Rethinking the Lexical Unit in Spanish as a Foreign Language: A Psycholinguistic, Linguistic and Didactic Framework for Teaching Collocations

This article presents a theoretical and methodological synthesis of Marta Higueras García’s (2006) monograph Estudio de las colocaciones léxicas y su enseñanza en español como lengua extranjera, the author’s integrated account of collocations as a privileged type of lexical unit for Spanish as a foreign language. The article first outlines the psycholinguistic foundations of the proposal (cognitivism, the mental lexicon, the principles of idiomaticity and chunking), then the linguistic characterization of collocations (base–collocate structure, semantic compositionality, idiomaticity, restricted co-occurrence), and finally the methodological sequence for teaching them. Particular attention is paid to the author’s original distinction between prototypical and non-prototypical collocations, a distinction that resolves long-standing terminological disputes and has direct pedagogical consequences. The article closes with a discussion of the didactic principles, the materials designed for teacher training, and the empirical validation reported in the book.