Español académico a través de la guía académica para estudiantes internacionales de la Universidad de Alicante

Resum

This study is carried out in the field of the Acquisition of Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFL) for academic purposes, a growing interest área due to increasing university exchanges and the internationalisation of our students. This field has been gained momentum since the Vázquez’ first studies (2001, 2004, 2005) and is becoming more important in recent years. At the University of Alicante (UA), within the research group on Acquisition and Teaching of Second and Foreign Languages (ACQUA), we have been working along these lines since 2010 through offering Courses of Academic Spanish for foreign students, which go for their sixth edition (Gil del Moral 2014), as well as through three Research Projects on university teaching, during the academic years 2013-14, 2014-15 y 2015-16 (Pastor 2015a, 2015b, 2016). Building on this framework, this paper aims, firstly, to analyse the reception of the Guía académica para estudiantes internacionales of the Faculty of Arts (FA), which was the result of the second Research Project mentioned and, secondly, to determine its benefits for the acquisition of the language and the academic performance. This mixed method study obtained the data through an opened-ended questionnaire for the international exchange students of the FA at UA during the first and second semester of the current academic year 2015-2016. Results show the usefulness of the Guía, which have been valued positively by the students.