¿Qué me recomiendas? Teaching the Pragmatics of Recommendations

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Nick Blaker
Matthew Pollock

Abstract

Research in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has demonstrated that pragmatics is a difficult area for L2 learners to navigate without explicit and/or implicit instructional intervention (Taguchi and Roever, 2017). Thus, the present instructional unit provides foreign language (FL) instructors of Spanish with a variety of activities designed to aid learners of Spanish in the process of acquiring the speech act of recommendations. This speech act requires both knowledge of pragmalinguistic (e.g., subjunctive conjugations) and sociopragmatic (e.g., formal vs. informal social contexts) strategies, and therefore, the current unit begins with metapragmatic instruction (i.e., awareness raising) through identification of recommendation strategies and culminates in role-plays of varying situations along the informal to formal scale that require use and knowledge of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic strategies in Spanish. Suggestions for assessment and extension of the unit are discussed and encouraged for implementation into the Spanish FL classroom.

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