Applied Pragmatics - Current Issue

This study explores the development of L2 learners’ interactional competence (IC) in online text chat involving request scenarios. Against the background of research on L2 IC development in spoken interaction, which had shown increased use of prefatory moves with increasing IC, we investigate how learners establish shared background knowledge in text chat through preliminary moves and whether the medium facilitates more prefatory moves at lower IC levels. We also explored how learners orient to entitlement and contingency associated with a possible grant through the selection of syntactic forms. 72 learners of English at three different proficiency levels and 16 English L1 speakers engaged in two dyadic role plays on WeChat. Online interactional data demonstrated L2 learners’ following a similar trajectory in the deployment of prefatory moves as in spoken interaction, using more prefatory moves and designing them more tightly to the interlocutor’s epistemic status as their proficiency and IC increase. Lower-level learners overwhelmingly produced I want/need or can/could structures, whereas higher-level learners also used I wonder if constructions to accommodate potential contingencies related to their requests, though not as systematically as native speakers. We discuss methodological and developmental implications from these findings for L2 pragmatics teaching and testing.

As frequent as disagreement is in everyday conversation, this speech act is rarely present in the foreign, second, or other language (L2) classrooms. Students almost never have an opportunity to disagree with their teacher, and disagreement with peers is framed as part of interactional activities without the interactional work needed in real life. Technology-mediated tasks can provide a space where students can practice this speech act in an authentic manner by engaging in interaction with other speakers of the language remotely. This exploratory classroom-based study investigates the production of disagreement in the language of beginner learners of Spanish in the U.S. through social media (Facebook). The results show that strong disagreement strategies were the most employed by all learners, regardless of treatment. A small change of the group engaged in Facebook toward target-like strategies suggests the potential of this task to expose students to this speech act, although the lack of enough rich interactive data prevents us from fully understanding the potential of the tool.

Adopting an applied conversation analysis (CA) perspective, this study explores the sequential organization of English used by a Chinese as a foreign language instructor, the actions projected and achieved through the instructor’s use of English, and how the instructor’s use of English influences students’ use of English and Chinese. We draw on video-recorded data of an advanced-level business Chinese class and conduct a micro-analysis of the instructor’s use of English in sequence-initiating, sequence-expanding, and sequence-closing positions. Contrary to pedagogical concerns that an instructor’s use of English may encourage students to use English to the detriment of L2 learning, the data support the idea that L2 use and learning can be optimized when L1 resources (e.g., English) are used judiciously to advance the instructor’s pedagogical agenda. Thus, while English is an omnipresent potential resource in the classroom, the instructor and students orient to it as one tool among several that can enhance the main business of their interactions: learning Chinese for business purposes.

This study reports findings from a mixed-effects analysis on item- and person-levels for five intact classes of learners following a semester-long pragmatics instruction. Data represent multiple-choice responses on an instrument assessing pragmatic awareness from learners at three levels of formal Japanese education (lower- to post-secondary). Instructional interventions differed in the degree of explicitness for both pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. Ten speech acts represented pragmalinguistic forms (apologies, complaints, compliments, farewells, greetings, introductions, invitations, offers, requests, and suggestions), with the number of speech acts taught operationalized as part of the explicitness. Twelve relationship status categories represented the sociopragmatic feature (acquaintances, best friends, boss/employee, coworkers, customer/service person, family, friends, girlfriend/boyfriend, wife/husband, professional relationship, neighbors, and strangers). Item-level results reveal a significant effect regarding learner accuracy on items measuring sociopragmatic content relative to pragmalinguistic content. Person-level results reveal that increased explicitness accounted for differences between intervention groups. However, the highest-performing group did not receive the most explicit instruction. The discussion includes an argument for greater use of video-based content in pragmatic instruction and assessment practices and the value of mixed-effects models when analyzing longitudinal classroom research across multiple sites.