Desarrollo de la competencia discursiva e intercultural de sinohablantes en el ámbito universitario europeo

Abstract

This research aims at responding to a social and institutional necessity as to how to develop the writing competence of university level Chinese-speaking students. The goal would be the production of university level B1 argumentative texts, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment (CEFR) and the Curricular Plan of the Instituto Cervantes (CPIC). The existing bibliography has worked with Chinese university level students, but in our case we have focused our interest on how to improve the production of argumentative texts in order to pass the official exam that gives access to various Humanities degrees. Through a field methodology, within a research-action, theoretical references have been combined in the applied linguistics field. The sample is made up of six students from the Changchun Normal University (China), assigned to the Confucius Institute of the University of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria during the academic year 2010-2011. In the course of this research, several questionnaires and checklists have been used to gather data, all of which are immersed within a didactic sequence. The analysis of the results has been carried out descriptively resorting to several examples and to a comparative study between the results of the necessities' analysis and the didactic sequence's final product. As theoretical basis, the characteristics of Mandarin Chinese, in regards to the Spanish language, have been taken into account, as well as the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) competences, the research strategic lines of the University of LPGC, theoretical contents of the argumentative text, the writing workshop, and the interculturality and applied linguistics of Spanish as a Foreign Language for Chinese speakers. In conclusion, this paper suggests several factors for the teaching/learning process of Chinese-speaking students, which could be applied to EHEA. It analyses the weaknesses in the learning process in regards to the production of written compositions and tries to look for an improvement concerning the textual production of this specific group of speakers taking into account other factors like, for instance, motivation and interculturality.