Influence of the Spanish Language Learning Manual on the Lexical Sufficiency of Taiwanese University Students of ELE A1 based on Lexical Availability

Abstract

The main objective of this work is to find the influence of ELE learning material on the lexical proficiency of Taiwanese university students with an A1 level of Spanish. This work is based on lexical availability as a lexical assessment instrument.

We evaluate the lexical competence of two groups of students with the same level of Spanish (A1). They have used two different manuals in class. The first group, consisting of 52 individuals, has worked with ELE actual (SM publishing house), and the second group, made up of 67 students, has used Espacio Joven (Edinumen publishing house). We will find out the influence of the learning manual on lexical competence from the quantitative analysis of the convergences and divergences between the lexical units extracted from both groups of students and those collected in the inventory of specific notions that Instituto Cervantes proposes in its Plan Curricular (PCIC) (2009) for an A1 level. For the quantification and editing of the data we used Dispogen II (Eveverría et al., 2005).

The analysis of results shows that the subjects produce very different answers from each other and that the two groups obtain similar results with respect to the PCIC. This implies that it is not possible to reach a firm conclusion. However, other interpretations related to the performance of the subjects can be extracted to use in later works.