Applied Pragmatics - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2019

This study examines the use of teacher humor in whole-group interactions in beginning-level Spanish foreign language (FL) classes. Previous research has focused primarily on student humor and on humor in intermediate- and advanced-level FL courses. Hence, the goals of the research were, first, to determine whether teachers use spontaneous verbal humor in beginning-level courses and, if so, in what ways. Second, we considered whether the amount of teacher humor was related to the amount of student humor. The findings indicate that many of the instructors in the study did, indeed, joke around with their students. Most teacher humor was affiliative or rapport-enhancing, delivered in the target language, and designed with students’ L2 abilities in mind. Finally, in classes in which teachers joked more often, there was a tendency for students to joke more often as well, suggesting that teacher humor may encourage student humor.

This study follows Ishida’s (2017) call for longitudinal studies that examine how learners in the early stages of their study abroad sojourn develop skills in responding to prior talk. Using multimodal Conversation Analysis (CA), the study compares three interactions across a six-week sojourn between a learner of Japanese and his host father. For longitudinal comparison, the study focuses on sequences in which the learner has initiated a question or comment, and the host father provides a non-minimal response. The study finds a diversification of resources and an expanded repertoire of possible actions for displaying recipiency, changing from primarily minimal response tokens that only weakly display his stance towards the prior talk early on, to the greater use of assessments and non-minimal expansions toward the end of the sojourn. The study provides evidence that short-term study abroad experiences for novice languages learners can afford opportunities for the development of interactional competencies.

This study examined second language (L2) Chinese learners’ developmental patterns of pragmatic competence in two computer-mediated communication (CMC) conditions: (1) CMC with data-driven instruction embedded in the course of CMC and (2) CMC without data-driven instruction. Learners’ pragmatic competence was operationalized as their ability to use a Chinese sentence final particle (SFP) ne during CMC with a native speaker partner. The study investigated: (1) whether learners (as a group) developed their use of ne over time in the two CMC conditions, and (2) how individual learners changed their use of ne (if any) in the two conditions. The quantitative analysis (token and type frequency of ne) revealed that CMC itself did not promote learners’ use of ne. However, it promoted learners’ production of ne when data-driven instruction was incorporated into CMC. Supporting the quantitative findings, the qualitative analysis showed that one learner in the CMC with data-driven instruction outperformed his counterpart in the CMC without data-driven instruction group in the diverse use of ne.

This research examined the attrition and/or maintenance of second language pragmatic competence among Japanese learners of English after returning home from studying in the United Kingdom (U.K.). Participants were university students who had studied abroad (SA) for four months at two U.K. universities and had lived in a homestay environment. A pragmatic appropriateness judgment task of request-making sentences was administered at the end of the SA and six months after returning home, in which the accuracy and speed of appropriateness judgment of these request sentences were compared. The results demonstrated a loss of (a) judgment accuracy for under-polite inappropriate requests, but not for appropriate requests; and (b) automatic processing of request-making sentences, evaluated using the coefficient of variation, for both under- and over-polite inappropriate requests. These results suggest that pragmatic attrition does occur after SA but does not occur at the same time for every aspect of pragmatic competence examined.