Teaching Standard Versus Non-Standard Spanish in a Study Abroad Program. Lektos: Interdisciplinary Working Papers in Language Sciences, Special Issue.

The question of teaching a standard dialect to Chicano students who are studying abroad has implications for teaching any standard versus nonstandard dialect. The University of Colorado has a program at the Universidad Veracruzana in Jalapa, Mexico, in which the policy is to teach standard Mexican Spanish (the cultivated norm of Mexico City) as an additional dialect to those students who already speak Chicano Spanish. One technique is to provide written exercises which develop the reading and writing skills of those students fluent in Colorado Spanish. Broadly speaking, the main differences between this dialect and standard Mexican Spanish lie in different pronunciations of the same lexical items and in the use of different lexical items for the same concept. Although the syntactic patterns of the two dialects are similar, there are certain recurring syntactic patterns in Colorado Spanish which can be termed nonstandard forms, calques or anomalous forms. Various types of exercises dealing with these dialect differences are used in the composition class: dictations, "proof reading" exercises, two-page compositions, and translation exercises. Four passages from student compositions are examined in this paper for instances of nonstandard usage. (Author/CFM)