This cross-sectional study in interlanguage pragmatics analyzes the requests employed by English-speaking learners of L2 Spanish, using data collected from university students at four different levels of language learning. The most common request strategies are first identified in a cross-linguistic analysis of Spanish and English and are then compared to the interlanguage data. The requests of lower-level students are found to be more idiosyncratic and pragmatically ambiguous than those of advanced learners, although not necessarily more direct. Advanced learners show signs of improvement, but still rely largely on L1 request behavior. Learners at all levels display more difficulties in areas in which there is cross-linguistic variation between the L1 and L2.

Although requests are the most widely studied speech act, there has not been extensive research on the requests produced by heritage speakers of Spanish in the United States. This study compares the requests of three groups: Spanish heritage speakers, Mexican native speakers of Spanish, and native speakers of English. The first research question examines the level of directness of the requests combined with the frequency of downgraders. The following two research questions analyzed separately the level of directness of the head act and frequency of downgrading mechanisms. Differences between the two L1 groups are found to be statistically significant for all three of the categories investigated. In contrast, the heritage speakers differ significantly from their Mexican monolingual counterparts in the level of directness of the head act, producing Spanish requests more in line with the tendency in English to employ indirect strategies. Although the heritage speakers differ from the L1 Spanish group on this one dimension, the fact that they share other characteristics with both L1 groups suggests the existence of a unique intercultural style. The findings of this study also indicate that heritage speakers display many of the same characteristics as L2 learners reported in previous research.

This article focuses on how the dictatorships and subsequent transitions to democracy are portrayed in recent history textbooks used in secondary schools in Chile and Spain. These periods are considered crucial because they have dramatically impacted the social and political landscape and have shaped the course of historical events at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The textbooks adapted are particularly revealing since they reflect the official version of history that is being passed on to a new generation. We have chosen four textbooks as our corpus, two from Chile and two from Spain. As our analytical framework we use analyses of Transitivity and Appraisal (systemic functional linguistics) to determine how participants and processes are represented and evaluated in the texts. The way authors silence some social actors while giving prominence to others is a strategy for constructing causality and historical explanations in textbooks.

During the period following the Spanish Civil War, the regime of Francisco Franco utilized an authoritative discourse rooted in Fascist ideology as a means for justifying absolute power and indoctrinating the masses. Perhaps the demographic group most heavily targeted by this aggressive campaign of propaganda was children, who in the eyes of Franco, had to be indoctrinated early before their noble feelings of youth were corrupted. This desire to reach out to the youth is evident in Así quiero ser: El niño del nuevo Estado, an elementary school textbook that imposes a rigid Fascist ideology. The totalitarian rhetoric of the text includes unyielding adoration of the Caudillo, a Utopian vision of reality, and covert strategies of persuasion and control that together comprise a powerful tool of manipulation. Taking into account both the sociopolitical context of the era and the genre of didactic literature, this critical discourse analysis of Así quiero ser incorporates the Bakhtinian notion of authoritative discourse with other approaches to analysing persuasive discourse, such as those employed by Kinneavy (1971), Harré (1985) and Menz (1989), among others.

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