Register and Circumlocution in a Simulated Medical Interview
Ms. Delgado’s Spanish IV class of 22 students is practicing a medical-office interaction. Pairs role-play a patient calling a clinic; one student is the receptionist, the other an adult patient. Recordings show 40% of receptionists used tú with the patient, 30% had pauses longer than five seconds when they needed words such as “insurance,” “appointment,” or “referral,” and several switched to English. The rubric currently awards most points for grammar accuracy and task completion. Three heritage speakers finished in two minutes and used natural circumlocution (“el papel que dice que usted puede venir”); several second-language learners stopped speaking. Ms. Delgado has one 50-minute class before the unit assessment and wants to improve both interpersonal communication and presentational speaking. She also needs to address the department’s emphasis on appropriate register without shaming students.
1. Analyze the pragmatic and strategic issues in the recordings. Distinguish them from grammatical accuracy and explain why the current rubric may mislead students.
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The main issues are pragmatic and strategic, not grammatical. Using tú with an adult patient in a clinic is a register error: the receptionist may know the usted form but fail to monitor it under communicative pressure. The five-second pauses show a gap in circumlocution, not a lack of vocabulary; students stop because they treat unknown words as task-ending. Code-switching may be a resource, but in a simulated monolingual clinic it can break the role. The rubric rewards grammar accuracy and task completion, so a student can score well with inappropriate register and still “complete” the call. That misleads learners: they infer that correct verb endings matter more than audience. The heritage speakers’ “el papel que dice que usted puede venir” is actually strong strategic competence; the rubric should reward it. I would separate language control (usted forms, present tense), pragmatic appropriateness (greeting, forms of address, turn-taking), and strategic competence (circumlocution, repair, maintaining the floor).
2. Design a 15-minute interpersonal information-gap task and a revised three-criteria rubric. Explain how the task forces students to use register and circumlocution rather than memorize a script.
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Info-gap (15 min): Receptionist has an appointment grid with three open slots; patient has an insurance card and a symptom note. Neither sees the other’s sheet. Required functions: greet, ask for name and insurance, offer two times, confirm, close. Add one planned problem: the patient’s insurance is not accepted, so the receptionist must apologize and offer a referral. Pairs switch roles after seven minutes. Teacher listens for usted and circumlocution, noting one recast per pair.
Revised rubric (3 criteria, 4 points each): (1) Register and audience: sustained usted, appropriate greeting and leave-taking; (2) Interactive strategies: circumlocutes unknown words, asks for clarification, keeps the exchange going without long silence; (3) Task completion and accuracy: exchanges all information, errors do not impede meaning. This rubric makes register and strategy visible instead of hiding them under grammar. A student who says “el papel que dice que usted puede venir” earns strategy points even without seguro.
3. Propose a presentational speaking task that recycles the same clinic content. Explain how it assesses different skills from the interpersonal role-play and how you would keep the two scores separate.
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Presentational task: each student records a 90-second voicemail summarizing the clinic’s appointment policy for a new patient, using formal register. They must include hours, what to bring, one reason to call back, and a polite closing. This recycles the same content but changes the audience and removes the interlocutor, so it assesses organization, cohesion, and sustained formal register rather than turn-taking. Provide a model voicemail and a checklist: greeting, three details, usted consistency, one circumlocution for a missing word. Students then listen to a partner’s recording and mark one strength and one revision. Because the presentational task is recorded, the teacher can assess pronunciation and grammar without the time pressure of the interpersonal role-play. Keep the two scores separate in the gradebook: a student may be strong interactively but need work on cohesion, or vice versa. This also gives the heritage speakers a chance to shine in fluency while still practicing formal register.