%0 Journal Article
%T "William E. Bull (1909-1972) y la ense anza del espa ol como lengua extranjera" ["William E. Bull (1909-1972): Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language"]
%A Barry L. Velleman
%J Revista Argentina de Historiograf¨ªa Ling¨¹¨ªstica
%D 2009
%I Revista Argentina de Historiograf¨ªa Ling¨¹¨ªstica
%X William Emerson Bull (1909-1972) was a Professor of Spanish Linguistics in a number of US universities. In his books and articles Bull researched such areas as the frequency of the Spanish ¡°tenses,¡± the semantics of the adjective, the validity of the traditional verb paradigm, and the semantic contrasts between ser and estar. His other works include a set of 472 posters designed to illustrate Spanish semantic contrasts (Visual Grammar of Spanish, 1961); Time, Tense, and the Verb (1960), a study of the so-called ¡°tenses¡± of the verb; and Spanish for Teachers: Applied Linguistics (1965), a teaching manual which is still cited in many recent studies. Bull¡¯s pedagogical text Communicating in Spanish (1974) was innovative for both its carefully planned structure and the rigor of its ingenious language descriptions.Bull¡¯s work is a reaction against the formal structuralism of descriptive linguistics, favoring a semantic approach in which the native speaker¡¯s production reflects an organization of objective reality which the foreign learner does not share. Bull also introduced an innovative application of concepts from mathematics and physics to language analysis. At a time when many Structuralists still distrusted the possibility of basing linguistic description on the meaning of objective reality, this is exactly what Bull did, producing a body of work that was immediately applicable to teaching. Bull¡¯s analyses constitute an attempt to provide English-speaking learners with a coherent description of the intuitions of the Spanish native speaker.
%K William E. Bull
%K language teaching
%K Structuralism
%K verb tenses
%K semantic analysis
%K pedagogy
%K grammar
%U http://www.rahl.com.ar/Revistas/I%20-%202009/velleman-RAHL-%281%292009.pdf