Relative Clauses: Prescriptive or Descriptive Approach in Spanish Textbooks?

Next Friday, May 13th 2011, I will be presenting the first and second stages of my research project at the 7th Annual Symposium at the Centre for Intercultural Language Studies (CILS) at The University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada.

My research is a critical study of how Spanish language textbooks present relative clauses at the post-secondary level. Specifically, do textbooks inform about what Spanish speakers actually say or do they simply prescribe usage patterns? Subordination through relative constructs is one of the ways through which L2 Spanish learners begin to produce complex discourse (e.g., clarify, integrate, and avoid repetition).  Thus, they deserve special attention.

For this study, I reviewed the presentation of relative clauses in 30 textbooks at the three different levels of language proficiency (beginner, intermediate and advanced) and then I contrasted them with prescriptive and descriptive grammars (Gili y Gaya, 1961; Solé & Solé, 1977; RAE, 1999, King & Suñer, 2008). The analysis shows that textbooks make emphasis in the preference of specific relative constructs outside a natural conversational context. That is, relative particles are presented in decontextualized examples. For instance, students learn that el que [which, who] and el cual [which, who] are interchangeable. Yet, descriptive grammars state that the latter is used after certain prepositions, it can never start a sentence and it is most commonly used in written language. Results suggest that L2 Spanish students may be learning to speak in a pragmatically deviant style. That is, using an out-dated form of the language. Therefore, textbooks may be hindering full integration into a Hispanic community when a student is not completely accepted by native speakers because of the way he/she speaks. A contrast with a current use of the language (e.g. CREA e-corpus) is suggested in order to verify the validity of the prescribed constructs.