Cómo dar cuenta del desarrollo de la competencia escritora en español L2 sigue siendo un tema relevante en el contexto de la Lingüística aplicada al ELE (Gª Parejo 1993, Pastor 1994, van Esch 2003, 2006, entre otros). En este trabajo investigamos si los aprendices que siguen un curso de lengua general mejoran su competencia escrita tras 120 h de clase de forma similar a lo propuesto en estudios longitudinales para otros formatos de cursos y combinaciones de lenguas. Siguiendo a Polio (2001), se recogieron muestras escritas de relatos de aprendices multilingües de nivel B1(MCER), en dos momentos (M1 y M2), más muestras de un grupo nativo de control para estudiar la fluidez y diversidad léxica en el género discursivo relato. Los resultados confirman las investigaciones previas: los aprendices mejoran en el M2 incluso por encima de los resultados de los nativos.

How to account for the development of Spanish L2 written competence in Spanish Second Language learning is a significant issue in the field or SLWriting (GªParejo 1993, Pastor 1994, van Esch 2003, 2006, among others). In this paper we investigate whether Spanish L2 students following a regular language course (with no special focus on writing) can improve their writing after 120 hours of tuition. Measures at two different times (M1, M2) were made in order to compare lexical density and lexical fluency in their L2 elicited narratives, following Polio (2001). Data from a control group of native speakers were also gathered. Results show that the more teaching hours followed by students, the better the results concerning type-token ratio and lexical diversity. In spite of the fact that these results seem to confirm previous research, a surprising fact was found: lexical diversity boosted significantly only at M2 equating -and even defeating- the native control group.