The History of Language in the Teaching of Spanish FL

Abstract

In this paper we propose to demonstrate that the knowledge by teachers of Spanish as a foreign language (SAFL) of certain essential notions in the history of the language may be of special interest, especially working at the lexical level. It is common for students to naturally associate a new word with the equivalent of their mother tongue, especially when it comes to lexical and semantic equivalences from the same origin. However, it is also usual to propose inappropriate relationships, based on homonyms that lead to thinking about false etymologies, while in a large number of cases they do not establish relationships between words that are linked by their origin, since the relationship is not transparent, although it is evident when some basic phonetic rules of regular linguistic change are known. Therefore, in this work we intend to guide the teacher so that he /she acquires certain tools of the history of the language, so that he /she can help the students to establish appropriate lexical associations that facilitate the learning of Spanish, which will include some guidelines to develop different methodological proposals.