FROM PRACTICE TO THEORY: ANALYSIS OF THE SPEECH ACT OF REQUESTING IN THE CORPUS DE APRENDICES DE ESPAÑOL (CAES) AND A PROPOSAL FOR BETTER PRACTICES

Abstract

This article analyzes the pragmatic competence in the Spanish interlanguage through the study of a speech act: the requesting. For that, 40 text productions from the Corpus de Aprendices de Español (CAES) (Instituto Cervantes and Universidade de Santiago de Compostela), made by Spanish as a Foreign Language (SFLE) A2 students, were examined quantitatively and qualitatively. The data was compared with a sample from 22 Spanish native speakers with the same social profile: male and female with high level studies and ages from 18 to 40 years old. Results show that Spanish learners know the characteristics of this speech act in the target language, but they do not recognise some linguistic and discourse patterns of its expression. For this reason, we propose some improvements for the teaching of the pragmatic component in the SFL classroom.