Pragmatic Competence

This volume includes eleven chapters written by well-known specialists in foreign language teaching and interlanguage pragmatics: K. Bardovi-Harlig, D. Boxer, C. Clennell and S. Nichols, A. Cohen, M. A. Dufon, J. House, H. Kobayashi and C. Rinnert, A.J. Meier, M. P. Safont, P. Salazar, and A. Trosborg. The authors bring together both theoretical and empirical studies dealing with pragmatic competence and its teachability: they review the latest studies carried out in the field, examine issues of developmental pragmatics in the classroom, describe various projects and analyses of different pragmatic aspects, provide evidence of the benefits of explicit teaching of pragmatics, and suggest interesting activities to develop learners' pragmatic knowledge.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language. The book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by eight empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. They target selected features of Japanese pragmatics and investigate the learners' use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence. The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, sentence final particles, speech acts of various types, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics (linguistic forms available to perform language functions) and sociopragmatics (norms that determine appropriate use of the forms) in Japanese. By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. The last section presents a critical reflection on the eight empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research.

This book describes second language learners? development of pragmatic competence - the appropriate language use in a social context. It reveals patterns of development across different aspects of pragmatic abilities measured over one year and presents rich descriptions of participants? experiences and the individual characteristics that shaped their developmental trajectories.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions such as: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language.

This book probes into under-researched issues in L2 pragmatics. Firstly, pragmatic competence, pragmatic awareness and metapragmatic awareness are re-defined and clearly distinguished on theoretical grounds. Secondly, pragmatic competence and its manifestations are evaluated on empirical grounds by distinct criteria and validated testing measures. More importantly, genuine pragmatic inference is elicited in contexts of online interpretation where figurative speech plays a central role. Genre-specific discourse which occurs in editorials and news reports serves as a natural testbed for examining the role of advanced mind-reading abilities in developing pragmatic competence. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory accommodates the findings of empirical assessment and yields new insights in the cognitive procedures activated during interpretation. The comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of pragmatic competence makes this book of interest to researchers and students in pragmatics, L2 theory and applications, genre studies, and to those concerned with the cognitive underpinnings of communication in L2.

This book provides comprehensive investigation of the effect of motivation on L2 learners’ pragmatic learning, which has been discussed for a long time but remains under-explored. This study examines whether and to what extent learners’ levels of motivation influence their pragmatic awareness, comprehension and production in an EFL context. It presents an original study that not only enriches our knowledge of the feasibility of modern technology in collecting large-scale data related to pragmatic competence but also eminently connects L2 pragmatics more closely with mainstream second language acquisition research by focusing on the role of motivation in pragmatic learning. This book will be of great value to researchers and postgraduates interested in second language acquisition, especially those who work on L2 pragmatics and individual variation among learners.

Taking a psycholinguistic perspective, this book investigates how second language (L2) learners’ pragmatic abilities in English can be measured. It complements and extends earlier work on the testing of implicit and explicit grammar. The authors present a set of tests they developed using both well-established methods of measuring pragmatic knowledge (e.g. a Metapragmatic Knowledge Test and role plays) and more original tests (e.g. an Irony Test and an Elicited Imitation Test). They explain the development of the tests and report the results of their work with native speakers of English and Chinese and Japanese L2 learners. A confirmatory factor analysis lends support to the theoretical basis of the tests. The authors also report studies that explored the use of the tests to investigate L2 linguistic proficiency, study abroad and formal instruction. In concluding, they consider the strengths and limitations of the tests and propose some directions for future research.

This book adopts a cross-sectional approach and mainly focuses on one of the core pragmatic constructs, formulaic/pragmatic routines, in addition to components put forward by Roever (2011) and Taguchi (2013). It actively integrates multidimensional pragmatic modalities—including both production (initiating and responding) and reception (recognition, comprehension, and perception), together with learners’ cognitive processes—rather than one or two types of task modalities. Focusing more on the Chinese EFL context instead of Japanese or European L1 learners, it also takes advantage of an emerging instrument, the computer-animated elicitation task, for data collection based on authentic oral responses and to avoid “coached” responses. The socio-cognitive approach, proposed by the famous linguistic expert Prof. Istvan Kecskes, is subsequently applied to conduct an in-depth analysis of the data. Hence, the book introduces a new and fruitful theoretical perspective to the traditional L2 pragmatic research field.