Motion-Event Descriptions a Recurrent Topic in Spanish Discourse

Abstract

This chapter contextualizes the description of motion events in Spanish language instruction. The Spanish language classroom offers students ample opportunities to watch, talk about, and even write about motion events that involve entities (animate or inanimate) changing location in space and time. The verb-framed typology receives minimal attention in the Spanish curriculum as evidenced by the infrequency with which this content appears in Spanish textbooks. Thus, learners depend primarily on the positive evidence processed from the Spanish language input (e.g., teacher talk) to deduce the underlying rules for mapping the meaning of motion in Spanish. This chapter concludes with a review of the literature in the domain of motion in L2 Spanish. Overall, findings converge at two levels: (1) the interlanguage of low proficiency learners exhibits greater first-language effect when encoding motion to the preferred Spanish morphosyntactic forms. The effect appears gradually to decrease with further exposure to L2 Spanish; and (2) the interlanguage of advanced Spanish learners more systematically resembles the L1 Spanish motion-conflation patterns. What is still unclear is when this convergence begins, as the populations investigated included primarily low proficient Spanish learners (either beginner or intermediate) compared to advanced learners, and proficient speakers compared to monolingual speakers. However, none of the studies reviewed appear to have compared learners at all three levels of Spanish proficiency completing the same experimental tasks as the ones reported in this book.