Lexical availability and planning of vocabulary teaching in Chinese-speaking ELE students

Abstract

This work analyzes the words of the centers of interest Parts of human body and Clothes that students of Spanish as a foreign language (ELE) from several Chinese universities and pre-university students whose mother tongue is Spanish (ELM) have evoked in tests of lexical availability and that exceed or equal the availability index (ID) of 0.1. This identifies the convergence or divergence in the cognitive processes of native and non-native students. Likewise, these results are compared with the words of the same centers of interest that the Chinese-speaking students have evoked in tests of lexical availability in their mother tongue, Mandarin (MLM). It is found that, although similar notions are updated, the lexical-semantic connections are not the same in each language. Finally, the vocabulary deficiencies in students of ELE are diagnosed, taking into account the differences in lexical availability between native speakers and nonnative speakers, and their teaching is planned based on both the highly available vocabulary detected in Mandarin as a support in learning, as well as the inventory of Specific Notions of the Curricular Plan of the Cervantes Institute for the distribution by levels.