizing, hypothesis testing, generalizations making, etc. Lastly, the need to include Linguistics in school curricula, for the absence of this discipline may explain the ignorance that the public shows towards many issues related to linguistics that are part of our everyday life, such as dialects, bilingualism, language acquisition, etc., or its very own name,»linguistics», which tends to be interpreted as «the study of foreign languages» by non-academics. For these reasons, we also suggest that some contents and concepts related to both Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics be taught at high schools, thus included in the curriculum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the utility, validity and use of several grammatical notions, mostly syntactic. Our goal is to assess whether some frequent concepts of the language class in high school should be replaced by others that are generally unknown, and also whether the content currently given to some of them should be modified. We defend such a possibility, which we justify with the main argument that grammatical analyses must relate forms to meanings and favor the reflection of students on the unconscious knowledge that each speaker has of his or her own language, together with the use that speakers make of linguistic expressions. For expository reasons, we consider four types of grammatical notions: those that are both used and useful; those that are useful, but seldom applied; those that are usually applied, despite being of little use; and, finally, those that could be useful and that are rarely applied. We set out this discussion to defend the need to establish a stable terminology perimeter for high school language classes, mainly based on the recent Glosario de términos gramaticales (2019). We take this minimum terminological agreement to be a necessary condition to carry out that reflection, for which we have advocated in previous works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we deal with two mentalist approaches to the study of language: the generative and the cognitive approaches. First, we put forward the assumptions of generative linguistics, which is focused on the formal study of computational properties of language; and, second, we compare them with those of the alternative program of cognitive linguistics, according to which language is not to be analyzed as a specific computational property of the human mind but rather as a capacity based on general cognition principles. After having presented the different theoretical foundations of both approaches, some meeting points between them are offered. The present work concludes with an appeal to the need to establish some bridges between different approaches that allow them to face the challenges currently posed by different advances in language sciences and cognitive science in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is included in the framework of the research project Estudio del léxico en el habla del santarroseño (Primera etapa). After choosing the countryside as the first vocabulary domain and on the basis of the matrix survey, we have selected the most significant questions related to our search: which is the basic lexicon that freshmen at the Profesorado y Licenciatura en Letras at the UNLPam have in relation to the countryside. The corpus consists of 30 surveys carried out in 2009 amongst these students. On this first study, we will describe the words provided by the survey participants and we will analyze their recurrence. These objectives aim at identifying which words are more significant to our youngsters in relation to the countryside, and transversely, they will allow us to get closer to the levels of domain and knowledge that students have of an area that is supposedly constitutive of the pampean identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]