Resumen

MARTINS VIEIRA, Isabel  y  GARCIA ROMERO, Marisol. Grammatical Knowledge of the Gerund: A Study of  Two Groups of Venezuelan Undergraduates. Núcleo [online]. 2008, vol.20, n.25, pp.199-220. ISSN 0798-9784.

This research was conducted within the framework of grammar pedagogy. Its aim was to examine what two groups of undergraduate students have learned about the non-periphrastic gerund in their mother tongue, Spanish. The methodology applied was a written test given to 50 students from the first year of scientific and technological courses at the Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB) and to 50 advanced students from humanistic courses at the Universidad de Los Andes (ULA-Táchira). The data were interpreted by means of content analysis, taking into consideration both grammatical criteria and type of language used by the students in their answers. The results show that the two groups mostly used morphological criteria and metalanguage for conceptualizing, whereas for grammatical reasoning they used semantic criteria and informal language. Also, there were no considerable differences regarding both declarative and procedural knowledge of the gerund between beginning students from scientific courses and advanced students from humanistic courses. A general conclusion could be that the knowledge and the strategies put into practice by these undergraduates to correct sentences with gerunds reveal that their formal knowledge of the non-periphrastic gerund is memory-based and fragmented and not very operative when it comes to correcting the grammar of their own texts.

Palabras clave : L1 pedagogy; grammar pedagogy; metalinguistic reflection.