Enseñanza y Aprendizaje de la Fraseología en Español como Lengua Extranjera en la Universidad Argelina con Apoyo de la Inteligencia Artificial Generativa Teaching and Learning Spanish Phraseology in Algerian Higher Education with the Support of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The growing interest in current approaches to communicative foreign language teaching should encourage a stronger commitment to the didactics of phraseology in Spanish as a foreign language classroom and open the way for its systematic development and progression, given its contribution to learners` communicative competence. Because phraseology is at once linguistic, pragmatic, and cultural content, its impact of Spanish as a foreign language students is undeniable and goes beyond simple vocabulary enrichment to touch interactional routines and culturally appropriate ways of speaking. In fact, phraseological units such as idioms, collocations, and fixed expressions often carry meanings that cannot be understood by translating word-for-word, which makes explicit work on them particularly relevant in a communicative perspective. Within this framework, the present study aims to evaluate the effect of adopting texts that have been pedagogically adapted with the help of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on improving the teaching/learning process of phraseology in Spanish as a foreign language courses. This option is justified by the difficulty of finding authentic texts that present a sufficient variety of idiomatic expressions and fixed phrases to offer opportunities for explicit and systematic instruction, in line with current communicative and intercultural goals. The study, carried out over 9 sessions totalling 12 hours with 52 first-year students at an Algerian university, is based on a quasi-experimental model with an experimental group and a control group. In this sense, the research evaluates both the effectiveness and efficiency of the instructional intervention in developing phraseological competence within the experimental group by comparing performance before and after the treatment. Reading lessons built around these AI-generated and didacticized texts, and designed according to students` needs and proficiency level, made it possible to obtain clearly positive results in a relatively short time. Specifically, there was a measurable Improvement from 15% to 43,84% in the learners` comprehension, memorization, and contextualized use of Spanish phraseological units. These findings suggest that integrating GenAI-supported materials can significantly enhance explicit phraseology teaching in Spanish as a foreign language settings, while also offering teachers a flexible resource to adapt texts to different topics and levels without losing the richness of authentic-like input.