Alternative guidelines to design pedagogical resources with compounds in Spanish as a second language

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present and argue for alternative didactic resources with Spanish compounds. The working assumption is the idea that the principles that govern compound formation are crucial as a means of improving a number of student skills in L2 Spanish. Compounds constitute valuable lexical additions to a speaker’s repertoire, and to a wide range of communicative goals. They also show certain properties (e.g., meaning motivation, membership of marked registers) that render them especially useful for a number of learning targets, such as encouraging students’ metalinguistic reasoning, fostering their creativity, and stimulating their curiosity about Spanish language and culture. To guarantee diverse learning results, several pedagogical resources were analyzed, and the activities were tested with Chinese learners of Spanish. Methodological guidelines were followed akin to those used in the task-based approaches and gamified learning. The activities are mostly cooperative and aimed at working on both comprehension and production (auditive and written) around a grammatical topic (e.g. plural) or a communicative task (e.g. description).