Attitudes of English Speakears towards Thanking in Spanish

Contrastive study

Abstract

The main objective of this investigation is to understand the linguistic attitudes of native speakers of English towards the act of thanking in Spanish. Given that we work within the field of Applied Linguistics in the teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language, we extracted those situations which most frequently occur in textbooks that demonstrate the act of thanking in Spanish. We created a questionnaire which allowed us to observe and compare contrastively the perceptions and attitudes between British and Americans, both male and female, with that of their Spanish counterparts, when faced with the presence or absence of the speech act studied, i.e. thanking. The questionnaire was administered to a sample of 300 students, divided equally into the three groups of nationalities used in the investigation. From the material collected, it was possible to make a qualitative and quantitative analysis of data. The results, based on statistical analysis, indicate that there are significant differences in attitudes and perceptions, between the groups of British and American male and female informants towards the absence of thanking in the Spanish culture.