'Lo que se pretende en los cursos de ELE es enseñando un español correcto'. Una propuesta para mejorar la enseñanza del gerundio español en un contexto holandés.

Abstract

In spite of the apparent similarities between the Spanish gerund and the similar form in one’s L1 (or other L2/FL), many students of Spanish as a Foreign Language make errors in its use that are considered incorrect from a prescriptivist or a descriptivist perspective. It is estimated that linguistic transference plays an essential role in this process, as well as the scarcity of explicit education of the form. For this reason it is surprising that up until now this syntactic phenomenon has not been heavily studied in the academic literature with didactic objectives in mind. Therefore, with the aim of evoking academic interest in this complex grammatical structure, the present study reports on the employment of the Spanish gerund by adolescent students of Spanish with Dutch as their L1 – a language with a relatively low use of the equivalent of the gerundio. After analysing didactic material and submitting 22 students of Spanish and 7 native speakers to a grammaticality judgment, it is concluded that above all education should be improved on the various semantic meanings of the non-periphrastic gerund and the nuances of the independent gerund. The ideal education of the gerund is then presented as an amplification of correct knowledge rather than the correction of incorrect knowledge.