Use and acquisition of articles in Spanish as a second language

Abstract

The objective of this research is to establish a typology of errors linked to the use of articles in SSL, and to associate the greater or lesser recurrence of errors at different levels of target language: A2 and B2. The contribution of this work is to help the more systematic and consistent treatment of articles among non-native speakers of Spanish. This investigation contemplated the analysis of 67 free Spanish-language essays in two language levels, from which a taxonomy of errors was created. Subsequently, a module for teaching the articles to each level group was carried out to see the effect that the instruction had on the handling of these elements, an effect that was measured in relation to a pretest and a posttest. The results show that after the teaching module increases the overuse and the wrong selection, over the concordance errors that appeared before the teaching module. The explanation for this may be the use of hyper generalization strategies and a greater feeling of trust among the learners. The error counts also show a positive correlation between a higher level of language, and a better use of articles in Spanish. Finally, it can be said that after the teaching module a better use of the neutral is observed, although the difficulties with the defined articles persist.