Chapter 5 draws on the description of the meaning and form of directive speech acts reported in Chapter 4 in order to offer a collection of practical activities for their teaching. Activities will be grouped attending to the semantic, formal, or contrastive aspects that need to be taught. Some of them will be designed to improve the students recognition and production of those illocutionary constructions and linguistic realisation procedures which allow the communication of the different illocutionary forces.

Others will be devoted to help teachers and textbook developers show students (1) the motivation of the form of directive speech acts in their underlying semantics and force dynamics, (2) the role of conceptual metonymy in the production of directive speech acts, and (3) the existence of families of speech act base constructions whose illocutionary force can be further modulated by means of linguistic realisation procedures.

Chapter 2 provides an accessible outlook on contemporary research on speech acts, explaining and illustrating the latest pragmatic, functional, conversational, and cognitive/constructional contributions to the understanding of illocutionary acts. The chapter advocates a contrastive, cognitive/constructional theory of speech acts, showing how this approach is capable of integrating pragmatic, semantic, and formal aspects of speech acts into a unified and comprehensive account that is compatible with current psycholinguistic knowledge on speech acts production and understanding. This chapter sets the theoretical foundations for Chapters 4 and 5, offering a fully-fledged theoretical proposal on the semantic and formal features of directive speech acts in terms of illocutionary constructions and metonymic operations. The semantic side of the constructions is captured in the form of illocutionary ICMs, and the formal side takes the form of inventories of base constructions and linguistic realisation procedures. It is further argued that speakers can modulate the explicitness of their directive speech acts through (multiple-source)-in-target metonymies.

The final chapter summarises the main contributions made in each of the chapters of this book, connects them to current trends, and specifies the needs for future research. Among the latter, it is suggested that the findings of the present investigation could be extended to the analysis of non-directive speech acts (e.g. commissive, expressive, representative, etc.). Additionally, it is argued that empirical validation from other disciplines and from experimental analyses, both in the fields of psycholinguistics and foreign language learning/teaching, will also be needed to lend a stronger support to the claims presented in this book.

Chapter 3 reports the results of a study which looks into a collection of ten textbooks for advanced EFL students in order to assess their treatment of directive speech acts. This chapter considers aspects related to (1) the quantitative representation of directive speech acts in the textbooks (i.e. determining if there is a balanced portrayal of the most frequent categories of directive speech acts), and (2) the qualitative treatment of directive speech acts (i.e. assessing if the depiction of directive speech acts in EFL textbooks has incorporated the main research advancements described in ). In particular, this chapter offers an account of the treatment of constructional, conversational, and contrastive aspects of directive speech acts in EFL textbooks for advanced EFL Spanish students.

Chapter 4 applies the cognitive-constructional theoretical model of speech acts proposed in Chapter 2 to the task of providing an exhaustive description of the meaning and form of the six directive speech acts under consideration (i.e. orders, requests, beggings, suggestions, advice acts, and warnings). The ensuing portrayal of directive speech acts also includes contrastive considerations about their linguistic realisations in Spanish (L1) and English (L2). The description of the form-meaning constructional nature of the aforementioned directive speech acts takes the form of a Cognitive Pedagogical Grammar. Information is, thus, presented in an accessible, largely jargon-free manner, so that it can be used by teachers and textbook developers for the explicit teaching of the workings of directive illocutions to advanced Spanish EFL students. For each directive category, this chapter offers relevant information about its semantics (i.e. know-what) and its formal configurations (i.e. know-how).

This chapter offers an introduction to the topic of the book. It includes some reflections on the relevance of mastering the use of directive speech acts for EFL learners. It describes the objectives of the investigation, the methodological decisions taken for the study, and the corpus of data used for the analysis. Finally, it offers a summary of chapter contents.