Teaching Spanish discourse connectors in China: problems and proposals

Abstract

In Spanish, connectors are those discourse markers that are specialized in linking different parts of a discourse and making explicit the argumentative relations between them. As functional linguistic units, they have complicated morphological, syntactic, semantic and discursive properties, which determine that they are very difficult to learn for foreign students, especially for Chinese learners, because of the systematic differences between their first language and Spanish. In this paper we will discuss the explanations of connectors found in the most used Spanish textbook in China: Español Moderno, and we will indicate the problems of this teaching method. Our aim is to propose some suggestions and teaching activities that could be used in the Spanish classrooms in China.

Keywords

• Discourse connectors
• Spanish teaching proposal
• the textbook Español Moderno
• Chinese students