Las instrucciones de los manuales de español para extranjeros y su heterogeneidad discursiva

Resumo

Despite its relevance in second language learning, written instructions and procedures stand for one of the less explored fields in text and applied linguistics. This paper takes a discourse approach to a corpus of instructions from six Spanish language textbooks. Given the chosen corpus, this paper seeks to confirm the following hypotheses: instructions are heterogeneous in terms of their discourse genre, and depend on the methodological approach adopted by the textbook. Therefore, as will be shown, they tend to imply ambiguous and vague connotations. Results deriving from our analysis partially refute these assumptions. In fact, it is possible to find a mixture of descriptive and narrative sequences, commands and certain expressions that are commonly used in SLA, although they do not seem to be methodologically-driven. Additionally, some samples do not stick to a set of criteria used for textbooks design. Thus, the discourse features as shown in these instructions may obstruct both the readibility and comprehension of them, and therefore most desirable outcomes of the teaching/learning process.