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In this article we will try to show five humorous signs used in Spanish linguistic jokes and that could be used in Spanish teaching. These signs are polysemy, homophony, paronymy, phraseology and diminutives. The election of jokes as a structure to use in teaching is based not only in the fact that it is the main humorous structure, but also in its easy to learn structure. As Attardo (2008) said, joke is the easiest humorous text type. Also, "joke is a humorous unit with no context and selfcontained, which has all the required information to be understood and enjoyed" (Martin, 2008: 37). The goal of this paper is to show how previously mentioned signs work in an internet extracted corpus, so we can get generalizations that can be used in Spanish teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of this study is to present a test to evaluate the pragmatic competence of Chinese students of Spanish as a foreign language. This article describes the process of creation of the test and presents the whole test for its use by Spanish language teachers. For the creation of this test, two empirical studies were carried out: a preliminary study and a main study. The preliminary study is an ethnographic study that starts from the exemplary generation method, whose final objective is to know the perception of the difficulty that Chinese students have. These students are studying in Spanish universities and are facing different communicative situations in their everyday life. Thus, this preliminary study serves as a starting point for the design of the main study, the elaboration of the test. For the design of the pragmatic comprehension test, a correlation or psychometric methodology is used, through which variables are described and their relationships are analysed from a representative sample of subjects. This paper shows a final product: a standardized test that meets the requirements of utility (authenticity, interactivity, impact, practicability and assessment, and scoring) proposed by Bachman and Palmer (1996) for language tests and psychometric reliability statistical requirements and validity. This pragmatic test is published in its entirety and exclusively in this journal so that it can be used by Spanish teachers and researchers with the aim of improving teaching and research in the acquisition of the pragmatics of Spanish as a foreign language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse discursive attenuation procedures that 52 students of Spanish as a foreign language of United States use. From a questionnaire, the answers linked to two communicative functions present in the Plan curricular del Instituto Cervantes were collected. In the first, participants had to decline an invitation from a friend, while, in the second, they had to refuse a request from a stranger. Although, initially, it was supposed to find a greater number of attenuation resources associated to participants' responses when these had relation to a larger social distance degree between interlocutors, results suggest that there are other factors that prevent the validation of this hypothesis. However, differences in the amount and type of attenuation mechanisms are found regarding both functions in two groups at an intermediate level of Spanish (the first one, between A2 and B1, and the second one, between B1 and B2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]