1 Spanish: Vocabulario Para La Comida

How This Section Reimagines Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary

Language textbooks typically contain vocabulary lists around various themes, presumably teaching the most useful vocabulary students would need to know around that theme. This OER example is a vocabulary list for a unit on food.

Textbooks traditionally have focused on “universal” approaches to language, which often defaults to teaching dominant forms of knowledge. Spanish language textbooks have often defaulted to Castilian Spanish from Spain or attempt to teach a neutral Latin American Spanish. However, the Spanish language is incredibly diverse across regions across Latin America, Equatorial Guinea, and the United States.

Moreover, Spanish outside of Spain is a language of colonization. These forms of Spanish have evolved to unique regional variations that often integrate Indigenous words, whose etymologies are important context for understanding language variation and local culture. Unfortunately, many heritage speakers of Spanish have been told that their forms of Spanish are “wrong,” “too ‘Mexican,'” or otherwise invalidating their culture and their linguistic capital. What would a Spanish language textbook that rather celebrates students’ linguistic knowledges look like?

At ELAC, students most often speak or know variations of Mexican and Central American Spanish. For this example, I’ve created a basic vocabulary list for fruits and vegetables that includes foods that are common in the United States but also fruits that are less common locally but widely available in parts of Latin America. I draw inspiration here from having studied Nahuatl and Quechua, in which I learned a lot of vocabulary for fruits, vegetables, and other foods that I have never tried nor even seen in my life. These Indigenous language programs also emphasize the importance of certain crops to a community, the ways in which these crops are cultivated, the various preparations of these foods, and other culturally rich context that enable students to better connect with Indigenous culture, perhaps even their own Indigenous cultures. I also included vocabulary variations from the Caribbean and South America to also provide some additional Latin American variation in language.