“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar

habilidades orales en estudiantes de

Servicios Gastronómicos

What’s New? An Effective Technique to Enhance

Gastronomic Services Students’ Oral Skills

Bernardo Buduen Saborit

University of Granma. (Cuba)

bbuduens@udg.co.cu

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9932-8246

Eduardo Escalona Pardo

University of Granma. (Cuba)

epardo@udg.co.cu

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2832-8828

Rubén Escalona Pardo

Taller Territorial Electromedicina Manzanillo

ruben.escalona@nauta.cu

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0191-1984

Resumen: La sociedad cubana desarrolla

una Revolución Educativa para lograr una

cultura general y sana entre las personas. El

Sistema de Educación lleva a cabo acciones

para asegurar aprendizajes con calidad a

todos los ciudadanos. Es un desafío para las

Ciencias de la Educación orientar el

desarrollo y las transformaciones en cada

institución docente a partir de la actividad

docente. Por ello, este artículo centra la

atención en el desarrollo de las habilidades

orales de los estudiantes en inglés. Se

deriva de un trabajo de investigación para

obtener el título de doctor del autor principal.

El problema científico radica en las

insuficiencias que tienen los docentes de

inglés de la especialidad de Servicios

Gastronómicos en Manzanillo, que dificultan

Abstract: The Cuban society develops an

Educational Revolution to achieve a general

and wholesome culture among people. The

System of Education carries out actions to

assure learning with quality to all citizens. It is a

challenge for the Sciences of Education to

guide the development and transformations in

each teaching institution departing from

teachers´ activity. For this reason, this article

centers the attention on the development of

students´ oral skills in English. It is derived

from a research work to get the principal

author´s doctor´s degree. The scientific

problem lies on the insufficiencies English

teachers of the Gastronomic Services specialty

in Manzanillo have, which hinder the

development of oral expression to interact with

clients during the gastronomic service in their

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Bernardo Buduen Saborit | Eduardo Escalona Pardo | Rubén Escalona Pardo

el desarrollo de la expresión oral para

interactuar con los clientes durante el

servicio gastronómico en su realidad

objetiva. El propósito es resaltar los

elementos teóricos que justifican la utilidad

del "¿Qué hay de nuevo?" técnica como un

recurso eficaz para desarrollar esta

habilidad. La técnica, diseñada por los

autores de este artículo, se aplica en la

práctica pedagógica para corroborar su

eficacia. Este es el mayor aporte del trabajo

de investigación. Entre los métodos

científicos utilizados están el

análisis-síntesis, la observación, el análisis

de documentos, la prueba pedagógica; así

como métodos estadísticos. Como resultado,

se abren nuevos caminos para la

participación de los estudiantes en

interacciones comunicativas espontáneas,

creativas y naturales.

objective reality. The purpose is to highlight the

theoretical elements that justify the usefulness

of the "What's new?" technique as an effective

resource to develop this skill. The technique,

applied in the pedagogical practice to

corroborate its effectiveness. This is the

greatest contribution of the research work.

Among the scientific methods used are

analysis-synthesis, observation, document

analysis, pedagogical test; as well as statistical

methods. As a result, new ways are open for

the participation of students in spontaneous,

creative and natural communicative

interactions.

Palabras Clave: expresión oral, interacción

comunicativa, Servicios Gastronómicos.

Keywords: oral skill, communicative

interactions, technique, Gastronomy Services.

Introduction

Learning the English language in Cuba has become a priority at every level of

Education. Economic globalization and technological advances are giving the

possibility to exchange with people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

(Escalona, 2020). This situation has a strongly effect among students from the

Gastronomic Service specialty because they are committed to lively interaction with

people from different parts of the world who communicate in the English language

while requesting a given service. For this reason, it is a necessity for each of them

to develop skills, mainly in the spoken language.

Conversation consists of spoken language. According to (Pridham, 2001) in

the Language of Conversation, not only do the features of spoken language differ

from the features of written language, but the methods used to analyze conversation

have to consider that conversation exists within a social context which determines its

purpose and shapes its structure and features. Though we are largely unaware of

the rules that govern conversation, we operate daily using them.

It is obvious; therefore, that learning to speak also means learning to talk.

Sometimes the students do the talking in class yet they are not involved in authentic

conversations, many times they are not practicing in real situations or they are just

repeating some monologue or even a dialogue they learned by heart.

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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos

The article Teaching Conversational Skills Intensively states that one of the

biggest challenges to current language teaching methodology is to find effective

ways of preparing students for spontaneous communication. As one answer to this

challenge, a new type of language lesson, the conversation class, has appeared

whose main teaching objective is to improve the students’ conversational skills.

(Thurrell,1994)

Here are some of the students’ problems for communicating through real-time

conversations:

• In using strategies for striking up a conversation.

• In using strategies for keeping a conversation going. (Students face problems

when they need to make contributions so that the conversation can take place.)

• In using strategies for closing a conversation. (Most of the times, the students

close the talk abruptly, thus affecting the flow of the exchange, even causing

them to be impolite.)

• In using strategies for subject changing.

• In taking turns. (Sometimes the students make undesired breaks or

interruptions. They do not wait until it is their time to do the talking.)

• In perceiving back-channeling and use the meanings derived from it to keep the

conversation going. (Sometimes the students cannot take advantage of the

possibilities face-to-face interaction provides for the participants to have

immediate access to feedback.)

• In completing adjacency pairs during the interaction. (The students have

problems to complete the adjacency pairs what might cause the conversation

even to stop.)

• In language use. (These problems occur when the students use language in

order to do the talking. The shortcomings appear basically in sound

pronunciation, intonation, pause, accent, vocabulary (choice of the right words to

say).

There have been different methods and approaches in foreign language

teaching for example grammar-translation, direct, audio-lingual and others. They all

have tried to solve students´ proficiency problems when speaking, but the one which

have been more effective is the communicative approach. With it, learners are

involved in real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition are

used, and this allows them to learn to use the language appropriately.

However, students with problems at the time of using the English language to

keep a conversation going are easily found in the English as a Foreign Language

classroom in the Gastronomic Service Specialty. For this reason, the problem of this

research lies in the insufficiencies of the English teachers of the Gastronomic

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Services specialty in Manzanillo, which hinder the development of oral expression in

English to interact with clients during the gastronomic service.

In Manzanillo, due to the growing demand for both international and national

tourism, this specialty finds a top place in the socioeconomic development of the

territory taking into account the different forms of employment that regulate the

country's labor policy, in which the polytechnic centers, particularly those of the

territory, play a fundamental role in the formation of the qualified force for the

progress of the services with quality, which demonstrates the social need for a

technician with a broad command of skills, both in the specialty and in the foreign

language.

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to analyze theoretical elements that

justify the usefulness of the "What's new?" technique as an effective resource to

develop the oral skill. This technique contributes to open opportunities where the

students are frequently involved in spontaneous, creative, natural and fun

communicative interactions.

Methods

This article is built on interviews with teachers of English to understand the

way they use to develop oral expression in class. They all have several years of

experience working with Gastronomic Service Students. The authors utilized the

bibliographical analysis method to study the contents related to the content under

analysis. They also applied the observation to corroborate the skills students acquire

by using the new technique elaborated.

For the development of the research, a random sample was selected, which

consisted of 62 students of the Gastronomic Services specialty in Manzanillo and 32

of them made up the sample, which represents 51.6% of the population.

Results and discussion

Trends in foreign language teaching in Cuba

According to Montano, (2008), the real objective in the history of foreign

language teaching has always been communication, but the linguistic and

psychological misconceptions that have existed do not allow for the creation of

methodologies that efficiently meet that objective. Structural linguistics, which,

coupled with one or another psychological theory, has dominated language teaching

for many decades, considers language in terms of its grammatical structure, without

much attention to its meaning and use. As a consequence, learners develop the

ability to produce grammatically correct sentences, but are unable to express their

views and opinions on a given topic

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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos

Mistakenly, the goal in many English classes is not communication, but the

knowledge of an isolated grammatical structure, of its use in communicative

practice. How many of the students in the classrooms use the correct form to ask for

a glass of water, ask for the time or for information about an address? How many

know when to speak, what to say, and how to express it properly?

Since the late 1960s, many authors insisted on this problem. Leontiev, (1982),

pointed out that there was an emphasis on the formation of linguistic habits and not

on the development of skills, and that there was a formal teaching with little attention

to the psychological factors of communication; a situation that still prevails in the

conception of many English courses.

Wilkins, (1976) states that the inefficiency in foreign language teaching is due

to the fact that the courses developed in the world maintained a structural

organization, where the parts of the language were taught separately to be

integrated little by little in a process of gradual accumulation. As a result, students

work easily with the linguistic material, but are unable to establish communication

because the capacity required is not equal to the sum of its elements.

When freed from the restrictions imposed by American linguistics in the teaching of

foreign languages, the communicative approach or methodology is developed and

spreads throughout Great Britain and North America on the theoretical basis of a

functional or communicative approach to teaching.

The development of communicative competence is the essential objective in

English classes, that is, the development of the ability to use the linguistic system

effectively and appropriately; the linguistic system of the foreign language is best

learned through the need to communicate; the use of the mother tongue is accepted

when necessary, translation can be used whenever it is beneficial for the students;

communication is stimulated from the beginning, paying special and systematic

attention to both the communicative functions and the structural aspects of the

language.

In this article, the authors consider that the potentialities of the communicative

approach in English classes in the teaching-learning process of the Gastronomic

Services specialty have not been fully exploited. As a result, when students

conclude their studies in Technical Education and begin to provide service in the

different gastronomic facilities in the country, where they have access to customers

who use English for communication, they have limitations in understanding the

message delivered in the foreign language.

Hence the importance of the "What's new?" Technique, as it is conceived

within the developmental teaching-learning process that prepares students to face

the social relationships they establish among themselves both in the classroom and

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outside it and allows them to expand their knowledge, their culture and their

linguistic training.

The language of conversation. What is it characterized by?

It is stated that a conversation is an oral or written dialogue between two or

more persons that alternatively take part in the exchange expressing their ideas or

feelings in an unplanned way. Communication is then established using verbal

language (words or linguistic signs) and non-verbal language (gestures, postures,

distance, eye contact.)

Unlike the monologue, a conversation implies a dialogued interaction through

which the interlocutors contribute to its construction as a text. Those contributions

are made by the participants on the basis of the cooperative principle.

The conversation may be about one or many subjects, and it is conditioned

by the context that surrounds the communicative situation. This context can vary

easily in an informal situation and the participants can express and discuss their

viewpoints.

The conversation is a way of having a relationship with persons and of getting

much information concerning the diversity of feelings, thoughts, experiences that

generate reflexive processes in which the senders organize their own discourse in

relation with the conversational context.

It consists of natural talk, the spontaneous information exchange that is

structured departing from the intention of the speaker and the proper interpretation

made by the hearer within the particular communicative situation that they are

involved in.

A conversation is a text. Defining the text.

In Discourse Analysis, the text is understood as the verbal record of any

communicative event. (Brown and Yule, 1983)

As a result of a communicative act, a text may be defined as a relatively

independent and hierarchically structured linguistic unit (macrostructure), which

reflects a complex state of affairs and has a specific communicative intention. The

state of affairs may refer to the real world or to the world of imagination and fiction.

(Glaser, Kastovsky, Szwedek and Gruyter, 1986)

According to (Roméu, 1992), the text should be seen as a communicative

coherent utterance that carries a meaning…it fulfills a certain communicative

function in a given context, produced with a determined communicative intention that

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would allow the accomplishment of definite tasks, for which the sender uses

interactional procedures and chooses the most appropriate language means.

Taking into consideration the definitions of the text cited, it can be affirmed

that a conversation can be understood as a text, what makes it necessary to take a

look at the seven standards of textuality proposed by (de Beaugrande and

Wolfgang, 1987). These authors include within the seven standards of textuality:

cohesion, coherence, informativity, acceptability, intertextuality, intentionality, and

situationality. Below there is a short reference to each of these standards.

Cohesion concerns the way in which the components of the surface text, i.e.

the actual words we hear or see, are mutually connected within a sequence. The

surface components depend upon each other according to grammatical forms and

conventions, such that cohesion rests upon grammatical dependencies.

Coherence refers to a set of conceptual relations under the surface text,

which is similar to cohesion in the way stretches of language link each other.

Cohesion refers to the surface of the text, while coherence refers to semantics or

meaning of the text.

Informativity is in relation to the way new elements appear in the text. It

concerns the extent to which its events are expected vs. unexpected or known vs.

unknown/certain. It refers to the author’s intention to provide information through the

text.

Acceptability concerns the text receiver’s attitude to evaluate whether the text

is acceptable or unacceptable based on the other six attributes of textuality.

Intertextuality concerns the factors that make the use of one text dependent

upon knowledge of one or more previously encountered texts. So other texts may

complete or complement the interaction. In this way, intertextuality refers to the

connection between the target text and the background knowledge of the audience

of anotherinserted text.

Intentionality refers to the fact that people do not have the same intentions

every time they speak with others (it seems to be a goal on the author’s mind). The

author hopes the target audience to be satisfied with the message carried by the

text. Intentionality refers to what a text producer plans to do and what he/ she hopes

the target text receiver will accept.

Putting into practice the cooperative principle, the students make

contributions to keep their conversations going, and so they consider Grice’s four

conversational maxims:

● Maxim of quantity.

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a. Make your contribution as informative as required.

b. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.

● Maxim of quality.

a. Do not say what you believe to be false.

b. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.

● Maxim of relation.

a. Be relevant.

● Maxim of manner.

a. Avoid obscurity of expression.

b. Avoid ambiguity.

c. Be brief.

d. Be orderly.

Situationality concerns the factors that make a text relevant to a situation of

occurrence (Beaugrande & Dressler, 1981): who (we do not speak with the same

people every day), what (we do not speak about the same topics all the time every

day), when (we do not speak in the same hours every day), where (we do not speak

in the same places every day), how ( we use different words to speak with different

people and also different strategies, gestures, postures, touch, etc), why (we do not

speak for the same reasons every time we do it).

In addition, situationality is connected with coherence and acceptability. Some

elements in the text refer to the context of situation and cannot be decoded unless

reliance on situationality is made. Generally, people in different situations can get

different meanings of the same text because of their different experiences. This

standard of textuality can help the target audience understand the message of the

text easily (Pragmatics studies the relationship between language and its users, not

the meaning of the words but what the speaker means with a certain utterance).

Therefore, the producer must create a text according to the circumstance or

condition in a particular place and at a particular time.

In this respect, it is important to consider the context provided by the situation

in which the students are interacting, in accordance with the topic of conversation.

The situation is ever changing since every day the students come across different

people and speak about different topics. In discourse, what people say is often in

relation to what they said earlier and/or to what they are going to say later. So it can

be stated that context borders not only intentionality but situationality as well.

While the standards coherence and cohesion are text-centered, informativity,

acceptability, intertextuality, intentionality, and situationality are user-centered. The

seven standards of textuality overlap with each other, and if a text (as a

conversation) does not meet any of the ones mentioned earlier, it may be considered

unacceptable.

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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos

Didactic considerations about language teaching

The teaching learning process of any subject comprises laws and principles

established by didactics, a scientific discipline that groups and regulates the

functioning of the mechanisms, methods and techniques that operate within this

process. While laws direct the process as such, the principles control its

methodological organization, thus making of it a systemic and dynamic process.

In addition, didactics takes into account psychological, pedagogical, cognitive,

affective, instructive and educative aspects to better deal with the teaching learning

process, which takes in a system of didactic components having each specific roles

or functions within the process itself, namely, the teacher, the students, the contents,

and others.

In the teaching learning process of English, these components, which are

logically ruled by laws and principles, work together, establish internal relationships,

and rely on each other. This makes possible to organize and structure the English

lesson in a more efficient and effective way since the methodological point of view, a

criterion widely analyzed and accepted by authors such as Antich, (1986), Gonzalez,

(2009), Enriquez, (2004) and others.

In relation to the development of students´ speaking skill, the researchers

consider important to assume the didactic principles proposed by Cuban famous

expert Antich, (1986) and the ones suggested by González, (2009), which

thoroughly fulfill the requirements of the teaching learning process of English. Some

of those principles are the following:

The conception of teaching language as a means of communication, also

known as communicability.

● The primacy of the oral language.

● The consideration of students’ mother tongue.

● The concentric distribution of the linguistic material.

● The leading character of practice.

● The consideration of the social and cultural aspects of the language.

Among these principles, this author considers communicability as the leading

principle in the teaching learning process of English. It conceives the didactic

organization of this process taking into account the teaching of the language based

on real communicative situations closely related to students´ daily life.

This principle mostly determines the development of students´ communicative

competence, which is regarded as “the individual´s real capacity to organize the

verbal activity properly according to the different communicative situations (…)”, as

Zimniaya, (1989) points out. The holistic character of this competence makes it

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cover some other competences that really contribute to develop students´ speaking

skill, namely, the linguistic, the discursive, the strategic, the sociolinguistic, and the

sociocultural competences.

The development of the speaking skill in students from the Gastronomic

Services Specialty represents also the development of their communicative

competence, a competence that can be successfully attained through social

interaction in the process of communication, in which the students can use the

language system appropriately in any circumstances.

Students develop a certain skill when they can take advantage of the

knowledge and operate with it to solve successfully theoretical or practical tasks.

That is why the student develop skills in the course of the systematization of

activities that require communication. This is achieved, for example, by transferring

the linguistic content of a situation learned in class to a slightly different situation.

What does the “What’s new?” technique consist of?

“What’s new?” is a communicative activity based on face-to-face interactions

and includes at least a one-to-one (student-student and/or student-teacher talk) and

a small group situation (student-small group talk).

This technique could be encouraged first thing in several lessons, and could be

practiced using two variants that can be used in different occasions.

Variant 1

The teacher asks student 1 (and/or other students) “What’s new?” The

inquired student(s) starts to speak what new events have happened in their lives

since the last time they met together in class. The teacher or student 2 will ask

student 1 question derived from their talk, and other students may get involved in the

interaction. Other students might be suggested to ask another classmate the

question, or even the teacher, who takes part in the activity and, at the same time, is

its facilitator).

Variant 2

Student 1 asks student 2 the question “What’s new?” Student 2 answers

speaking about something new that happened to them since the last time they met

together in class. Student 3 asks student 2 a question and the latter answers, and

later asks student 4 the same question. Other students from the class may continue

to ask the same question to others. The students will be answering the questions

derived from their talk, so that several students may get involved in the interaction.

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“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos

Different questions are asked derived from the contributions of the student(s)

that answer the “What’s new?” question for the first time, and those questions and

their answers may be about the people the students found on their way to school or

on their way back home the day before, the topics they talked about, the things that

happened to them, where and when those things happened, why the events

happened the way they did, how people involved in one story reacted in the different

situations.

The exchange of information flows among the students, and in doing so they

should take turns as a way of organizing their contributions in the talk.

The teacher guides the activity in such a way that several students are

involved in the activity as much as they can every time they practice it, and that the

students progressively come to interact more on their own each day.

The teacher makes sure that the contributions are as spontaneous and

natural as possible, and that there is the occurrence of some informative (new)

elements and adjustment to the situation in their interaction while they do the talking,

using accepted utterances (due to the choice of the right words said with coherence

and cohesion) to fulfill the purpose of their talk (according to their communicative

intention).

In assessing the progress of the activity, the teacher will consider the quality

of the interactions more important than their length.

Why “What’s new?” can become a highly effective tool to enhance the

students’ oral skills. The interactive activity that is called “What’s new?” meets

several theoretical specifications linguistically and pragmatically speaking, which are

in accordance with its potentialities to help the students have real conversations with

others.

First, conversation is characterized by features typical of the oral form of

communication (sound pronunciation, intonation, pause, accent, the vocabulary

used (choice of the right words to say), stylistic elements (stay in register, street talk,

slang), violation of grammar rules (contractions, ellipsis). So “What’s new?” will

contribute to a sufficient use of the language based on the participants’ choice of

words. That choice will be madefrom the knowledge the participants have of the

surrounding world and the command they have of the English languageto be

involved in different situations.

There are two outstanding features that “What’s new?” presupposes for the

in-person conversation. On one hand, the presence of the human voice, which is a

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Bernardo Buduen Saborit | Eduardo Escalona Pardo | Rubén Escalona Pardo

determinantfactor since conversation is typically an oral act that guarantees the

verbal side of communication. So voice allows capturing in real time the intonation

changes, how long the pauses exactly are, the tone of the exchange (whether happy

or sad, tough or nice, ironic or sarcastic), how loud the volume is, as well as

attitudes like assertion or hesitation on the part of the participants.

On the other hand, the paralinguistic elements that accompany the act of

communication and complement it ensure the non-verbal side of the talk through a

variety of meanings interpreted from the gestures, postures, eye contact, proximity,

and touch produced by the sender of a message at a certain point.

Second, “What’s new?” involves the students in talks where the standards of

textuality are to be considered since they will introduce new elements in their

interaction. Besides, the students use expressions that should be acceptable due to

the elements of cohesion (the links that bind together the sentences) and coherence

(the semantics or meaning of the text), in accordance with what the participants are

talking about every time.

Teacher-student interaction and also student-student interaction can be

practiced since everyone comes across different people in different places every

single day, so the students are going to talk about different people and topics with

different intentions in different contexts of situations, most of the times interrelating

the conversation that has been started with other textual resources (may be another

previous talk, or something that is being played on the radio or TV, or remarks about

the weather, or facts related to a picture one is holding in his hand, or a book that

one is reading and holding in his hand at the time the talk takes place). Those

resources would allow the students to make more contributions to conform the whole

conversation.

In short, the seven standards of textuality proposed by (Beaugrande and

Dressler, 1981) are appropriate for analyzing any text types, including a

conversation, that may arise from the practice of the English language teaching

activity “What’s new?”, emphasizing its cohesion, coherence, informativity,

acceptability, intertextuality, intentionality, and situationality as properties that would

guarantee the effectiveness of that conversation as a text in a variety of

communicative situations.

With the application of this novel technique and after the analysis of the

results of all the methods applied in this research, it was corroborated that the

“What’s new?” technique encouraged the use of words not as having a meaning by

themselves but in relation to the context in which they are used. In other words, the

ISSN 0213-7771 - e-ISSN 2443-9991 Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82

https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2022.i31.v2.04

“What’s New?” Técnica para desarrollar habilidades orales en estudiantes de Servicios Gastronómicos

emphasis was made on the relationship between the language signs used in the

utterances and the meanings they have for the participants in the interaction,

specifically attention was given to what was said, what it is meant to say, and what

the interlocutor understands from what is said.

The “What’s new?” technique also guaranteed, with the teacher’s help as a

facilitator and actor, the talks to be spontaneous and natural, gradually reducing its

degree of preparedness, so that the students worked more on their own each time.

“What’s new?” was a successful tool when used in the teaching of oral

English to the Gastronomy Service students, either intermediate and advanced

students alike, encouraging the necessary adaptations considering the use of the

vocabulary with its particular meaningful units and grammatical constructions

according to each level and also leading the students to interact with others

depending on the conversation skills achieved by them.

To obtain the results, an initial diagnostic was applied for the English subject

in the first semester of the 2021 school year. It consisted of a practical oral exercise

in which students assumed roles of waiters and clients. In this diagnostic, the current

state of development of the oral skills of these students for interaction with the client

in English in the service was verified, and it was aimed at measuring the following

indicators:

- Use of conversation starters and greetings to welcome the clients.

- Use of questions of different types to start the conversation with courtesy phrases

to take and offer an order.

- Use of questions of different types to keep the conversation going and explain a

menu.

- Skills to change the topic and give suggestions in the service

- Skills for verification as a reaffirmation of the service.

- Skills to use the statements that allow them to communicate with the client when

presenting the bill.

- Skill to actively listen to the client during the conversation.

- Skill to end the conversation with courtesy.

Learning the skills for customer conversation during service is very difficult for

students as it is very dynamic, changing and unpredictable. Conversation, that

cooperative and negotiating interaction of meanings between two or more people,

requires students' attention, rapid input and information processing, social

interpretation of inputs which tend to confuse, understanding of the vocabulary of the

language and the understanding of a language that is abstract.

In relation to the complexity of establishing a conversation with the client, those who

learn the English (or other) languages commit violations of its rules on one occasion

or another, such as:

Cuestiones Pedagógicas, 2(31), 2022, pp. 65-82 ISSN 0213-7771 - e-ISSN 2443-9991

https://doi.org/10.12795/CP.2022.i31.v2.04

Bernardo Buduen Saborit | Eduardo Escalona Pardo | Rubén Escalona Pardo

- talking too much,

- not letting the client finish what they were trying to say,

- break the order in taking turns,

- speak when no one is listening,

- talk about inappropriate topics,

- respond when the client tries to communicate.

On the other hand, in relation to the complexity involved in conversing with a

client in English, it is necessary to consider that:

- sometimes things are said that clients do not understand,

- talk about things that customers do not know,

- students don't know what to talk about,

- the rules of the conversation change from person to person,

- the conversation sometimes includes topics that customers are not interested in,

- it is difficult for students to use sentences that allow them to stay adjusted to the

formal or more informal and many other aspects that change or are unpredictable or

difficult to interpret.

The results of the initial diagnostic test behaved as shown in the table below

Table 1

Results of the initial pedagogical test