The Role of Hispanic America in the Teaching of Spanish as Foreign Language: Representations of Students and Teachers

Abstract

We believe that with the positioning of Spanish as an international language and the prominent role of Hispano- American countries in the vitality and projection of this language (Mora-Figueroa, 1998), there is a need for the inclusion of linguistic and cultural varieties in the teaching and learning process of Spanish as Foreign Language, in a context where the Spanish varieties in course books and practices still prevail (cf. Kraviski, 2007). In this paper we propose an analysis of the representations of both students and teachers about the place of Hispanic America in the teaching and learning of Spanish as Foreign Language at Secondary School level (Altmann and Vences, 2004; Pérez, 2003) through questionnaires. At the same time, we will focus on the approaches of the different linguistic and cultural varieties of Spanish (Alvar, 2002), arising in the most used course books in secondary education (initial levels). Moreover, following a qualitative methodological perspective, we undertook a case study (Benson, Chik, Gao, Huang and Wang, 2009) which includes the use of different techniques and instruments, i.e., a methodological triangulation of different sources (namely, questionnaires and course books assessment grids) in order to interpret the obtained data (Pérez, 2003; Altmann & Vences, 2004). On the one hand, the results show that a lot of the course books entail topics related to cultural varieties but some of them fail in addressing aspects related to the linguistic diversity within the Spanish language. On the other hand, students reveal cultural representations which are somewhat stereotypical and show at the same time a sincere desire to learn more about Hispano-American cultural and linguistic diversity, whereas teachers are quite aware of the existence of Spanish cultural and linguistic varieties but some of them are not so eager to work with these varieties within the classroom walls. According to our findings, the study of Spanish language and cultural varieties can be done by making use of vocabulary exercises of contrastive nature, research activities based on audiovisual and online resources, reflexive exercises about poetry and novels and semi-real production tasks.