Interactional linguistics and teaching Spanish as a foreign language: an empirical study in the classroom

This article is based on the assumptions of interactional linguistics and combines elements of conversational analysis and applied discourse analysis in order to characterize communicative exchanges, as well as the strategies employed in negotiating meanings and constructing the interactional sense of B1 level students, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), for Spanish as a foreign language. The data used for the elaboration of this work were collected during the development of an ethnographic fieldwork (participant observation, self-observation, field diary elaboration, class monitoring, review of department programming and curriculum, analysis of class materials and others at the same level), carried out in a public education center in the city of Granada between January and June 2022. In total, thirty-seven hours of class in audio format were recorded and transcribed. The analysis of the data obtained is based on the concepts of interactional linguistics studies (Mondada, 2001; More and Nussbaum, 2013), discourse analysis (Gumperz, 1982; Calsamiglia and Tusón, 1999; Van Dijk, 2000; López, 2015), and conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974, 1977; Sacks, 1992; Tusón, 1997, 2002). The results extracted from this work help us to better understand the teaching-learning process in informal interactions in the Spanish classroom, as well as to guide our teaching activity to establish objectives, program activities, evaluate results, and develop in a more detailed way the oral communicative competence of our students.