Marcadores discursivos indicadores de cortesía de la variedad mexicana. Un enfoque pluricéntrico para su enseñanza en ELE

Abstract

This article addresses the importance of teaching and acquiring conversational discourse markers in the development of L2 Spanish speakers’ communicative competence. It is assumed that discourse markers, in addition to connecting sentences and giving cohesion and coherence to a text, permit the inference of a speaker’s communicative intention, and sometimes function as indexes of verbal courtesy. Moreover, the validity of teaching Spanish from a pluricentric position is supported. Within this framework, conversational courtesy markers used in Mexican Spanish are explored in order to offer a categorization and some sample teaching activities for the L2 Spanish classroom. These materials are intended to be used by an instructor to explain the functions of the conversational courtesy markers in order to foster the expansion of student knowledge of other varieties of Spanish, to prompt reflection on differences between norms of verbal courtesy in different Hispanic cultural heritages, and to thus strengthen students’ pragmatic competence.