¿Hoy te has levantado o te levantaste? Treatment of dialectal variation in the presentation of past tenses in L2 Spanish textbooks published in Spain

Abstract

This study analyses the recognition of dialectal variation in L2 Spanish textbooks published in Spain with regard to the approach to describe the use of two tenses that convey past meaning: pretérito indefinido and pretérito perfecto compuesto. This language feature has been traditionally regarded as one that differentiates between the varieties of Spanish spoken on each side of the Atlantic, thus allowing the study of the variety preferred by authors. The findings reveal that most textbooks tend to favour the local variety. This trend, however, has been changing steadily over the past years, as progressively more textbooks acknowledge dialectal variations in the use of Spanish past tenses. The subjective nature of the semantic scopes of these two tenses and the fact that their deployment frequently depends on the choice of the speaker are largely neglected by most of the materials analysed. This research aims to raise awareness about the ideological nature of textbooks and the standard language ideologies often entrenched in them, while raising attention to dialectal diversity and language variation in second-language instruction.