Merino and Méndez Vallejo at the 2022 PLL Conference. Creating pedagogical materials using spoken corpora to develop socio-pragmatic competence

In September 2022, Adriana Merino and Catalina Méndez Vallejo presented a paper at the Pragmatics and Language Learning Conference, organized by the National Foreign Language Resource Center at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the Center for Applied Second Language Studies at the University of Oregon, which took place online on September 12-14, 2022. The conference’s main theme was Teaching and Learning Interactional Pragmatics in a Digital World and included topics in pragmatics, discourse, interaction, and sociolinguistics in their relation to second and foreign language learning, education, and use. Adriana and Catalina contributed with a paper on Interactional and Instructional Pragmatics. Their talk was based on data-driven pedagogical materials (DDL) created for Spanish language learners in higher education, using corpora of spontaneous, natural conversations, and interviews between NS/NS and NNSS/NS of Spanishes in different settings (e.g., academic, work, social encounters). The presenters claimed that these language samples, both in video and/or audio-taped, provide a unique view of language use and can be used to complement language courses at various levels of proficiency.