The presence of diatopic and diastratic variation in a Chinese textbook for Spanish as a foreign language

Abstract

The presentation of linguistic variation in teaching materials is crucial for the development of students’ sociolinguistic competence. This article first classifies linguistic variation in Spanish. Taking as its object of study the Chinese Spanish-as-a-foreign-language textbook series Modern Spanish, a content analysis is conducted to analyze and evaluate how diatopic and diastratic variation is addressed. The results show that the “main road–detour” approach adopted by this material in presenting diatopic varieties leads to an imbalance in students’ linguistic competence and motivation when they encounter American Spanish, compared with their command of Peninsular Spanish. Therefore, a “Y-shaped bifurcation” model is advocated for presenting diatopic variation, so as to transfer autonomous decision-making to learners in their learning process. At the same time, the study notes that the material does not sufficiently consider students’ age-related characteristics, as it focuses mainly on the cultivated variety; consequently, it is suggested that the discursive features of young Spanish speakers be incorporated into a wider range of communicative situations in order to enrich the diastratic dimension.