A Pedagogical Application of NooJ in Language Teaching: the Adjective in Spanish and Italian

This paper relies on the work developed by the research team IES_UNR (Argentina) and presents a pedagogical application of NooJ for the teaching and learning of Spanish as a foreign language. However, as this proposal specifically addresses learners of Spanish whose mother tongue is Italian, it also entailed vital collaboration with Mario Monteleone from the University of Salerno, Italy. The adjective was chosen on account of its lower frequency of occurrence in texts written in Spanish, and particularly in the Argentine Rioplatense variety, and with the aim of developing strategies to increase its use. The features that the adjective shares with other grammatical categories render it extremely productive and provide elements that enrich the learner’s proficiency. The reference corpus contains the front pages of the Argentinian newspaper Clarín related to an emblematic historical moment, whose starting point is March 24, 1976, when a military coup began, and covers a thirty year period until March 24, 2006. The use of the linguistic resources created in NooJ for the automatic processing of texts written in Spanish accounts for the adjective in a relevant historical context for Argentina.