Léxico, morfología y gramática en la enseñanza de español como lengua extranjera

Abstract

This article examines the role of lexical morphology in pedagogical grammars of Spanish as a way to increase knowledge of vocabulary. We review the ways in which derivation and compounding are introduced in Spanish textbooks and which present different types of teaching activities all of which explicitly relate to word form and word meaning. We claim that word structure should play a more important role in the acquisition of vocabulary. More specifically, we propose to connect the formal genesis of a word to its external syntax. Following this approach, we outline some teaching activities in which word formation is connected directly to the semantic and syntactic projection bf the complex word. This is supported by current research in theoretical morphology and by recent work on the acquisition of morphology in L1 and L2