Resumen del examen
Estudiante: Raimunda Paredes | Asignatura: Diversidad lingüística en el aula de lengua castellana | Idioma: EN
Pregunta 1
Formal learning versus natural learning of the goal language by migrants.
Respuesta del estudiante
For migrant learners, natural learning of the goal language refers to spontaneous acquisition in everyday contexts (workplace, street, peer interaction) through abundant, meaning-focused exposure and communicative necessity. It is typically implicit, relies on interaction and negotiation of meaning, and develops mainly procedural competence (fluency and pragmatic adequacy in routine situations). However, input is often uneven, restricted to limited domains, and may include nonstandard varieties; consequently, progress can be slow in morphosyntax and academic registers, and stabilization/fossilization of interlanguage is frequent, especially when opportunities for rich interaction are scarce or social networks are linguistically segregated.
Formal learning refers to instructed learning in institutional settings (school, reception classrooms, adult courses), characterized by planned sequencing of contents, explicit focus on form, feedback, and systematic work on literacy and academic language. It promotes metalinguistic awareness and declarative knowledge that can support accuracy, control of inflectional morphology, orthography, and access to curricular discourse. Its effectiveness depends on instructional quality, intensity, continuity, and alignment with learners’ immediate communicative needs; without sufficient meaningful input and use outside the classroom, gains may remain limited or decontextualized. In practice, successful linguistic integration usually requires the complementarity of both: naturalistic exposure for communicative automatization and formal instruction for accuracy, literacy, and school-based language.
Pregunta 2
Fill in the missing names in this chart, corresponding to the ten largest immigrant groups in Spain, by country of origin. (Note: Assume chart is provided)
Respuesta del estudiante
1 Romania
2 Morocco
3 United Kingdom
4 Italy
5 China
10 Venezuela
Pregunta 3
How has the proportion of students entering high school in Spain evolved in recent decades, considering the variable of nationality (Spanish/foreign)?
Respuesta del estudiante
Over the last decades the intake into secondary education has shifted from being almost entirely Spanish to a markedly more diverse composition: from the mid–late 1990s, the proportion of foreign students entering high school rose very sharply (from residual figures to around one tenth of the cohort), reaching its maximum in the years of greatest immigration (mid/late 2000s). After that peak, it stabilised and in some years fell slightly, while Spanish students have remained the overwhelming majority throughout, with their relative weight decreasing only insofar as the foreign share increased.
Pregunta 4
How does the process of exclusion take place, according to Pulido? Indicate the stages and the critical moment.
Respuesta del estudiante
According to Pulido, exclusion is not an abrupt fact but a progressive process that starts from the social construction of “difference” and ends in the effective denial of participation and rights. It unfolds through the following stages:
- Categorization of the person/group as “different” (identification and labeling).
- Stereotyping and stigmatization (attributing fixed, negative traits to the labeled group).
- Prejudice (generalized negative evaluation that legitimizes unequal treatment).
- Discrimination (translation of prejudice into practices and institutional decisions).
- Segregation/marginalization (spatial and/or educational separation, reduced opportunities and expectations).
- Exclusion (effective expulsion or de facto impossibility of full access, participation and recognition).
Critical moment: the passage from prejudice to discrimination, because it is when negative representations cease to be merely attitudinal and become concrete practices that produce inequality and, subsequently, segregation and exclusion.
Pregunta 5
Explain the main difficulty for Arabic speakers learning Spanish at the suprasegmental level.
Respuesta del estudiante
For Arabic-speaking learners, the main suprasegmental difficulty in Spanish is mastering its stress-and-rhythm system: Spanish is stress-timed with contrastive lexical stress that can distinguish meaning and is reflected in orthography through accent marks. Many Arabic varieties do not encode lexical stress in the same functional way and rely more on different prosodic patterns, so learners tend to misplace stress, fail to reduce or lengthen syllables appropriately, and produce a non-target rhythmic pattern. This frequently results in incorrect word stress (especially in longer or morphologically complex words) and an overall intonational contour that sounds unnatural or can affect intelligibility.
Pregunta 6
Differences in birth rates between Spain and the countries of origin of Hispanic American immigrants.
Respuesta del estudiante
Spain has maintained very low fertility in recent decades (well below replacement level), whereas most Hispanic American countries of origin of immigrants (e.g., Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Dominican Republic) have traditionally shown higher birth rates and fertility levels. Although fertility in Latin America has declined over time, it has generally remained above Spain’s, so Hispanic American immigrant populations tend to be younger and to contribute proportionally more births than the native Spanish population, narrowing the gap only partially as their fertility converges downward after settlement.
Pregunta 7
How does the chosen second language textbook approach the teaching of vocabulary? (topic 6)
Respuesta del estudiante
The selected Spanish as an L2 textbook treats vocabulary as an instrumental component of communicative competence and introduces it mainly in a contextualized way, embedded in thematic units and in oral/written texts that serve as input. New lexical items are presented through meaning-focused activities (images, situational contexts, paraphrase/definition and occasional L1 mediation), followed by controlled practice (matching, completion, classification by semantic fields) and later freer, task-based production (role-plays, short writings, information-gap activities) in which the same lexis is required. The book prioritizes high-frequency, functional vocabulary aligned with everyday school and social domains, and promotes lexical organization by topics and word families. It also incorporates recycling and spiral review across units, encouraging noticing of collocations and formulaic sequences, and includes basic vocabulary-learning strategies (use of glossaries, word maps, and inference from context) to foster learner autonomy.
Pregunta 8
What is the shortcoming of the textbook that the chosen supplementary material (topic 6) addresses, and by what means would it achieve this? Maximum 10 lines.
Respuesta del estudiante
The textbook’s main shortcoming is that, despite presenting basic L2 contents, it offers insufficient scaffolding for the academic language needed in ESO (CALP): limited work with authentic curricular texts, weak explicit instruction on discourse functions (defining, explaining, comparing, justifying) and scarce systematic recycling of key academic vocabulary in context. The supplementary material compensates for this by using task-based didactic sequences built around real subject-area texts (science/history worksheets, short expository articles) and oral presentations, incorporating pre-teaching of academic lexis, guided reading and writing frames, model texts, and cooperative interaction so that learners can progressively appropriate the linguistic resources required to participate in mainstream classes.