On the teachability of nominal compounds to Spanish leaners of English for Specific Purposes (original) (raw)

Nominal compounds in ESP are complex and ubiquitous structures difficult to manage by Spanish learners due to syntactic and semantic constraints, and fostered by cross-linguistic influences between both languages. By providing training on the comprehension and use of eight categories or semantic spaces of nominal compounds, the development of a group of Maritime English learners was studied. Three tests (a pre-treatment, a posttreatment and a delayed post-treatment test) were administered to address the main issue of whether simple nominal compounds (i.e., two noun compounds) are teachable and easily learnable grammatical structures. Likewise, this paper aims to study the influence of instruction on the comprehension of nominal compounds, the degree of comprehension difficulty each semantic space implies, and the role of both context and language proficiency in the whole process. Results show, on a first basis, that instruction proves to be useful but not fully successful. Moreover, data obtained report the existence of more and less acquisition-resistant compounds, which allows for the ranking of most and least teachable nominal compounds; context proves to be helpful in hypothesis testing and meaning disambiguation; and, finally, the proficiency variable may be a relevant issue but needs further study and discussion.