Desarrollo de la competencia ortográfica en ELE en alumnado universitario sinohablante: Análisis de necesidades y taller de escritura

Abstract

In the Chinese university context of teaching and learning Spanish as a foreign language (SFL), after detecting problems on written text production among our students, we developed an investigation in order to deepen the linguistic knowledge on the use of orthographic competence (spelling and accentuation) and design an intervention to improve that competence. The case study research is made up of Chinese undergraduate students pursuing a degree in Spanish Language at Dalian University of Foreign Languages - 大连 外国语 大学 - (Liaoning Province, northern China), known by its acronym in English as DUFL. Our study is divided into three phases. The initial or exploratory phase is intended to better understand the learning context on which we will act; define a general profile of our students in relation to the frequency of use of learning strategies by using the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) questionnaire from Oxford (1990) applied to 403 informants; to identify the most common orthographic errors in accentuation and spelling after the analysis of a corpus of text produced by 183 informants, and finally to understand how they learn and teach orthography within the context of the DUFL. The second phase is aimed at the elaboration and implementation of an intervention model in the form of a workshop, justified in the needs detected in the initial or exploratory phase in which 63 undergraduate students in the third year of their degree have participated, all of them having an average of B1 level of competence in Spanish, according to the CEFR. The educational workshop that we have called “writing workshop”, with a duration of three months of work in weekly sessions of 90 minutes, tries to promote the improvement of the orthographic competence on the text production among the Chinese undergraduate students who learn Spanish as a foreign language. The third and final phase of our study is focused on assessing the implementation of the above-mentioned intervention model. The main results obtained showed the profile of the participating students with a frequency of use of medium level learning strategies (3,13/5) and no statistically significant differences in use between both sexes; the analysis and distribution of the orthographic errors of accentuation and spelling after the analysis of 121 746 words written with an average error rate per subject of 2,58 %, and finally, the degree of improvement of orthographic competence in the students that participated in the "writing workshop". After its application, there was an improvement in the average orthographic competence, marked by the decrease in the average of orthographic errors rate, in accentuation (-0,54 %) and spelling (-0,53 %). The representativeness of the study sample, which is reduced to DUFL students, and the difficulty in generalising the results obtained in the "writing workshop" to other teaching contexts, are the main limitations of our research, which aims to deepen the study of the orthographic competence of the Chinese undergraduate students of SFL.