Chapter 7

El desarrollo de la competencia prosódica en el marco de tareas de mediación lingüística

La mediación, como modo de comunicación y actividad comunicativa de la lengua, puede resultar útil para el desarrollo del control fonológico y, en particular, de la entonación. Habida cuenta de la escasa conciencia metalingüística que los hablantes con una competencia en desarrollo suelen poseer sobre la entonación, esta puede ser origen de numerosos malentendidos o problemas de comunicación. El entrenamiento de los aprendientes en tareas de mediación que tengan por objeto facilitar la comprensión mutua en la construcción conjunta de conocimiento y minimizar el impacto socioafectivo de los enunciados puede ayudar a dominar los sutiles resortes implicados en este rasgo prosódico. En relación con estos presupuestos, se plantean aquí algunos criterios pedagógicos relativos tanto a la realización de tareas de aprendizaje como al desarrollo de instrumentos de evaluación en escenarios de mediación aplicados al aprendizaje de español como lengua adicional y, en concreto, de la entonación como recurso significante en la realización de determinados actos de habla mediante esquemas oracionales interrogativos.

Although already present in the additional language arena for some time now, mediation has increasingly captured more attention in recent years especially due to the enhancement of its construct by the CEFR Companion Volume (Council of Europe, 2020; hereafter CEFR-CV). Within this framework, mediation stands out — together with reception, production, and interaction — as an attempt to overcome the previous paradigm of independent language skills as well as to relate language learning to language use following an action-oriented approach (Sánchez Cuadrado, 2022). Since mediation heavily relies on the other three modes of communication and comprises a vast array of communicative activities, it offers a great opportunity to develop all language learners’ competences, including their pronunciation or, in CEFR-CV’s terms, their ‘phonological control’ (both the articulation of sounds and prosodic features). In this view, pronunciation shifts from a more traditional focus on accent and accuracy to the ability to convey meaning. In other words, intelligibility in its full realisation now becomes the major goal when dealing with pronunciation in language teaching. In the first part of this chapter, we explore how oral mediation tasks, specifically those related to cognitive and relational mediation, may prove useful to work on this linguistic competence, together with some considerations on the balance between specific task-fulfillment criteria and qualitative features of the language when creating assessment rubrics. Then, we focus on one prosodic feature, i.e. intonation, that clearly stands out in communicative language learning, although it has sometimes been overlooked in language teaching. As Cook clearly informs, with intonation mistakes “the listener does not realise you have made a straightforward language mistake like choosing a wrong word but ascribes you the attitude you have accidentally conveyed” (Cook, 2016, p. 106). We hold that learners who engage in mediation tasks, especially those involving mediating concepts in cooperative learning scenarios and facilitating communication in delicate situations and disagreements (CEFR-CV, 2020), can benefit from intensive training on intonation patterns present in certain language functions such as “confirmation checks” or “intervening diplomatically”. These language functions are crucial when establishing the right conditions for peer collaboration or when helping others cope with interpersonal affective problems, as the mediator must avoid the possible negative impact that their intervention may wrongly imply. Using the right intonation is of paramount importance in order to achieve this. Finally, drawing on previous work on intonation within the field of teaching Spanish as an additional language such as Lahoz Bengoechea (2007, 2012), some methodological suggestions are provided to work on intonation patterns of questions when mediating, specifically those involved in different speech acts such as requesting clarification, asking display questions or persuading.