La traducción como herramienta pedagógica en ELE: un estudio de caso con estudiantes universitarios italófonos de mediación lingüística sobre las perífrasis verbales

In this paper, we set out to investigate the potential of translation as a pedagogical tool in the field of Spanish language teaching, with particular reference to Italian-speaking university students. For many decades, translation as a teaching technique has been hindered by the fact that it was not in line with the communicative approach that has long characterised language teaching. Following the publication of the Companion Volume (2020) of the Common European Framework of Reference for Foreign Languages, the concept of translation framed from a pedagogical point of view has come to the fore once again. In particular, our aim is to examine the extent to which translation can contribute to the process of learning Spanish as a foreign language by addressing a grammatical issue that is often problematic for Italian-speaking learners, namely verbal periphrases. We will present the results of an experiment carried out with students of the university degree in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, in order to observe what difficulties they have encountered when carrying out translation tasks for pedagogical purposes between two cognate languages (Spanish-Italian). In this way, we will be able to speculate on the viability of translation as an effective pedagogical tool in the field of current trends in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language.