Adolfo Manuel Sánchez Cuadrado, Alejandro Castañeda Castro 
When designing learning materials for the development of grammatical competence, current approaches such as Cognitive Grammar and Focus on Form may prove useful in order to, respectively, tailor the grammatical analysis to learners’ cognitive processes and integrate grammar instruction into communicative language practices. In this paper we address these issues in relation to Spanish verb tenses within the dynamic cognitive-epistemic model emerged from the Cognitive Grammar framework. Specifically, we analyze our pedagogical approach to teach the pluperfect indicative based on two of the pillars that have sustained the materials development process, i.e., (1) the validation of the materials by means of the piloting of a pedagogical sequence taught to Spanish/L2 learners, and (2) the confirmation, by means of the evidence gathered from corpus linguistics with Sketch Engine and the ESTenTEN23 corpus, of the suitability of certain constructional patterns when exploring specific linguistic phenomena related to this tense, particularly, its possible neutralization with the simple past in causal sentences.