Contribución de la prensa a la adquisición del vocabulario

Abstract

The press brings the reader closer not only to the news of a community but also to its language and culture. The objective of this study is to know the relationship between press consumption and lexical competence. Specifically, the weekly time spent by 171 graduate students from Malaga reading the press and its rela-tionship with two lexical tests in Spanish – mother tongue – and French or English – foreign language – will be analysed. The results show that there is no significant relationship between available vocabulary and press consumption. Instead, the relationship is significant with the ability to identify technicalities when the data refer to the foreign language of the informants. These findings invite us to continue promoting didactic applications that integrate press reading both to improve lexical competence and to integrate the sociopragmatic component of the language.

Keywords

• language teaching
• lexical competence
• media
• sociolinguistics