Estudio de la madurez sintáctica de estudiantes de Primaria y Secundaria de la isla de Gran Canaria

Abstract

The current research tries to analyze the indexes of syntactic maturity, that is to say the ability to produce complex sentences and phrases, among the students of Gran Canaria island (Spain). This is a study and an assessment of the syntactic complexity among students at mandatory and non-mandatory levels of education, this indicates that we will work on the development of the syntaxis and its evolution all trough the educational life of Canarian students; in this way, we will analyze and compare which are the real characteristics of these compositions made by pupils from the first educational levels of Primary School to Bachillerato. We will also try to verify if it exists, as many previous studies state, an interrelationship between the development of linguistic capacity and the chronological maturity that school years give. This topic may be grouped under the context of sociolinguistic studies on the production of written texts created by children and teenagers during the school years, specifically it is framed under the topic of psicolinguistics and linguistics applied to the teaching of Spanish as a mother tongue. To create this piece of work we will follow the rates designed by K. Hunt for the analysis of syntactic maturity, that years after M. Véliz moved to the Spanish language. We will also take into account the research made by Torres González due to geographical reasons. We will show the theorical frame to measure the syntactic maturity and we will introduce Hunt´s concepts and indexes as a reference through the process of our piece of work. We will present the methodology we followed on this study: how we selected the sample, how we shaped our corpus and how we carried out the statistical analysis of the final results. We will deal with every single index to measure the syntactic maturity in an individual way (primary indexes, clausal secondary indexes and non-clausal secondary indexes), and we will also analyze the results according to the suggested social variables. After the analysis of each group, we will compare and make a statiscal test to know the correlation degree. In the analysis of the clausal secondary indexes we will add a qualitive study. At the end, we will compare the results we have obtained in our research with other studies carried out on the syntactic maturity of students, paying special attention to those made in the Spanish language. We will end up with our conclusions regarding the objectives and hypothesis considered at the beginning of this piece of work.