Corpus linguistics and dialogues of Spanish language learning materials: an analysis of the directive speech acts in the context of service encounters

Abstract

This paper was developed in order to compare the directive speech acts present in the dialogues of Spanish course books adopted by the Federal University of Alagoas and in the spontaneous oral corpus found in Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The aim of this study was to analyze the linguistic and discursive differences in the formulations of directives in both materials and highlight problems related to the artificiality of the dialogues devised for educational purposes. From this analysis, it was attempted to justify the precarious conditions to develop pragmatic competence in students of Spanish as a foreign language which are influenced, among other factors, by the lack of teaching materials that present more realistic and spontaneous language samples. The results showed linguistic differences between the two materials under analysis. These differences revealed a considerable gap between spontaneous oral speech and dialogues designed in Spanish teaching materials.