This article presents an integrative approach to teaching Spanish pronunciation to Mandarin-speaking learners within a communicative and task-based framework. It combines principles from Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS), the Verbo-Tonal Method (VTM) and Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) to design sequences that connect pronunciation work with communicative goals. The proposal is based on a double criterion: corrective, because it addresses phonetic features that may affect intelligibility, and communicative, because it prioritizes forms relevant to oral interaction. Special emphasis is placed on prosody, multimodal perception and the use of melodic curves obtained with Praat, together with Verbo-Tonal techniques such as body movement, tension and combinatorial phonetics. Finally, the article provides examples of activities for upper-A2 and B1 learners that can be adapted to different Spanish as an additional language contexts.
The project "The development of an interlinguistic school grammar: towards reflective language teaching in multilingual contexts" (Egramint), in which this article is included, aims to develop a cross-linguistic school grammar that promotes reflection throughout the language teaching-learning process. To this end, and as a preliminary step, an exploratory study has been carried out on the beliefs that active teachers of first and foreign languages have about grammar teaching. The results have been obtained from the analysis of the answers to a questionnaire composed of 38 questions that was completed by a varied sample of 70 teachers from all over Spain. It can be observed that there are significant differences in some teaching practices, but teachers of all languages and at all educational stages show homogeneous behavior in terms of the preferred methodological criteria to be applied in class. Language teachers, both in primary and secondary school, mostly opt for reflective teaching, working from the students' own examples and the problems found in their texts.
In this paper, we present the results of a study on the effects of typological proximity between Portuguese and Spanish on the use of derived words (DW) by learners of Portuguese as a foreign language (PFL) at different stages of their (inter)linguistic development. Based on a comparative study of the lexicogenetic constructions used in a corpus of texts written by PFL learners in immersion and their Spanish counterparts, we assess the extent of the coincidence of word construction patterns and morpholexical constituents (bases and affixes) in the two languages, in order to gauge how this knowledge influences the production of derived words at different levels of proficiency (from A1 to C1). According to the data collected, learners who have Spanish as their L1 accurately instantiate (85.7% on average) the construction patterns of Portuguese, in line with the high degree of coincidence of the patterns and affixes used in these two languages. The deviations, in addition to being insignificant, mainly concern the graphic representation of lexical bases.
En este trabajo se presentan los resultados de un estudio sobre los efectos de la proximidad tipológica entre el portugués y el español en el uso de palabras derivadas (PD) por parte de aprendientes de portugués como lengua extranjera (PLE) en diferentes etapas de su desarrollo (inter)lingüístico. Basado en un análisis comparativo de las construcciones lexicogenéticas empleadas en un corpus de textos escritos por aprendientes de PLE en contexto de inmersión y sus equivalentes en español, el estudio evalúa el grado de coincidencia entre los esquemas de construcción de palabras y los constituyentes morfolexicales (bases y afijos) en ambas lenguas, con el fin de determinar cómo este conocimiento influye en la producción de palabras derivadas en distintos niveles de competencia (de A1 a C1). Según los datos obtenidos, los aprendientes cuya lengua materna es el español aplican con gran precisión (un promedio del 85,7 %) los esquemas construccionales del portugués, en consonancia con el alto grado de coincidencia de los patrones y afijos empleados en ambas lenguas. Las desviaciones observadas, además de ser poco significativas, se concentran principalmente en la representación gráfica de las bases léxicas.
As online K-12 language teaching grows, teachers’ self-efficacy is critical but its factors in digital settings remain unclear. This study addresses this gap by examining the self-efficacy levels and influencing factors among online K-12 Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) teachers. Using a mixed-methods approach with data from 610 questionnaires and 13 interviews, results indicated generally high teachers’ self-efficacy. Key internal factors include gender, age, educational background, major, and teaching experience, while external environmental factors such as class size, platform support, training, and parental involvement also play a significant role. However, job status and weekly class hours did not show a significant impact. This study extends self-efficacy theory into the online CFL context and offers practical implications for digital pedagogy, platform design, and teacher training.
