Morfología contrastiva y aplicada a la enseñanza del español en China

Abstract

The teaching of the Spanish morphology has been a field little explored in the context of research in China, due to the traditional consideration that Mandarin Chinese is an isolating language while Spanish is a fusional language with a rich inflectional and derivative morphology. As a result, this little interest in morphology, there are few didactic manuals available for teaching this subject in Chinese universities. Therefore, this work seeks to compare the derivative morphology of Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, in order to find out the common and different features of both languages and propose a teaching methodology of morphology in Chinese universities. This work consists of two parts. In the first part, the formation of words with the derivative affixes of both languages has been analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively from three perspectives: category of the lexical base, productive meanings, and morphophonological factors. The analyzed examples of Spanish and Chinese are extracted from the Vocabulario EEE and the Corpus of the National Language Committee of China. After this analysis, it has been concluded that in Mandarin Chinese there are numerous derivative affixes that share many similarities with those of Spanish involved in word formation, and that can be beneficial in the ELE classroom. The second part contains a critical analysis of the two most main Spanish teaching manuals in Chinese universities, a questionnaire conducted with Chinese teachers about their perception of contrastive morphology, and a design of word-formation activities in Spanish. The results indcate that the teaching of derivative morphology has not received much attention: explanations about the theoretical concept of morphological units and the proposed activities of word-formation in the teaching manuals still need significant improvements. Finally, the didactic proposals are presented in this work, which are designed and aimed at helping both Chinese teachers and students, since these are the true objective of this work. Keywords: contrastive morphology between Spanish and Chinese; Derivative morphology applied to the teaching of Spanish in China