Renaissance Methodologies for Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language

The history of Spanish teaching is not only limited to the teaching of grammar in the xvi Century, as we might.be tempted to believe in our days. Brilliant scholars such as Erasmus and Vives were in favour of a "degrammaticalized" pedagogy. And materials for teaching Spanish following a conversational, learn-through-practice approach are printed and used quite extensively from the first part of the century. Materials of that kind are recorded much earlier (xiii C), for teaching other "vulgar" languages (French, Flemish, English). Spanish is incorporated into this methodology rather late, almost two centuries afterwards, exactly when the «Spanish Empire» reaches the Low Countries and the need for learning Spanish is felt abroad. Books and manuals for teaching Spanish are rare in Spain, except grammars (more specifically "theoretical grammars"). Books of dialogues, representative of a non-grammatical methodology, appear only in foreign countries, where the need for this kind of materials increases. The conclusion is that the elaboration- of materials by Spaniards in Spain will not influence the teaching of their language to foreigners, in spite of the fact that famous grammarians (Nebrija, Villalôn) refer in their works to the expansion of Spanish outside Spain. The reason might be that the feeling and understanding of the methodological requirements for teaching Spanish to non-native speakers of the language were notoriously absent. Very much as it was going to be the case until nowadays

Ancient history · Art · Art history · Empire · Erasmus · Flemish · Foreign language · Grammar · Humanities · Language education · Linguistics · Pedagogy · Rule-based machine translation · Sociology · Spanish language · Teaching method · The Renaissance · Classics · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Historical Studies in Science · History · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies

• Nebrija y las gramáticas del español en el siglo de oro

  José Luis Girón Alconchel•Historiographia Linguistica•1995

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• Quatre Anniversaires En 1992

  Jean Antoine Caravolas•Historiographia Linguistica•1991

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