Teaching the Relatedness of Spanish and Portuguese

An approach for showing the relatedness of Spanish & Portuguese to Sp lang students involves: speaking alternately in the two langs, inviting a native Portuguese speaker to talk to the class, showing slides of Portuguese-speaking countries, discussing culture, & illustrating similarities & differences between the two langs. Major points to stress: most Portuguese words have a cognate in Sp; differences in cognates often fall into patterns which can facilitate vocabulary learning; Eng -tion & -ity endings are similar in the two langs; most Ns have the same gender in the two langs; many Vs are similar; tense formation is closely analogous; Portuguese often uses the future subjunctive which has disappeared in Sp; Spanish ue & ie often correspond to Portuguese e ((iota)) & o ((open o)); similar words sometimes appear in different grammatical constructions or in different order; & some words are totally different in the two langs. Such a comparison may encourage students to study Portuguese