«Pues» como marcador de toma de turno en español L2

Being a competent L2 speaker involves not only acquiring knowledge of grammatical forms in the target language, but also developing pragmatic competence, which is crucial in the appropriate production of speech acts, (im)politeness strategies, and understanding the use of discourse markers. The present article deals with how EFL learners of different mother tongues manage to develop their pragmatic competence through the use of the turn-taking marker pues. The aim of the study is to investigate the different pragmatic functions of pues in the initial syntactic position and to analyse in which discourse functions it appears to be more or less frequent in different groups of learners. In this manner, it will be studied how the use of this turn-taking pragmatic marker can serve as an indicator of the development of pragmatic competence in Dutch-speaking Belgian, Italian and Slovenian learners of Spanish. The results of the learner group will be compared to those of a native benchmark group.