Dificultades en el aprendizaje de ELE para eslovacosanálisis de errores socioculturales en el aprendizaje de la lengua extranjera mediante infografías y la elaboración de un corpus

Abstract

The present study intends to fill in the gap that, from our perspective, has existed in the process of teaching and learning a Foreign Language, as traditionally the Error Analysis approach has not taken into account the sociocultural dimension. The main objective of this research has been to analyse the sociocultural competences of Slovak university students who study Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL, hereinafter) to design a proposal for a guide to sociocultural knowledge and behaviour. In addition, six specific objectives have been set to carry out our research: 1) to contextualize SFL studies in the university system in Slovakia; 2) to identify the profile of students who study Spanish at university level in Slovakia; 3) to design a work plan through the use of ICT with infographics to identify the knowledge and sociocultural behaviours of Slovak university students; 4) to create a corpus of oral and written productions by Slovak university students; 5) to analyse the oral and written productions of Slovak university students; and 6) to design a proposal for a guide to sociocultural knowledge and behaviour for Slovak university students based on the analysis of their productions. To achieve our proposed objectives we have followed the Error Analysis paradigm, defined as a methodological approach within the data analysis process, whose stages are: 1) corpus compilation; 2) identification; 3) cataloguing; 4) description; 5) explanation of errors; and 5) proposal of therapies to solve errors, depending on their didactic or pedagogical perspective. Furthermore, in this procedure we have applied the combination of two methodological strategies: both the qualitative and the quantitative ones. The former has been used for the description, identification and explanation of errors in the oral and written productions of Slovak students that are collected in the Mixed Corpus; whereas the latter has been used to measure the errors, once they have been described, identified and explained. The infographic has been the main didactic resource of our research, on the one hand, for the design of the activities that have been presented to our participating students and, on the other hand, to promote digital, communicative and cognitive skills in our teaching practice. Ten activities have been designed, five of them belonging to the Oral Corpus and the remaining activities to the Written Corpus. Each activity deals with a different sociocultural content and is connected to a specific communicative situation. These sociocultural criteria and their corresponding communicative situations are classified into three main groups, according to the taxonomy designed to comply with the purposes of this study. The three main groups are: 1) life conditions and social organization, 2) interpersonal relationships and collective identity and 3) lifestyle. These main groups are divided as well into several analysis subcategories that have allowed us to identify and collect those data needed for the present study. From our research, we can conclude that the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language has been growing and consolidating over the last years in the Slovak context. However, in the present doctoral dissertation we have shown the need to reinforce the sociocultural dimension in the process of teaching and learning a foreign language. For this reason, from the data collected from the university students in our study, we have designed our didactic proposal, the Sociocultural Knowledge and Behaviours Guide for the SFL Class (Guía de saberes y comportamientos socioculturales en el aula de ELE).