Las expresiones idiomáticas en la enseñanza/aprendizaje de ELE: un estudio sobre el nivel intermedio (B1/B2)

Abstract

The studies carried out thanks to the lexical approach (Lewis 1993) testify to the importance of teaching the phraseological units for a better development of the communicative competence since they allow to learn groups of words. The lexical units are characterized —moreover— by their high frequency of use in conversation and by being used in multiple communicative situations, with various registers and in different types of texts. In this study, the focus will be on a concrete type of lexical unit, the idiomatic expression, which the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) suggests to present in the highest levels, specifically from C1; however, here it is proposed that, in the case of learners of Spanish whose mother tongue is Italian, or in the case of learners of neighboring languages, the teaching of these units would be already organized at an intermediate level (B1/B2), since our experience shows that if introduced into programming, learning takes place even at these levels. At first these lexical units will be described from a theoretical point of view, then some choices / presentation strategies will be exposed in the classroom and finally the corpus will be shown with the data of the exams results (ie, data related to learning) of the B2 level learners. These expressions are widely used by natives; hence the importance of teaching them so that the learner won’t just recognize them and use them, but also for him/her to fit into the linguistic community of the language they are learning.