Una heurística para la enseñanza de los artículos españoles
A Heuristic for Teaching Spanish Articles

Summary/Abstract: The difficulty of Slavic students in learning Spanish articles is well known. However, in a context where L2 English (i.e. a language with articles) is increasingly present in the students’ linguistic repertoire, there are traits, such as definiteness, that are potentially transferable to L3 Spanish. However, there are other regularities, as is the case of English bare generic subjects, which hinder the transfer of knowledge and can result in L2 > L3 interference. Unlike what happens in Germanic languages, Spanish (and probably other Romance languages) do not normally take bare noun phrases as subjects. The only exception to this rule seem to be monadic verbs, since they allow bare postverbal subjects with partitive readings in the case of plural and uncountable nouns (not so with countable singular nouns). For this reason, we consider that it is possible to reduce the number of rules significantly if the article is taught as a syntactic requirement of Spanish subject noun phrases. This facilitating strategy aims at reducing the cognitive load of students whose mother tongue lacks an article system.

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