Disponibilidad léxica en español de alumnos marroquíes de enseñanza media

Abstract

The lexical availability in Spanish of Moroccan secondary school students is a research project whose main objective is to analyze the vocabulary elicited by 350 learners of Spanish in 17 specific lexical fields (also known as centers of interest among specialists in this scientific area). This research is ascribed to the studies of lexicon in Spanish as a foreign language that are carried out in parallel to the great Pan-Hispanic Project of Lexical Availability, coordinated and directed since the 1990s by Professor López Morales. Methodologically, this research closely follows the scientific guidelines and criteria applied by vocabulary researchers within the aforementioned Pan-Hispanic Project. For the preparation of the final dictionary, the common editing standards proposed by the linguist Samper Padilla (1998) have been mainly used. Some specific methodological criteria that are used in the analysis of the lexicon available in Spanish/FL have also been applied (Samper Hernández, 2001a; 2002). The study of the vocabulary provided by the Moroccan surveyed students has been carried out from both a quantitative and a qualitative point of view. The first perspective is based on the numerical results offered by the three parameters that are usually analyzed in research on the available lexicon: word production, different answers production and the cohesion index. These general results have been compared, on the other hand, with those of other communities, both foreign (Carcedo González, 2000b; López González, 2010; Lin, 2012; Sandu, 2014) and native (whose data were compiled in Samper Padilla et al., 2003). Regarding the specific results of this research from a sociolinguistic point of view, in addition to the analysis according to the incidence of the variables 'gender', 'geographical area' and 'sociocultural level', we have also studied the influence of other conditioning factors such as 'mother tongue' and 'school level'. Additionally, we have contrasted a great part of these results with those provided by other studies of lexical availability in foreign speakers. From the qualitative point of view, the main objective has been to analyze the type of responses provided by the informants of the different groups included in the sample, especially those lexical units that make up 75% of the accumulated frequency. In addition to studying the compatibility index, tables have been drawn up that show the coincident and divergent vocabulary of the groups that make up each extralinguistic variable. On the other hand, these qualitative results have been contrasted with those of Romania (Sandu, 2014) and Gran Canaria (Samper Hernández, 2009).