¿Textos o pretextos? naturaleza y uso didáctico de los textos en los manuales de ELE

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate what is the nature of textsprovided as input in Spanish as a Foreign Language text books (authentic, adapted, contrived or designed for the classroom), and what is their pedagogical rationale (practice of receptive or productive skills, focus on linguistic form, or focus on acertain text type), especially regarding the required output. To do thus, we have selected and analyzed a corpus of 116 units from 14 current Spanish textbooks of levels B1 and B2 of the CEFR. The results prove first that a large amount of the input consists of contrived texts written by the authors mainly in order to developreceptive skills; and second they show that the number of tasks of textual analysis is clearly inadequate and symptomatic of an obvious pedagogical dysfunction between teaching objectives and learning outcomes.