Teaching oral production and comprehension skills in Spanish as a foreign language in textbook collections for Brazilian learners

Abstract

The teaching of Spanish is currently facing a lack of support from the Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático (PNLD, National Textbook and Teaching Material Program), which previously provided evaluation and distribution of didactic books. In this context, teachers of this curriculum component must create their own teaching materials. As a possible alternative, recognizing the strategies used in the activities of didactic manuals can assist these professionals in developing new activities. Therefore, our objective was to qualitatively analyze all listening comprehension and oral production activities in three PNLD textbook collections. Additionally, we identified how phonetic-phonological aspects are addressed in these manuals, based on communicative pronunciation teaching (Celce-Murcia et al., 2010). We found that the collections, in their own way, opt to propose activities with different textual genres, a broad combination of semantic fields and grammatical content, and various strategies to promote listening and speaking. Nevertheless, there is little focus on pronunciation. To some extent, all collections show a preference for developing listening skills, with activities centered on "description and analysis" and "listening discrimination". Oral practice steps ("controlled practice", "guided practice" and "communicative practice") are infrequently included.