Teaching Pragmatics and Instructed Second Language Learning

Study Abroad and Technology-Enhanced Teaching

Nicola Halenko

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350097162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores second language pragmatic development with a specific focus on two areas: classroom-based pragmatic instruction in the study abroad context, and using technology for developing and assessing pragmatic competence. Teaching Pragmatics and Instructed Second Language Learning directly compares the effects of technology platforms and traditional paper-based tasks within the second language environment for developing pragmatic competence. These analyses are based on empirical research of how undergraduate Chinese learners of English receive explicit instruction in classrooms using different training materials. The book makes an original and innovative contribution to collecting oral speech act data in the form of computer-animated production tasks (CAPT) designed to enhance learner engagement and performance. Using this tool, it explores the beneficial role of technology in teaching and learning, offering practitioners and researchers practical ways to maximise second language pragmatic development in the classroom.

1

Introduction

Over more than forty years, pragmatics has developed into a dynamic research field which continues to expand and diversify. Investigating communicative actions in social contexts is at the heart of pragmatics study and several definitions have been proposed over the years, showing pragmatics to be an ever-evolving research discipline. Both Lo Castro (2003) and Crystal (1997) not only provide the most widely cited definitions but capture well the tripartite importance of the speaker, listener and context which underpin pragmatics study. Lo Castro’s (2003: 15) definition of pragmatics highlights the shared endeavours of interlocutors to achieve a communicative goal – ‘the study of the speaker and hearer meaning created in their joint actions that include both linguistic and non-linguistic signals in the context of socioculturally organised activities’. Crystal’s (1997: 301) earlier definition spotlights the complexities of managing talk that is influenced by a number of external factors: ‘pragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of the users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication’.

Pragmatics has found a well-established home within second language acquisition (SLA) research. Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), also known as second language (L2) pragmatics, has evolved as a particular sub-field of SLA whose primary interest is to examine L2 users’ knowledge and language use in social interaction, most often investigated from cross-sectional or longitudinal (developmental) perspectives. L2 pragmatics is directly linked to models of communicative competence (see Chapter 2). Thomas (1983) and Leech (1983) are known for distinguishing linguistic knowledge (pragmalinguistic) from sociocultural knowledge (sociopragmatic), meaning in addition to having a command of language forms, having the ability to use language in socially appropriate ways is of, at least, equal importance. For instance, when requesting a favour from someone, aside from knowing what forms and lexis are needed to produce the request (grammatical competence), users need to consider their linguistic choices in light of acceptability of the request according to the local cultural norms, the specific situation, the favour itself, and from whom they are soliciting the favour (pragmatic competence). It is recognized that grammatical and pragmatic competencies are inextricably linked (Kasper & Rose 2002; Taguchi & Roever 2017; Trosborg 2010) and need equal attention in the language learning process.

Over the years, it has been shown that inside the classroom, however, grammatical competence tends to be valued more highly and often receives the greatest attention, at the expense of developing pragmatic knowledge (e.g. Bardovi Harlig & Dörnyei 1998; Schauer 2009). Although pragmatic rules often differ cross-culturally, highlighting the need to develop this skill, specific pragmatic-based instruction rarely appears in foreign language curricula and commercial textbook materials rarely address pragmatic features of the target language in any meaningful depth (Barron 2016; Crandall & Basturkmen 2004; Limberg 2016; Nguyen 2011; Schauer 2019). Outside the classroom, interaction in the target language environment may not easily facilitate the development of pragmatic competence either. First, access to expert language users may be limited, which is particularly difficult when studying in at-home learning environments. Even when learners do have greater access such as during a study period abroad, they may prefer not to take advantage of communicative opportunities for self-discovery (Dörnyei et al. 2004; Kasper & Rose 2002). Second, since no pragmatic rule books exist, pragmatic language features may not be salient to learners so opportunities for advancing pragmatic knowledge may be missed. In authentic interactions, pragmatic feedback may not be readily offered to the learner either due to the sensitive nature of highlighting breaches of cultural norms.

It is perhaps not surprising then that research reports disparities between linguistic proficiency and pragmatic competence to be common, even in advanced-level learners of English (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig 2014; Glaser 2018). Some studies have suggested that, without the aid of instruction, pragmatic development is slow (Barron 2003; Cohen 2008; Taguchi 2010), with some language learners failing to achieve any appropriate level of pragmatic competency despite being long-term members of a target language community (Cohen 2008; Kasper & Rose 2002). The importance of language learners developing a reasonable level of pragmatic competence to avoid communication breakdown is clearly underlined by Thomas (1983). She states that whilst grammatical inaccuracies may be excused and accounted for as part of the language learning process, pragmatic infelicities may be judged as a character flaw. This suggests high-risk consequences for interpersonal relationships when failing to consider local pragmatic norms.

1.1. About this book

L2 pragmatics has been actively investigated since the late 1970s. Early defining volumes such as Interlanguage Pragmatics (Kasper & Blum Kulka 1993), Pragmatics in Language Teaching (Rose & Kasper 2001) and Pragmatic Development in a Second Language (Kasper & Rose 2002) helped elevate the appeal and importance of L2 pragmatics in research communities. These volumes also include some of the major intervention studies of the time and so serve as an important backdrop against which new volumes such as Teaching Pragmatics can advance the field. Examining the benefits and limitations to becoming a pragmatically competent language user, and how this might be best achieved inside and outside the classroom are some of the key discussion points in this volume. What we can glean from L2 pragmatics research to date is that it can be learned, and this can have a positive effect on learners’ confidence, performance and interaction in the target language. Research also shows that many pragmatic features of language are indeed teachable, and explicit instruction, in particular, has been found to yield the best results (see Plonsky & Zhuang 2019; Taguchi 2015 for reviews). Furthermore, practitioners now have access to a growing body of pragmatics-focused materials thanks to editions such as Ishihara and Cohen (2010), Tatsuki and Houck (2010) and Riddiford and Newton (2010). It is also increasingly apparent that pragmatic performance and development are not at all straightforward. Investigations continue to uncover a wide range of complex influential factors such as individual learner differences, motivation, learner agency, and exposure to and engagement in the L2 environment (e.g. Taguchi 2012).

Overall, research to date has offered many key insights to learning and teaching but much remains under-explored in the areas of intervention studies and technology-enhanced teaching and learning, for example. Taguchi and Roever’s (2017) comprehensive monograph, Second Language Pragmatics, examines the current research landscape and is a timely marker for opening a new chapter in pragmatics research. Teaching Pragmatics aims to operationalize some of the most recent calls for advancing the field (see Chapter 5 for more detail on how this volume addresses current gaps in L2 pragmatics research). Firstly, the volume goes beyond basic explicit classroom interventions to examining pretest and posttest performance across multiple experimental groups, working with multiple speech acts and employing multiple delayed test designs. In doing so, the teachability and learnability of multiple speech acts can be directly compared. This exploration of the amenability of different pragmatic features to instruction has important implications for L2 pedagogy (Plonsky & Zhuang 2019). Secondly, environmental influences are explored by measuring the frequency of experimental group contact with the study abroad (SA) environment and the extent to which a non-instructed control group benefitted from exposure alone. Thirdly, adopting rating scales as a means of assessing performance is showcased in this volume to avoid the well-documented challenges of making direct L1-L2 speaker comparisons to judge pragmatic success.

Finally, an emergent sub-field within L2 pragmatics has been the growing attention paid to the beneficial role technology can play in pragmatics investigations. Taguchi and Sykes’s (2013) volume helped synthesize current directions in this area but gaps in the research remain, particularly from the teaching and assessment perspectives, as the authors themselves note. At the heart of Teaching Pragmatics is the field’s first attempt at directly comparing the effects of technology platforms with traditional paper-based tasks for developing pragmatic competency. This includes a comprehensive look at an innovative oral computer-animated production task (CAPT), designed to enhance learner engagement and performance. Within the instructional study presented in this volume, the CAPT is used for both language practice of speech acts and as an assessment tool to measure pragmatic performance.

All the aforementioned features of this volume either break new ground in pragmatics research or offer new insights into under-explored areas (see also Chapter 5). The intention is to address some of the current shortcomings and offer a replicable contribution to experimental studies. To this end, the volume aims to provide a full account of the study, within the limitations of a publication of this kind. To help further pedagogical development in instructed pragmatics, the main data collection instrument (CAPT) can also be found on the open access IRIS website (a digital repository of instruments and materials for research into second languages) (Marsden et al. 2016).

Since this book is one of only a few volumes dedicated to teaching L2 pragmatics, this is an excellent opportunity to survey and synthesize the current literature in terms of what we know about the why, what and how to teach pragmatics. The aspect of when (pragmatics should be taught) is only briefly considered since this is not a primary aim of the study. However, discussions concerning age and proficiency are recurrent themes in the chapters, and readers’ attention is also directed to wider reading regarding these issues at strategic points in the book.

1.2. Research scope

It is important to also establish the parameters of the empirical study included in this volume. Participants in this study were adult, international students based in a university setting. Whilst these two variables are probably the most widely researched in the field, the justification for continuing the tradition of investigating speech acts in this way is to improve international students’ overseas academic experience at the UK institution where the research was based and to improve the impact and longevity of its study abroad programmes. In terms of international student recruitment, China continues to be the biggest source of non-UK students (21.5 per cent) outside of the EU (30.5 per cent) on a national level (Universities UK 2018). At the local level, Chinese ESL students account for over 50 per cent of the international cohort on the British campus where this study is located so this learner group is worthy of investigation for these reasons.

With the academic HE context in mind, the study investigates L2 pragmatic success within a specific genre of discourse known as institutional talk. Discourse of this type is understood as talk between an institutional representative (e.g. faculty staff, advisor at a job agency) and a client (e.g. a student, job applicant), or between members of the same institution in workplace-type interaction (e.g. a nursing supervisor and nurse, hotel or factory employees) (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford 2005). This study focuses exclusively on institutional talk between members of university staff, as the institutional representative, and university students, as clients.

Institutional talk is recognized as being quite different from general L2 conversation, which often investigates pragmatics from turntaking and negotiation perspectives. Within institutional talk, there is a need to achieve an end goal (within restricted conventional forms) and the need to recognize there will be constraints and frameworks informing how this end goal is achieved (Drew & Heritage 1992). It is not the case that, as in ELF contexts, interactants have room to negotiate meaning using English as the communicative medium. Within staff-student interactions, in a target language university setting, participants need to be aware of the expected norms of the academic encounter, such as observing social roles and power relationships, and then make corresponding language adjustments based on this knowledge.

Where institutional talk is status-appropriate for the participants’ roles and adheres to expectations, the talk is described as congruent (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford 1990, 1993). An example of congruency might be a student requesting an academic meeting with an advisor. In the event of noncongruent interactions, where the status of the representative is challenged (e.g. a student requests an extension to a deadline), status-preserving strategies (SPS) are required as mitigators to ensure the task is accomplished in a favourable way and to maintain a good academic relationship (Bardovi Harlig 1990). Asking for an extension to a deadline, for example, could be mitigated by making the request in a brief and timely manner (non-linguistic SPS) and by using situationally appropriate request strategies and lexical modifiers (linguistic SPS) for damage control. Failing to negotiate noncongruent encounters in an appropriate way is likely to result in non-completion of the task in the short term (the deadline extension is not granted) but could also risk a lasting negative impression of the student in the long term. It is the negotiation of these noncongruent encounters which L2 learners can find particularly challenging and which are a feature of the empirical study presented in this book. Chen’s (2006) longitudinal study of a Taiwanese graduate student’s academic emails to faculty at an American institution is a good illustration of these struggles. The 2.5-year study charts how status-unequal e-communication is initially challenging for the student since there are no explicit rules to follow or model practices to imitate. This is because emails between staff and students tend to be private exchanges and feedback is rarely offered. These barriers caused the student’s progress in producing pragmatically appropriate emails to be slow and limited. Early emails often drew on L1 practices and were characterized as lengthy (with irrelevant detail), were demanding and needy in terms of tone and linguistic expressions used, contained few reasons or explanations as might be expected, and often failed to demonstrate status-appropriate politeness. The study in this volume aims to help students overcome these linguistic and cultural barriers so struggles of this kind do not impede the study abroad experience.

Research shows producing pragmatically appropriate language in a British context may be particularly problematic for international students from positive politeness¹ cultures (Brown & Levinson 1987) such as Spain (Marquez Reiter 2000), Greece (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008; Pavlidou 1998; Sifianou 1992), Korea (Kim 2008) and China (Gu 1990) as their language can be perceived as rude if they do not adhere to expectations of the UK’s negative politeness² host culture (García 1989; Marquez-Reiter 2000; Sifianou 1992). As Sabaté i Dalmau and Curell i Gotor (2007: 293) explain, L1 users belonging to a positive face-based culture often perform speech acts at an inappropriate level of intensity when communicating in a negative-based L2 culture due to applying inadequate sociopragmatic concerns and politeness, relative to the target culture. Put simply, when studying overseas in an L2 environment, learners may get the grammar or words right but the pragmatics wrong and this can have a negative impact on how effective their communication is. The study in this volume also investigates the extent to which Chinese speakers from positive politeness cultures manage L2 pragmatic output in a UK-based negative politeness environment.

In terms of measuring the pragmatic success of the participants in this study, the historical practice in L2 pragmatics research is to employ native speaker (NS) norms as a comparative benchmark. Whilst Barron (2003) and Warga (2007), amongst others, argue that some kind of baseline is a useful or unavoidable yardstick (Roever 2011) against which to measure L2 learner performance, the concept of the NS norm must also be viewed with caution. Within intercultural communication studies, the ongoing debates of what it means to be interculturally competent regularly profile the issues surrounding using a NS model, yet these discussions are only recently beginning to resonate in second language pragmatics research. Specifically, critics outline the following difficulties with positing a NS ideal: First, selecting the appropriate L2 norm in a principled manner is a challenging task given the range of language varieties available, within which social class, gender and age-based variation are also likely (House & Kasper 2000). Second, NS themselves also deviate from the standard norm so L2 speakers should be afforded the same concessions, given they are also multicompetent L2 users (Cook 2002). Third is the case of L2 users exercising learner agency and intentionally opting out from convergence to the L2 norm in order to preserve and promote their own L1 identities (Kasper 1997). In such cases, non-L2-like behaviour is a conscious decision rather than being attributed to gaps in pragmatic knowledge. Finally, research has shown acquiring pragmatic knowledge to be a lengthy process, particularly in the absence of instruction. Whether L2 speakers wish to achieve L2-like levels or not may therefore be an unrealistic goal. This may be why some degree of convergence is advocated as a preferable aim (Giles et al. 1991; Kasper 1997; Sabaté i Dalmau & Curell i Gotor 2007).

For the reasons described above, and the caution attached to using L1 comparative data, the study in this volume adopts a stance which avoids the promotion of direct L1 and L2 comparisons. Instead, the aim is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Researching L2 pragmatics
• 3 Instructed L2 pragmatics
• 4 Requests and apologies
• 5 Background to the study
• 6 Methodology
• 7 Request and apology findings
• 8 Study abroad language contact findings
• 9 Discussion
• 10 Conclusions and future directions
• Notes
• References
• Appendix 1. Living in the UK questionnaire
• Appendix 2. Scheme of work for the six-week explicit instructional period
• Appendix 3. Sample of communicative practice materials
• Index
• Imprint