Linguistic Competence across Learner Varieties of Spanish
Arnulfo G. Ramírez
Louisiana State University
Linguistic Competence across Learner Varieties of Spanish presents a detailed examination of how five groups of learners/users of Spanish (N=25, 5 at each level) organize and use different aspects of their linguistic competence. The five groups (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced, Superior and Native Speakers) perform language tasks involving three dimensions of language knowledge (verb lexis, sentence production, and metalinguistic judgments of grammaticality) and three aspects of language use (conversa- tional, descriptive, and narrative discourse). The book consists of eight chapters:
Chapter 1 (Introduction), Chapter 2 (Verb Lexis), Chapter 3 (Sentence Formation), Chapter 4 (Metalinguistic Judgments of Grammati- cality), Chapter 5 (Conversational Discourse), Chapter 6 (Descriptive Discourse), Chapter 7 (Narrative Discourse), and Chapter 8 (Linguistic Competence across Language Measures).
Chapters 2 to 7 follow a similar pattern, beginning with a (1) review of major theoretical concerns, (2)methods/procedures for studying the particular aspects of linguistic competence addressed in the chapter, (3) categories for analyzing the linguistic data, (4) quantitative/qualitative description of the performance of each lan- guage group, and (5) Summary and Conclusion. Chapter 8 establishes linguistic profiles for each language group and selected individuals by contrasting the variable performance across the six dimensions of linguistic competence.
ISBN 9783895867903. LINCOM Studies in Language Acquisition 22. 195pp. 2008.
