Literary texts in teaching Spanish as a foreign language: Course book Prisma from CEF levels A1 to B1

Abstract

Understanding the hypothesis that literary texts can be useful, both for adoption of a foreign language and cultural patterns of people who use this language as a mother tongue, we are studying the presence of literary texts in the course books used for teaching Spanish as an optional subject at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. It is about the didactical material Prisma, levels A1 to B1, whose analysis will require descriptive-interpretative method. It is important to mention that students who choose attending Spanish as an optional subject do not have classes of literature and culture, so they are acquainted with Hispanic literature and culture individually or with the aid of a teacher. They can learn about Hispanic literature and culture from the foreign language course book, where they can find short passages which can them adopt help certain grammar units and lexis, so the aim of this paper is studying whether they have been or in which ways they have been used in the mentioned didactic material and if they fulfill the needs of students when we mention getting to know cultural values of people whose language is used as a target language. After the analysis, it was determined that literary texts are not in the same extent present in the course books for all levels and that they appear occasionally in thematically unconnected parts of the rest of the lesson, so the teacher has additional responsibility, and this is overcoming insufficiencies of the analysed material used for the performing of the classes.