Domain of Spanish language (high level)

COMPETENCES: - To have and to understand knowledge that gives a base and chance of being original in the development and application of ideas, in an investigation context. - To be able to apply the acquired knowledge and their capacity of problems solving in new contexts or in little known bigger contexts (or multidisciplinary) related to their study area. - To be able to integrate knowledge and to affront the complexity of formulating judges based on an incomplete or limited information that includes reflections about social and ethics responsibilities related to the application of their knowledge and judges. - To be able to communicate their conclusions and knowledge and reasons which support them, to specialized and not specialized publics in a clear, not ambiguous, way. - To know the last two decades Spanish linguistic and literature panorama. - To analyze the Spanish recent linguistic and literature culture from an interdisciplinary point of view. - To apply methodological tools to the right teaching paperwork and the programming of Spanish in the national and international ambit. - To generate conscience of the necessary close relation of language and literature, like a reality that must be studied in the teaching processes and in the Spanish acquisition together. - To develop teaching skills in the Spanish ambit throughout a working system based in the close collaboration between the student and the teacher´s team. - To build a critic own speech that integrates the studied contains and the application of the used methodology. - To develop the necessary skills, strategies and abilities to work in an actual Spanish representative cultural texts corpus. - To discuss and analyze the actual linguistic and literature culture and based on representative literature texts and from other recent communicative and esthetic materials. - To relate the linguistic and literature contemporary Spanish contributions by other disciplines contributions, such as History, Philosophy or Law. - To generate and to evaluate didactic material to the Spanish teaching, particularly in high levels. - To develop investigator skills in the ambit of Spanish - To know and to review the relevant bibliography about the studied and worked questions. - To produce academic texts about the programmed subjects. - To know and to distinguish different discourse types. - To analyze the relation between normative speeches and the social use of the language. LEARNING RESULTS: It´s pretended an analytical and critical approach to some topics and social and cultural actual aspects, from the point of view of contemporary discourses, so that the students can proceed to a formal and thematic analysis of those discourses, with the goal of being able to explain, in a didactic, rigorous and original way, how these texts reflect some of the questions the Spanish actual society is worried about.

Regulatory discourses tend to propose conservative schemes in the language in different situations. They are not issued alone or primarily by academies, but by those with power in certain instances. The family, for example, constantly issues policy speeches: issues that must be said at the table and issues that should not be named, words not to be said in public, etc. The different groups and institutions that organize social life emit normative discourses: things that can be named in public discourses and things that cannot be named, ways to name people in public, what linguistic varieties can or can't be used, how and in what contexts, etc. Linguistic ecology seeks to account for the conditions under which the functioning of linguistic mechanisms is forced by certain groups, which impose semantic, phonetic or syntactic organizational schemes in favour of their own interests. That is, the actual use of the language is proposed under different sociological conditions by different actors who manage it as an instrument of their interests. The normative balance is presented in the face of the breaking of the standard and the relationship between all normative discourses, and the social use of the language that conditions its stability and evolution is studied. It is now debated whether the normative discourses of academies, opinion institutes and other centres of social power aimed at controlling the language in the face of the normative discourses of social groups and, above all, the most powerful and influential of the media, business and political propaganda, are useful. An example is the proliferation of English terms in other languages, like Spanish: many authors raise their voices against what they consider a plague; others consider that the system itself has a certain self-regulating capacity and that no normative discourse will be able to regulate the entry of English words into Spanish. Linguistic ecology also cares about the health of languages. This depends not only on the specific expressions of the speakers, but on the institutional and physical means on which it relies in this globalized world. In this sense, it is advisable to consider the dissemination of Spanish in the media, the geography of Spanish, the use of Spanish in international organizations, its history, the situation of its teaching in non-Spanish-speaking countries, and also its coexistence with other linguistic varieties. The program of this subject will be as follows: LESSON 1. The construction of the norm and norms 1.1. Introduction 1.2. The Royal Spanish Academy and the creation of the Spanish standard. The management of variation. The literary language as a mirror. 1.3. Example of normative discourse. 1.4. The situation of the different languages before the norm 1.5. The dissemination of Spanish: 1.5.1. Spanish in traditional media 1.5.2. New media 1.5.3. An example: the chat language 1.5.4. The language of advertising LESSON 2. Ecology in languages 2.1. Introduction 2.2. Linguistic sustainability 2.3. Substitution and extinction of languages 2.4. Languages in contact. Pidgins and Creole languages 2.5. Neology. English words 2.6. Spanglish LESSON 3. Academic language 3.1. Linguistics properties of academic texts 3.2. Academic genres LESSON 4. Linguistic Policy 4.1. Language policy and planning 4.2. Political correction and public discourse. Administrative euphemism. LESSON 5. Linguistic sexism 5.1. Sexism and language 5.2. The generic male 5.3. Sexist meanings of some Spanish words LESSON 6. Euphemism and Dysphemism 6.1. Manipulation of the referent: euphemism and disphemism 6.1.1. Taboo and interdiction 6.1.2. Euphemism 6.1.3. Dysphemism 6.2. Discourtesy strategies in the media 6.3. Verbal hostility in social networks: cyberspeak; netiquette

The course will be carried out from a point of view that allows presenting the more actual thoughts about the speech discourse with the application of this knowledge to the characterization of the different speeches discourses in its different modalities, taking into account its characteristics and its relation with social and cultural circumstances in which they have taken place. Classes will be theoretical and practical, and will be focused on promote the group work as much as the individual one. The teaching methodology includes, between others, the next options: - Oral expositions of the teacher, with audiovisual support - Critic reading of recommended texts for its posterior debate and analysis in class - Expositions and debates in class - Analysis of different types of speeches from different perspectives in which the teacher will take part, as much as the students - Exposition of the works elaborated by the students (in an individual or in a group way). Students will have the chance of attending individual or group tutorials, whose timetable will be fixed at the beginning of the course.