Pragmatic and Emotional Perspective in the Short Story “La mano de la niña” by Mercedes Formica: Linguistic Tools for Teaching Affective Expression in Spanish as a Foreign Language (B2)

Abstract

This article addresses the socio-emotional component in the teaching of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) at upper-intermediate levels (B2), based on a classroom practice carried out with 12 students. It is grounded in the premise that understanding and expressing emotions are key to developing students’ communicative competence and ethical awareness. To this end, the short story “La mano de la niña” by Mercedes Formica is proposed as a teaching resource to work on the affective and reflective dimension, with particular attention to emotional vocabulary and the linguistic strategies used to convey feelings. Following the classroom work with the text, students’ oral and written productions demonstrated how they express judgments, emotions, and evaluations using structures appropriate to the B2 level. The results suggest that the use of literary texts enhances both comprehension and language production while fostering empathy, critical reflection, and social awareness regarding situations of injustice and inequality. This experience shows that integrating a socio-emotional approach in Spanish language teaching contributes to more meaningful learning and to the development of interpersonal skills and ethical values essential in multilingual and multicultural contexts.