What does it mean to teach and learn Spanish for specific purposes? The difficulty of describing the specific uses of the language

Defining and explaining what specificity means in the use of language for teaching and learning is a complex communication action, given the lack of agreement on the definition of the term. In this field, we conducted a discourse analysis of the definitions and explanations offered by 20 expert teac...

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Autor principal: López Ferrero, Carmen
Formato: Artículo revista
Lenguaje:Español
Publicado: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires 2025
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Acceso en línea:https://revistascientificas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/filologia/article/view/16870
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Sumario:Defining and explaining what specificity means in the use of language for teaching and learning is a complex communication action, given the lack of agreement on the definition of the term. In this field, we conducted a discourse analysis of the definitions and explanations offered by 20 expert teachers of Spanish for specific purposes (EFE) about the concept of specificity. The results of the analysis show that the participants of the study use pragmatic and lexical linguistic resources that reveal difficulties in the formulation of definitions. On the pragmatic level, the most frequent marks of indescribability identified are various mitigating resources (constructions limiting the opinion to one’s own person or to a particular field, verbal constructions or modal discursive particles of doubt or probability, approximators or diffusives); on the lexical level, corrective reformulations, use of proformas and repetitions are observed. These pragmatic and lexical resources of indescribability are a reflection of the diversity of perspectives in the field under definition, that of specificity in the use of Spanish. The formulation of a precise description shared by teachers and researchers will contribute to further progress in the field.