THE ROMANCE LINGUISTIC SYSTEM IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL COMPETENCE

Partakers of a globalized era in which, in addition to English, Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian or Portuguese have become internationally transcendent, this article intends to provide the tools to develop passive linguistic competence in Romance-language speakers-in particular of children-aiming to understand the general meaning of texts written in other languages of the same linguistic family. To do so, we resort to children's literature, a sort of literary production characterized by the use of simple language extremely useful for contrastive analyses of this kind. Using fragments from "Cinderella" written in a number of Romance languages, we apply EuroComRom's (2005) seven sieves. Knowing this turns out a key element to understand the logic-semeiotic order of the Pan-Romance textual structure, a linguistic fabric in which so singular languages such as Maltese language are involved.