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In:Applying Corpora in Teaching and Learning Romance Languages
Edited by Henry Tyne and Stefania Spina
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 122] 2025
► pp. 66–88

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Chapter 3
Teaching persuasion in Spanish for academic purposes

Mitigation and boosting strategies

 | Universitat Politècnica de València
Published online: 20 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.122.03car
Abstract
The three objectives of this chapter are: to help students to identify and classify the mitigation and boosting devices used in a corpus of Spanish academic papers on linguistics; to help students detect the collocations used with the most frequent mitigation and boosting devices; and to determine the benefits of this experiment in the teaching of how to use persuasion in Spanish for academic purposes. The method section describes how the corpus was analysed with a tool to tag metadiscourse markers. The results reveal that students were able to identify most of the Spanish mitigation and boosting devices and their collocations, but they had some difficulties in classifying and discussing their functions.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Teaching academic Spanish and metadiscourse
  • 3.Mitigation and boosting strategies
  • 4.Material and method
    • 4.1Material
    • 4.2Method
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Identifying and classifying the mitigation and boosting devices in an academic corpus on linguistics
    • 5.2Assisting students in detecting the collocations used with the most frequent mitigation and boosting devices
    • 5.3Determining the advantages of this experiment to teach students how to use persuasion in Spanish for academic purposes
  • 6.Conclusions
  • References
References (51)
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