A didactic approach to develop lexical competence: the use of Diccionario ejemplificado del Español de Cuba

Abstract

The aim of the article is to expose the potential of the Exemplified Dictionary of Cuban Spanish (TRISTÁ; CÁRDENAS, 2016) from a didactic approach, whose practical significance is given in the social feasibility it possesses for the teaching of the lexicon in the cuban context and, specifically, of a type of phraseological unit: routine formulas. The motivation for writing this article derives from the growing interest in the study of the phraseological unit’s representative of the cuban modality of Spanish, based on the consultation of the lexicographical repertoires contributed by the prestigious Cuban authors Tristá Pérez and Cárdenas Molina. The methodology employed is a bibliographical review with a qualitative approach. In this contribution, we adopt some of the approaches provided in our review published in 2019, on the Exemplified Dictionary of Cuban Spanish. The results show that the didactic use of the analysis of the corpus offered by the researchers is relevant for the knowledge and teaching of the Cuban variant of Spanish to non-Spanish-speaking students in a situation of immersion at the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba. It is concluded that the accumulation of information gathered in the two volumes makes it possible to enrich the lexical competence of the students. The study carried out on the notion of lexical competence makes it possible to define it as the wealth of vocabulary and the degree of general lexical mastery that the user of a language possesses and employs in his or her linguistic production.