Dislocation in the Oral Discourse of Slovene Students of Spanish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

Although dislocation is one of the key mechanisms of information structuring in Spanish and reflects as such the linguistic and the pragmatic competence of every speaker, even more so of a learner of Spanish as a foreign language, it usually receives little attention in didactic guidelines and materials. In order to contribute to alleviate such deficiency, in the present study we are looking to determine how university students of Spanish whose native language is Slovene use this structure in their oral discourse. Therefore, we briefly describe the distinctive characteristics of dislocation in Spanish and in Slovene, we examine the place it currently occupies in teaching Spanish as a foreign language and, foremost, we analyse the oral interaction of 58 Slovene-speaking students as documented in the corpus of the PRACOMUL project. We believe that it is only by knowing with which communicative purposes learners use this mechanism, as well as by identifying grammatical inconsistencies and discourse inadequacy issues, that it will be possible to raise awareness about the importance of this and other information structuring means and progress toward a more systematic and pragmatically oriented treatment in their teaching and learning in Spanish as a foreign language.