Assessing pedagogical approaches to foster the comprehension and retention of new L2 Spanish idioms

Abstract

This paper contains the experimental design of an empirical study that aims to assess the relative effectiveness of a number of pedagogical approaches designed to boost the comprehension of new L2 Spanish idioms and foster their retention. Building on a previous study (Ureña Tormo 2019), we suggest testing three pedagogical treatments, with two of them encouraging the participants to guess the meaning of the target idioms, before or after receiving information on their semantic motivation, and the other one focusing on meaning inference from context. The target units are 15 Spanish idioms related to a range of topics and the participants are 90 English speaking learners of Spanish. The results that we obtain will allow for the assessment of the effectiveness of each pedagogical proposal, and will be compared to the ones obtained in Ureña Tormo (2019).