Es bien conocida la dificultad de los estudiantes eslavos en el aprendizaje de los artículos españoles. Sin embargo, en un contexto donde el inglés L2 (lengua con artículos) está cada vez más presente en el repertorio lingüístico de los estudiantes, hay rasgos, como la definitud, que son aprovechables en el aprendizaje de E/LE. No obstante, hay otras regularidades, como es el caso de los sujetos escuetos ingleses con valor genérico, que obstaculizan la transferencia de conocimiento y pueden resultar en interferencias lingüísticas de tipo L2 > L3. A diferencia de las lenguas germánicas, en español (y probablemente en otras lenguas romances) los sintagmas nominales con función de sujeto van casi siempre acompañados de artículo. La única excepción a esta regla parecen ser los verbos monádicos, ya que permiten sujetos escuetos posverbales con valor partitivo en el caso de los nombres plurales y continuos (no así con los nombres discontinuos en singular). Por ello, el objetivo de este trabajo es proponer una heurística (ensenar el artículo como requisito sintáctico de los sintagmas nominales con función de sujeto) a fines de reducir el número de reglas gramaticales y restar carga cognitiva en el uso de los artículos españoles a estudiantes cuya lengua materna carece de un sistema morfológico similar.

The study was aimed at exploring the psycholinguistic background of Polish students of L3 Spanish. Two groups of students (B1 and B2) were asked to fill out a survey with questions related to proficiency, self-confidence, language identity, usefulness, prestige, stress, sound, and frequency of use. The last part of the survey included some questions about psychotypology, as well. In terms of foreign language anxiety, Spanish was ranked by most of the students as the most stressful language. A follow-up session was carried out with them in order to try to discuss the reasons behind their choices, and their feedback helped to shed some light on the topic and raised further questions about the role and impact of Polish teachers of Spanish in Poland.

Despite being extremely frequent in Spanish, articles pose one of the biggest challenges for Polish L1/English L2 students who learn it as a L3, even among the most advanced learners. However, little attention has been paid to the influence of the task at hand, especially since certain registers and writing styles tend to make use of a higher number of noun phrases, thus increasing both the amount of article syntactical environments and the probability of an error to be made. The main purpose of this article is to investigate whether there is a statistically significant relation between the number or article-related errors and an increasing number of article environments. In order to do this, a simple linear regression analysis was run for both B1 and B2 groups separately, and finally the whole level (n = 72). The results of the t tests suggest a significant linear relationship between the number of article-related errors and article tokens, between article-related errors and noun tokens, and between article and noun tokens. The article provides some considerations on possible actions to be taken both for researching and teaching the Spanish article system to [–ART] L1 learners.

Poiché si tratta di elementi linguistici «poco salienti a livello percettivo» (Chiapedi, 2010), gli articoli rappresentano una delle aree più problematiche nell’insegnamento dell’italiano L2, specie nel caso degli apprendenti la cui madrelingua non possiede una tale categoria lessicale. Benché nel parlato una persona possa comunicare in modo più o meno efficace pur utilizzando gli articoli in modo erroneo, nella scrittura questo tipo di errori diventa particolarmente visibile in quanto la definitezza non può essere espressa che verbalmente, e quindi una debole padronanza del sistema di articoli L2 potrebbe minare il rendimento accademico degli studenti. Infatti, sul piano pedagogico, molti studiosi richiamano l’attenzione sul fatto che l’insegnamento degli articoli L2 è un compito che viene spesso trascurato oppure mal eseguito: la differenza tra definitezza e specificità viene trattata molto di rado, e ancora meno la funzione espletiva dell’articolo nei soggetti preverbali. L'obiettivo di questo contributo è quello di proporre un modello semplificato per l'insegnamento degli articoli italiani L2, sviluppato principalmente a partire dell’ipotesi della fluttuazione elaborata da Ionin, Ko, Wexler (2004), nonché sulla base della corretta interpretazione dell’articolo determinativo come operatore iota (ing. ι-operator; Chierchia, 1998) e dell’approccio euristico proposto da Testa (2021). Il modello qui proposto, dunque, si propone ridurre il numero di regole da memorizzare per gli studenti di madrelingue prive di articoli, dato che l’elevato numero di regole descritte nelle grammatiche tradizionali potrebbe sovraccaricare le risorse cognitive degli apprendenti, difficoltando così il processo di acquisizione.   A model for teaching Italian articles to students of mother tongues without articles At the perceptual level, articles are not very salient elements (Hewson, 1972) and therefore represent one of the most problematic areas in teaching Italian L2, especially in the case of learners whose mother tongue does not possess such a lexical category. Although in speech a person can communicate more or less effectively while using articles incorrectly, in writing definiteness can only be expressed verbally and therefore a weak command of the L2 article system may undermine the academic performance of students of L2 Italian. In fact, many scholars have drawn attention to the fact that the task of teaching L2 articles is often neglected or poorly performed, e.g. the difference between definiteness and specificity is very rarely dealt with, as well as the expletive function of the article in preverbal subjects (see Longobardi, 1994). The objective of this paper is to propose a simplified model for teaching Italian L2 articles, developed based on Ionin, Ko & Wexler’s (2004) fluctuation hypothesis, the correct interpretation of the definite article as an iota operator (Chierchia, 1998) and the heuristic approach proposed by Testa (2021). Our model, therefore, aims at reducing the number of rules to be memorized by students whose L1 has no articles, given that the high number of rules described in traditional grammar textbooks may overload the cognitive resources of learners, thus hampering the learning process.

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