The discourse which is produced in the Spanish as a Foreign Language classroom - due to the context in which it is produced (academic), and because of the situation in which it is produced (the classroom in the presence of the students as recipients) - presents some features which make its classification difficult if we consider the frameworks available to date for the analysis of different types of discourse. If we review the literature on this subject, the starting point has traditionally been the oral/written dichotomy, thus characterizing the types of discourse according to their degree of elaboration and according to their transmission channel. However, pedagogical discourse hardly fits into the existing classifications. This paper aims to establish a theoretical framework taking the studies on conversational Spanish as a springboard to characterize this type of discourse taking into account which traits are shared with it.