Pragmatic language instruction and beginner learners of Spanish: A discourse approach to pragmalinguistics

Abstract

This paper addresses pragmatic language learning in beginner Spanish as a Foreign Language students in an anglophone academic context. The focus of instruction is on learners’ mapping their linguistic knowledge to their pragmatic intentions in basic transactional contexts. Instruction is grounded in theory and research in the nature of language; Second Language Acquisition; Stages of Interlanguage and Discourse in a socio-cultural context. This paper discusses the effects of instruction on a group of learners’ performance of 14 functions in three transactional settings. A Discourse Analysis methodology was used to examine learners’ discourse in their role-plays with native speakers. The study includes a profile of the learners’ pragmalinguistic ability as well as their perceptions of the effects of instruction. The exploratory results seem to indicate that the learners were able to make appropriate linguistic choices to express their intentions in complete speech events with specific discourse features they are able to handle at their stage of interlanguage.