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- Volume 2, Issue 1, 2020
Applied Pragmatics - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2020
Volume 2, Issue 1, 2020
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Learning pragmatics through tasks
Author(s): Júlia Barón, M. Luz Celaya and Mayya Levkinapp.: 1–25 (25)More LessAbstractThis study aims at examining the benefits of teaching L2 pragmatics with the use of tasks. The participants were 50 Catalan/Spanish bilingual students (aged 12–14) from three intact classes who were learners of English as a Foreign Language and with an upper-intermediate level of proficiency. The three groups followed different approaches to teaching pragmatics: G1 was instructed in pragmatics following a task-supported approach; G2 was also instructed in pragmatics but no tasks were used; and G3 was a control group with no instruction on pragmatics and no use of tasks, either. To assess pragmatic learning, role-plays were used both before and after the pedagogical intervention. The pragmatic analysis focused on the speech acts of giving opinion, agreeing/disagreeing, interrupting, and acknowledging the interlocutor. Results showed that the two instructed groups, regardless of the type, were more pragmatically competent in the posttest in one of the pragmatic moves (i.e., interrupting). Additionally, G1 presented statistically significant differences in the posttest when acknowledging the interlocutor. Regarding the control group, no differences were found in any of the moves. These findings suggest that instruction in general, and task-supported instruction in particular, has a positive impact on the development of interlanguage pragmatics in a classroom context.
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Proficiency effects on L2 Arabic refusals
Author(s): Khaled Al Masaeed, Naoko Taguchi and Mohammed Tamimipp.: 26–53 (28)More LessAbstractThis study examined the relationship between L2 proficiency and (1) appropriateness of refusals, (2) use of refusal strategies, and (3) multidialectal practices in performing refusals in Arabic. Using a spoken discourse completion task (spoken DCT), data were collected from 45 learners of Arabic at three different proficiency levels and from 15 Arabic native speakers. The situations used in the spoken DCT varied in power and social distance (i.e., refusing a friend’s request to lend money, refusing a neighbor’s request to lend a car, and refusing a boss’s request to stay late to work extra hours). Findings generally revealed a positive relationship between proficiency and L2 Arabic learners’ appropriateness, use of refusal strategies, and multidialectal practices in their refusals. However, results showed that native speakers solely employed spoken Arabic (i.e., the dialect), while learners relied heavily on Modern Standard Arabic. Analysis of refusal strategies showed that native speakers tended to provide vague explanations in their refusals except when refusing the neighbor’s request, whereas the learners preferred to provide specific reasons for their refusals. Moreover, advanced-level learners were substantially verbose; as a result, their refusals could be perceived as lecturing or criticizing their interlocutor. This paper concludes with implications for researching and teaching L2 Arabic refusals with special attention to multidialectal practices.
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Email requests in an ELF academic setting
Author(s): Judit Dombipp.: 54–79 (26)More LessAbstractEmail messages have become the prevalent medium in academic communication between students and faculty at Hungarian universities. Over the past decade communication with international students of diverse language and cultural backgrounds has made the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF) typical in a previously culturally homogeneous setting. This paper analyzes email requests written by international students of various first language (L1) backgrounds (N = 37). The aim is to characterize requests in terms of directness, strategy use, request modification, address forms and closings. Findings shed light on three salient features of ELF requests: an overall preference for direct strategies, a limited range of internal modifiers, and uses of mostly formal, though not always academic address forms. Given the goal-driven nature of ELF interactions, the paper argues that these characteristics may serve as pragmatic strategies to preempt misunderstanding and to enhance intelligibility. Furthermore, interactants’ wish to express identity and their engagement in constructing new norms specific to their unique ELF contexts may also underlie their pragmalinguistic choices.
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Using a corpus in creating and evaluating a DCT
Author(s): Brett J. Hashimoto and Kyra Nelsonpp.: 80–120 (41)More LessAbstractDiscourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) have been one of the most popular tools in pragmatics research. Yet, many have criticized DCTs for their lack of authenticity (e.g., Culpeper, Mackey, & Taguchi, 2018; Nguyen, 2019). We propose that corpora can serve as resources in designing and evaluating DCTs. We created a DCT using advice-seeking prompts from the Q+A corpus (Baker & Egbert, 2016). Then, we administered the DCT to 33 participants. We evaluated the DCT by (1) comparing the linguistic form and the semantic content of the participants’ DCT responses (i.e., advice-giving expressions) with authentic data from the corpus; and (2) interviewing the participants about the instrument quality. Chi-square tests between DCT data and corpus data revealed no significant differences in advice-giving expressions in terms of both the overall level of directness (χ2 [2, N = 660] = 6.94, p = .03, V = .10) and linguistic realization (χ2 [8, N = 660] = 17.75, p = .02, V = .16), and showed a significant difference but small effect size in terms of semantic content (χ2 [6, N = 512] = 30.35, p < .01, V = .24). Taken together with the interview data, our findings indicate that corpora are useful in designing DCTs.
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Learning pragmatics through tasks
Author(s): Júlia Barón, M. Luz Celaya and Mayya Levkina
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Pragmatically speaking
Author(s): Tracey M. Derwing, Erin Waugh and Murray J. Munro
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