Al rescate de la economía o cómo hablar con metáforas de asuntos serios

As a result of the formulation of the Cognitive Theory of the Metaphor by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) scholars discovered that this literary device could contribute to the development of communicative competence among L2 students. However, there are barely any didactic materials to take advantage of it. With the purpose of filling this gap a didactic sequence for Business Spanish, level C1, is presented. The speech in social sciences is rich in technical terms coming from the assignment of a metaphorical value to words we use in everyday language. Texts from the economic section of the newspaper El País will be used in order to detect the underlying conceptual metaphors that are essential for argumentation. After this training lesson, students must be able to construct metaphors for the discussion on economic interventionism. Keywords: Metaphor, cognitive linguistics, economy, Business Spanish