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Oral and written language are constantly interrelated in literate communities. In this paper, we examine the repercussions of teaching argumentative oral discourse on the development of argumentative writing and vice versa. The participants were seventh-grade students, who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: the Oral-1 group, which received an oral language intervention first, followed by a written language intervention; the Esc-1 group, which received the written language intervention first, followed by the oral intervention, and the control group, who attended regular Spanish Language and Literature classes. We assessed measures of both oral and written argumentative discourse at pretest, posttest-1, and posttest-2 to determine the development of both intramodality and intermodality skills. The results showed that intramodality effects were larger for the written than for the oral language intervention. Both interventions produced intermodality effects. It is concluded that the teaching of argumentative discourse should incorporate the bidirectional influences between the oral and written modalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses three Spanish focus constructions: clefts, the Det+N+ SER construction (e.g. la verdad es que...), and the lo+ADJ+SER construction (e.g. lo bueno es que...). Since their status in the oral-written dimension is still ambiguous and it has even been proposed some closeness with the written language, the research focused on their frequency in an oral corpus of Mexican Spanish, as well as their discourse functions. The data collected shows that these constructions are more frequent in the telenovela, while among non-fictional genres they are linked to those situated within the communicative immediacy space (v. Koch y Oesterreicher 1985). Their functions are grouped in two dimensions: micro- and macrotextual; the latter being the prevailing one since by using these constructions the speaker organizes and marks topical lines in discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely accepted that in oral exchanges with, for example, family members, friends, and co-workers, speakers of Chilean Spanish alternate between verbal tuteo and verbal voseo. In this paper, drawing on a corpus of conversational interactions between relatives and friends from Santiago, I examine the relative frequency with which these speakers use verbal voseo in relation to verbal tuteo, and I explore the social and linguistic factors that determine the variation, paying particular attention to the parameters that affect the use of verbal voseo. In addition, I compare the distributions observed here with those observed in previous studies that base their analyses on corpora that contain less natural communicative contexts. The results indicate that, in spontaneous conversational interactions, the speakers use verbal voseo with a frequency much greater than the frequency with which they use verbal tuteo as well as the frequencies observed in previous studies. This, and the fact that verbal voseo is conditioned by an interaction between the gender and the age of the speakers, as well as by the specificity of their interlocutors, shows that speakers of Chilean Spanish born in Santiago assign covert prestige to verbal voseo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]