CURRENT APPROACHES TO ORTHOGRAPHY INSTRUCTION FOR SPANISH HERITAGE LEARNERS: AN ANALYSIS OF INTERMEDIATE AND ADVANCED TEXTBOOKS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7203/Normas.5.6816Keywords:
ortografía, españolAbstract
As it is well known, heritage learners of Spanish have an advantage on oral production and aural comprehension over L2 learners. However, due to their lack of formal instruction in Spanish, their linguistic weaknesses lie on their literacy skills (reading and writing). In terms of writing skills, students mainly struggle with orthography issues (accentuation and spelling) and larger literacy skills (e.g. developing a thesis or organizing ideas). However, there is an important gap in the literature regarding orthographic acquisition since most of the research in the field on focus on form instruction has predominantly been on grammar acquisition (Anderson, 2008; Montrul and Bowles, 2008; Potowski, 2005, among others). In fact, despite the increasing amount of textbooks addressed to this student population with an emphasis on the writing process, to my knowledge there has not been a study on the current approaches of Spanish heritage learners’ textbooks for orthography instruction. After analyzing four popular textbooks for Spanish heritage, it can be deduced that the lack of research on this area perpetuates the maintenance of traditional non-communicative explicit instruction of orthography through drills after an explicit explanation of the rules of both accentuation and spelling but new textbooks shed some light towards the implementation of focus on form teaching techniques commonly used in the L2 classroom such as input-output activities.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
-
Abstract625
-
PDF (Español)1204
Issue
Section
License
This article is under this license: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 .
Authors agree with the following statements:
- The authors retain the copyright and guarantee the journal the right to be the first publication of the work as well as a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the authorship of the work and the initial publication in this journal.
- Authors may separately establish additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the work published in the journal (for example, place it in an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are allowed and encouraged to disseminate their work electronically (for example, in institutional repositories or on their own website) before and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive scientific exchanges.