Contributions of Research on Tempo-Aspectual Morphology in Second Language Acquisition to Teaching L2 Spanish

The difficulty of learning Spanish tempo-aspectual morphology is a long debated issue, which both researchers on second language acquisition (SLA) and experts on foreign language teaching have worked extensively for last decades, all of them guided by different theoretical linguistics approaches. The aim of this work is to present the state of the art of the relationship between SLA and Spanish L2 teaching regarding tempo-aspectual morphology. To that end, three reviews are done: first, a brief review of tense and aspect; second, a review of findings of the research on the acquisition of Spanish L2 perfective and imperfective past tenses from the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen 1991; Andersen & Shirai 1994, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colome 2020; Salaberry 2021) till nowadays; third, a review of two recent studies which analyse the link between findings in research on SLA and teaching Spanish as a second language (Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colome 2022; Comajoan-Colome 2022). Although research on tempo-aspectual morphological acquisition is supposedly related to innovative teaching strategies in the Spanish L2 classroom, recent analyses of the influence of SLA studies on second language teaching show that there is still work to do to link these two subdisciplines of applied linguistics (Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan-Colome 2022; Comajoan-Colome 2022). Our purpose is to bring to light the need to reinforce the cooperation between research on SLA and second language teaching to improve the experience in the classroom for both teachers and learners.