The role of multilingual competence on development of paremiological competence in first language (L1)

Abstract

Traditionally, little attention has been paid to the acquisition of phraseological units (PUs) in general, and of paroemias in particular, in didactic proposals and textbooks of Spanish and other foreign languages (LE). Therefore, the treatment of phraseology and paremiology in the teaching and learning of (E/A of LE) continues to represent a challenge for researchers and teachers, mainly in terms of methodological strategies focused on the didactics of these disciplines in the LE classroom. The study of UFs in LE A/E has become a field of its own called phraseodidactic, an emerging field within the field of phraseology, given the importance of these units in the process of acquisition and development of the communicative competence of the language user. However, the same does not happen with research focused on the acquisition of paremiological competence in LE A/E, that is, in what we will call "paremiodidactic". One of the major problems in this regard is that the absence of paremiological awareness in the mother tongue (LM) complicates the learning of these units in both LM and LE and even causes a fracture in communicative competence with native speakers of that community, which prevents adequate and fluent communication and comprehension in LE and seriously hinders the possibility of achieving a high proficiency in LE as indicated by the CEFRL levels. Added to this is the multilingual proficiency of today's students, who are forced by globalization to master several LE. In this paper, we analyze these issues and present a study on the multilingualism inherent in today's students, in order to find out the relationship between the paremiological proficiency and he multilingual proficiency of students in Spanish LM. The results are a privileged source of information for further research in paremiodidactic of foreign languages.