This research aims to investigate the presence in textbooks of varied material in terms of geolectal equivalents and its perception by teachers of Spanish as a foreign language. In order to examine potential differences in their approach, a pedagogical framework-based task was designed to study a corpus of 100 ELE teachers’ evaluations (50 from Colombia and 50 from Spain) and examine their consciousness and dissimilarities regarding pragmatic correctness when expressing addresses and greeting headings in electronic messages. The results show that native teachers tend to consider as correct the stimuli of peninsular Spanish or of their own variety, while those representing different geolectal variations of Spanish tend to score very low, even being considered as inter or intralinguistic error.
This research studies a group of Chinese university students of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to analyse the macro- and microstructure of their emails and their pragmatic competence. In order to study the features and context adequacy of their email communication, a corpus of 200 emails written by 100 second-year students (sophomores) and 100 fourth-year students (seniors) was analysed to identify the uses and preferences concerning subject lines and opening and closing moves and to investigate the uses and functions of strategies related to disagreement in their communication to a faculty member. Findings show that both Chinese groups lacked standardisation in relation to the use of subject line and opening and closing moves. Data also proved that Chinese EFL emails were inappropriate due to insufficient mitigation, lack of acknowledgment of the imposition involved and lack of status-congruent language.
The speech act of disagreement is an area that has received scant attention in the field of interlanguage pragmatics. However, in academic communication the strategies employed in this act of speech precede the development of an argument, a textual genre that is considered central to scholastic positioning. The less equitable the power relationship between the parties (between peers, between teacher and group of students, etc.), the stronger the illocutive intensity of this act. This study aims to investigate the strategies used in an unequal situation (student/lecturer) by Chinese learners of Spanish as a second language in order to perform the speech act of disagreement in their second language. Data relating to 149 Chinese university students were gathered by means of a pedagogical framework-based task in which they had to write an email to their lecturer expressing their disagreement. To identify their sociopragmatic knowledge in a digital environment and its adequacy in an academic Spanish context, the microstructure of their writings was examined for pragmatic moves related to politeness and level of directness. Our results suggest that the Chinese students analysed in the study did not adjust to an appropriate register or manner in academic Spanish.
Studies of how adult Chinese speakers express disagreement at work or in business have a well-established tradition; whereas, studies on young students and university lecturers are scarcer. In general, the description of relationships with authority figures has been characterised by evidence of greater distance and a greater rituality than equivalent Western uses. The objective of this work is to verify whether, in a mutated communicative situation, students express their opposition to lecturer via email using predominantly indirect and attenuated linguistic forms—as might be expected—or whether linguistics changes are evident. For this purpose, 149 university students wrote a letter to their language lecturer in which they express their disagreement with the grade received. The results of the analysis reveal that, contrary to what was predicted, acts of direct speech are prevalent.
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