Syntactic variation and Pan-Hispanic awareness in teachers of Spanish as a second language

Abstract

The increasing view of Spanish as a pluricentric language has raised awareness of its linguistic diversity also in the grammatical domain. The concept of Pan-Hispanism—the recognition that varieties different from Castilian Spanish can be acceptable as Standard Spanish—has been publicly implemented by the prescriptivist institutions. The goal of this article is to analyze the influence of Pan-Hispanism and awareness of syntactic variation in teachers of Spanish as a second language. To do so, we surveyed 264 native and non-native teachers of Spanish across the world through an online questionnaire where they had to (a) implicitly judge sequences which reflected grammatical phenomena of different diatopic varieties of Spanish, and (b) explicitly indicate which variety they used in their classes. The results show that, despite the advances and institutional efforts towards pluricentrism, awareness of Pan-Hispanism in grammar is still very low among teachers of Spanish, since most tend to reject grammatical uses that are alien to their own variety. The prevalence of the prestige of Castilian Spanish is linked to a still dominant Eurocentrism in the teaching of Spanish as a second language, thus showing the need for adopting a more tolerant and inclusive view of Spanish linguistic diversity.