Social construction and SFL: metalinguistic reflection, interculturality and pragmatic discourse competence in mobile students

The purpose of this study is to seek to improve the Spanish as a foreign language teaching/learning process through linguistic and multidisciplinary research, interrelating the theoretical foundations of text linguistics, gender discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics and social pedagogy. The theoretical framework warranted experimentation with an action re-search proposal carried out with mobile Italian students during the 2016/2017 academic year. The aim of the study was to develop a meaningful learning process to Spanish as a foreign lan-guage at beginner levels, in which social construction, grammatical learning and the develop-ment of intercultural pragmatic discourse competence adapted to the communicative needs of the learner are integrated holistically. From the treatment of gender stereotypes through the grammatical phenomenon of the feminisation of professions in Spanish, a didactic propos-al was articulated that emphasised the importance of promoting, at beginner levels, critical intercultural communication competence (ICC) using online journalistic texts that enable the learner to observe and learn to analyse elaborated linguistic schemas that are fostered in the sociocultural environment of communicative interaction and determine linguistic use.