Papel de los diccionarios de colocaciones en la ensenanza de espanol como L2

It is generally acknowledged within the Spanish as second language (SSL) community that collocations need to be taught and that collocation dictionaries are useful. Nevertheless, no one has carried out yet any experimental study to investigate what kind of collocation information must be included into a dictionary and how to encode it for a user to take full advantage of it. We describe the results obtained from a small experiment in the use of collocation dictionaries in the teaching of SSL. More precisely, the goal tof this experiment is to verify whether the inclusion of semantic and syntactic information on collocations into the dictionary as well as examples of usage could correlate with a better performance on the part of learners. This is namely the premise underlying the Diccionario de colocaciones del espanol (DiCE). DiCE is based on the Explanatory and Combinatorial Lexicology (Mel.cuk et al. 1995), where collocations are assigned semantic labels and syntactic tags.lexical functions. In order to weigh up how useful this information is, we had to compare the DiCE with another dictionary which did not include this information: the only dictionary that has been published in Spanish which deals with collocations is the Diccionario combinatorio practico (DCP, Bosque 2006). The experiment was conducted on 25 learners of Spanish and 5 native speakers. Its goal was to evaluate whether the users of the dictionaries had better results with the dictionary that included semantic and syntactic information of each collocation. Since we needed to know their previous knowledge, we decided to organize the test according to three different criteria: 1. without any collocation dictionary; 2. with the DCP, and 3. with the DiCE. On the one hand, the results of the experiment are positive but, on the other, worrying. Positive because they confirm our premise: in general, students perform better when the dictionary includes semantic and syntactic information on collocations, and worrying because they show that in some cases, the performance of the students decreases when they use the dictionaries mentioned above. Further, more extensive studies are needed to investigate this phenomenon.