Word selection criteria in teaching Spanish as a Second Language in Schools

Students taught in an educational system that uses a language of which the students know nothing or in which they have very little proficiency are faced with a double task. Students have to acquire basic communicative competence in the new language to enable them to interact with the members of the educational community; and they have to acquire specific competence in the communicative uses pertaining to the school setting, which have to do with the learning and teaching of the curriculum. These two competences are implemented in two different functional varieties of language: the basic interpersonal communicative language and the academic language. The two varieties differ at every level of expression, including the lexical level. In addition, their respective vocabularies contain a vast number of words. Therefore, instructors and curriculum developers alike need to carefully select the word range used in teaching. This paper reviews the different criteria used in the selection and ordering of words and offers a theoretical framework. Instructors and curriculum developers could utilize this framework as a basis when deciding which words to take into consideration when the two functional varieties (the basic language and the academic language) are taught in the classroom. The paper also includes a critique of a selection of words based on a set of criteria advanced in two samples of academic language from the oral register and the written register. The study confirms the operability of the two functional varieties as second languages in school settings. It argues for the necessity of creating repertoires of available words, technical words and academic words from current representative sets of basic language and academic language in Spanish. These repertoires could help in the rigorous planning of vocabulary learning by grade and thus serve as a springboard for the preparation of teaching materials.