Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers 9781783099931

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION Series Editors: Professor David Singleton, University of Pannonia, Hungary and Fellow Emeritus, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland and Associate Professor Simone E. Pfenninger, University of Salzburg, Austria This series brings together titles dealing with a variety of aspects of language acquisition and processing in situations where a language or languages other than the native language is involved. Second language is thus interpreted in its broadest possible sense. The volumes included in the series all offer in their different ways, on the one hand, exposition and discussion of empirical fi ndings and, on the other, some degree of theoretical reflection. In this latter connection, no particular theoretical stance is privileged in the series; nor is any relevant perspective – sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic, etc. – deemed out of place. The intended readership of the series includes fi nal-year undergraduates working on second language acquisition projects, postgraduate students involved in second language acquisition research, and researchers, teachers and policy-makers in general whose interests include a second language acquisition component. All books in this series are externally peer-reviewed. Full details of all the books in this series and of all our other publications can be found on http://www.multilingual-matters.com, or by writing to Multilingual Matters, St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: 123

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers Andrew D. Cohen

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit

DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/COHEN9924 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Control Number: 2017061008 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-992-4 (hbk) ISBN-13: 978-1-78309-991-7 (pbk) Multilingual Matters UK: St Nicholas House, 31-34 High Street, Bristol BS1 2AW, UK. USA: NBN, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, USA. Website: www.multilingual-matters.com Twitter: Multi_Ling_Mat Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/multilingualmatters Blog: www.channelviewpublications.wordpress.com Copyright © 2018 Andrew D. Cohen. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Nova Techset Private Limited, Bengaluru and Chennai, India. Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press Ltd. Printed and bound in the US by Edwards Brothers Malloy, Inc.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Acronyms

ix

Foreword Rachel L. Shively

xi

1 An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers 2 The Development of Pragmatic Ability with Lauren Wyner

1 26

3 The Handling of Pragmatics by Native and Nonnative Teachers 57 4 What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics and What They Report Doing

81

5 Basic Issues in the Teaching of Pragmatics with Lauren Wyner

101

6 Ideas for Teaching Pragmatics and for Motivating Learners

125

7 The Role of Technology in Teaching and Learning Pragmatics

154

8 The Learning of Pragmatics

181

9 The Assessment of Pragmatics

211

10 Researching Pragmatics

241

11 Conclusions

264

References

270

Author Index

287

Subject Index

292

v

Acknowledgments

I would first like to acknowledge the many native- and nonnative-speaking teachers who responded to the international survey presented in Chapter 4, which generated numerous constructive suggestions that were integrated into Chapters 5 and 6. Their insights were invaluable in producing this book. I would also like to thank Meryl Siegel for her input in the early stages of the survey design. Her feedback was valuable both in shaping the design and in the way that the results were interpreted. In addition, I would also like to acknowledge the extensive contributions made by Lauren Wyner to both Chapters 2 and 5. It was her presentation on the second language (L2) and foreign language (FL) relationship in pragmatics at the 2nd American Pragmatics Association Conference at University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in October 2014 that prompted my interest in this particular area, and led to our collaboration on an article which appeared in Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching (2015), which contributed to Chapters 2 and 5. Another colleague who I would like to acknowledge is Erhan Aslan, whose most insightful research on language instructor teaching, on both French as a native language and German as a foreign language, prompted a very productive interaction between the two of us, which helped to motivate me to continue with this project. The results of his study, which were published in the Canadian Modern Language Review in 2015, helped to corroborate my thinking about why writing a book of this nature made sense. Let me also say that I feel most fortunate to have the solid support of outstanding colleagues in my efforts to promote the field of pragmatics and in taking on this particular book-writing project. The following individuals have all contributed both directly and indirectly to making this volume a reality, whether through productive interactions with them over the years, reading their insightful writings in the field, attending their stimulating conference presentations and their steadfast support of my work: Kathleen Bardov-Harlig, César Félix-Brasdefer, Naoko Taguchi, Noriko Ishihara, Julie Sykes, Zohreh Eslami, Rachel Shively, Carsten Roever and Elite Olshtain. I am greatly indebted to all of them. Needless to say, there are many others not mentioned in this list who have also contributed to shaping my thinking and my writing. Many of their names appear in the references for this volume. vii

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

I give special acknowledgment to Julie Berlin for the illustrations in the book. She listened carefully to me as I described each pragmatics situation and did a wonderful job of converting my imagined scenes into reality. I think they help to convey nicely the way pragmatics shows up out in the world. Finally, let me acknowledge my wife, Sabina, to whom I have been happily married for 50 years, for her wonderful support of my post-teaching professional endeavors and her willingness to put up with the intensity with which I tackled this book-writing project, involving for the fi rst time voice recognition software. Sometimes this meant that our daily interactions inadvertently became part of the text of the book until I discovered that I had left the Dragon software functioning! Publisher Acknowledgments

Thanks go to Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching for permission to draw on portions of Lauren Wyner and my paper, ‘Second language pragmatic ability: Individual differences according to environment’, which appeared in 2015 in Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching 5 (4), 519–556. Thanks also go to the MinneTESOL Journal (www.minnetesoljournal.org) for permission to use portions of my paper, ‘Learner strategies for performing intercultural pragmatics’, which appeared in 2011 in the MinneTESOL Journal 28, 13–24. Finally, thanks go to the Iranian Journal of Language Testing for granting permission to use portions of my paper, ‘Towards increased classroom assessment of pragmatic ability’, which appeared in 2014 in the Iranian Journal of Language Testing 4 (1), 5–25.

Acronyms

ACTFL CARLA C1, C2 CC CMC DCT EFL ELF ENL ESL FL HS L1 L2 MAXSA M-C MICASE NNS NNT NS NT RA SA SCMC SIE SNS TL WBT WEs

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (University of Minnesota) fi rst culture, second culture Creative Commons computer-mediated communication discourse completion task English as a foreign language English as a lingua franca English as a new language English as a second language foreign language high school fi rst language second language maximizing study abroad multiple-choice The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English nonnative speaker (NNSs, pl.) nonnative-speaking teacher (NNTs, pl.) native speaker (NSs, pl.) native-speaking teacher (NTs, pl.) research assistant study abroad synchronous computer-mediated communication synthetic immersive environment social networking sites target language web-based tutorial World Englishes

ix

Foreword

Pragmatic competence in a second language has been defi ned as ‘the ability to communicate your intended message with all its nuances in any sociocultural context and to interpret the message of your interlocutor as it was intended’ (Fraser, 2010: 15). By reflecting on the L2 knowledge and skills that this defi nition entails, we can appreciate the challenges that learners face as they develop their L2 pragmatic abilities. Among other things, learners need to gain receptive and productive abilities to: • • • • • • • •

perform speech acts such as requesting, apologizing, and thanking; grasp the non-literal meaning of words and phrases in the L2; link grammar structures with their communicative functions; express politeness and impoliteness; engage in humorous exchanges; manage their participation in conversations; match language forms to different situations and interlocutors; and employ language to present themselves in desired ways, for example, as funny, serious, respectful, or thoughtful people.

Given that the ways that speakers express their intended meanings through language varies from one culture to another, L2 learners cannot always successfully transfer their L1 pragmatic norms to the L2. For example, while using an imperative verb form to order a coffee in Peninsular Spanish is commonplace and appropriate, in American English the same form may sound rude or demanding. Learning the social meanings and functions that specific words and structures convey in the L2 can help learners to avoid miscommunication and to express the meanings that they intend. L2 learners can certainly develop L2 pragmatic competence through immersion in an L2 speech community. However, research in the past three decades indicates that naturalistic learning may proceed fairly slowly and that providing learners with instruction in L2 pragmatics can be effective in accelerating learning and enhancing metapragmatic awareness. It is this last point that forms the point of departure for this volume: Cohen advocates for incorporating pragmatics instruction into the foreign language curriculum from the early to the more advanced stages of L2 proficiency. However, as he points out, teachers are typically left to their own devices to plan and deliver pragmatics instruction, since textbooks and teacher education programs are often lacking in information and training to teach pragmatics. In xi

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providing practical information for teaching pragmatics, as well as considering the perspectives of both native- and nonnative-speaking FL teachers, this volume makes an important contribution to filling the gap in available resources for teachers and teacher educators. Cohen’s credentials are unmatched in the area of teaching and learning L2 pragmatics. He was among the earliest scholars to focus on the critical role of pragmatics in L2 learning and teaching and his research has consistently produced important insights to advance our understanding of this topic. Not only has Cohen been a leader in L2 pragmatics research, he has long been at the forefront of developing and disseminating resources and materials for FL teachers and learners. For instance, for many years, Cohen taught a summer workshop for teachers focused on L2 pragmatics through the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. He and his colleagues also created the Maximizing Study Abroad guidebook (Paige et  al., 2006), which provides practical and accessible materials to help study abroad students learn language and culture – including pragmatics – during their stay abroad. Cohen was further instrumental in supporting the creation of instructional materials in Japanese and Spanish that are freely available online through the websites Strategies for Learning Speech Acts in Japanese (http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/introtospeechacts/index.htm) and Dancing with Words: Spanish Pragmatics (http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html). Both webpages offer interactive exercises for students and instructional materials for teachers. More recently, Cohen launched the Second and Foreign Language Pragmatics Wiki (http://wlpragmatics.pbworks.com/w/page/99620139/ Second_and_Foreign_Language-Pragmatic _Wiki) with the idea to provide a user-friendly platform for FL teachers to share their lesson plans and pragmatics resources. Finally, Cohen himself is an avid language learner who has studied the pragmatics of 12 different languages as diverse as French, Hebrew, and Japanese. His personal successes and challenges with L2 pragmatics contribute a learner perspective to this volume. It is in the same spirit of Cohen’s previous efforts to make teaching and learning pragmatics a reality that this volume offers FL teachers and teacher educators an insightful and practical resource to thoughtfully, critically, and effectively incorporate pragmatics into the FL curriculum. Rachel L. Shively Illinois State University References Fraser, B. (2010) Pragmatic competence: The case of hedging. In G. Kaltenböck, W. Mihatsch and S. Schneider (eds) New Approaches to Hedging (pp. 15–34). Bingley: Emerald. Paige, R.M., Cohen, A.D., Kappler, B., Chi, J.C. and Lassegard, J.P. (2006) Maximizing Study Abroad: A Students’ Guide to Strategies for Language and Culture Learning and Use. Minneapolis: CARLA.

1 An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers

1.1 The Aim and Scope of the Book

This book deals with intercultural pragmatics and focuses on how both nonnative teachers (NNTs) and their native teacher colleagues (NTs) may be able to enhance their classroom instruction regarding targetlanguage (TL) pragmatics. The immediate audience for the book is teachers and teacher educators. The intention is to provide ideas for how they can make pragmatics as accessible as possible to learners. The ultimate goal is to improve the teaching of pragmatics for the sake of learners, who stand to benefit from insights as to how to be pragmatically appropriate in their TL of choice. At the outset, it needs to be stated that just as it is problematic to defi ne what native speaker means (see Davies, 2003), there can undoubtedly be considerable differences among so-called NTs, just as there can be differences among so-called NNTs. Here are some of the sources of such differences among NTs: •

• • • • •

NTs can have varying degrees of contact with the fi rst language (L1) that they teach. Whereas some may never leave the L1 community, others may fi nd themselves living in another community where their use of the L1 is affected by the use of one or more other languages. While still living within the L1 community, the NTs may have differential use of their L1 for numerous reasons. The number of years that the NTs have been teaching their L1 would expectedly have an impact on their facility with the language in the various skill areas. NTs may also be fluent speakers of other languages and may actually be exposed to several languages from birth. Some NTs are more natural teachers than others. Some NTs are more knowledgeable about pragmatics in their L1 than are others. 1

2

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Likewise, there can also be differences among NNTs: •

•

• •

NNTs can have differing exposure to the TL, not just by virtue of time spent living in a community where it is spoken as the dominant language, but also as a result of their own personal contact with that language in the community. The fact that it is available in the community does not necessarily mean that the NNTs develop nativelike ability in the pragmatics of that language. Teachers differ with respect to how proficient they actually become in the TL. For example, some become better at certain skill areas in the TL than do others. This may be a function of how many other languages they have studied, their language aptitude and language strategy repertoire, their knowledge of linguistics and their ability to make practical use of this knowledge. Teachers may differ not only with respect their knowledge base regarding pragmatics in the TL, but also with respect to their ability to perform this knowledge in a pragmatically appropriate way in a given situation. Just as with NTs, some NNTs may be more natural teachers than others.

Therefore, given the myriad of differences among so-called NTs and likewise among NNTs, when these labels are used in the book, the intended reference will be to the average representative of the NT or NNT group, knowing full well that there is variation within each group. The position taken in this volume is that pragmatics deserves to be taught in a TL class and ideally even from day one in the beginning-level language class. For example, greetings are introduced right away in language class, but how they are used differs dramatically from language community to language community. Since greetings are so external, they are highly discernible, but still may possess some subtle features. Since they function as an important social lubricant, instruction in their appropriate use can be extremely valuable. For instance, bonjour in French does not have the same distribution as buenos días in Spanish. In addition, the use of buenos días varies according to the specific speech community. In other language communities, greetings do not necessarily involve time of day, but rather how the other person is doing or even whether or not they have eaten. The stance that pragmatics needs to be explicitly taught from the early stages of language instruction calls for taking a close look at the potential role of any instructors in bringing this about, which means that there are challenges for both NTs and NNTs. Furthermore, the concerns of teachers – especially NNTs – regarding instruction about pragmatics are not necessarily addressed in teacher development programs. It would appear that teachers may not have easy access to practical suggestions as to what to do about their own gaps in knowledge when it comes to pragmatics. This book is intended to provide numerous suggestions for closing the gap.

An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers

3

The book will focus primarily on the experiences of instructors as they teach their learners about the pragmatics of the TL, whether it be more a second-language (L2) experience since the language is spoken extensively in the learners’ immediate community, or more a foreign-language (FL) experience in that the language is not spoken extensively in the learners’ immediate community. All the while, there is the realization that this traditional dichotomy is giving way to a more hybrid reality in an increasingly globalized world. Therefore, it is fair to say that there is less of a dichotomy between L2 and FL, and more of a continuum. Not only would this be the case as it applies to globalized English (section 1.2.4), but also as it applies to other languages that have an international presence, such as Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese, to name just a few. Language users are drawing on the internet, and especially on social media, in new and engaging ways. The consequence is that traditional means of interpreting pragmatic intention across languages may not work as well as they used to. It is no longer possible to make assumptions as to how FL pragmatics are disadvantaged by virtue of the distance from the TL speech community, nor to assume that users of the TL as an L2 are automatically likely to use pragmatics that are more in step with the TL speech community. It will be made clear in the book that there are aspects of teaching pragmatics where it may help to be an NT and other areas where it may help to be an NNT. The book will speak to both of these areas where teachers may be looking for creative means to compensate for their gaps in knowledge about TL pragmatics. The book will consider the issue of the teacher’s language background, teaching experience and current teaching context, since these factors can help to explain their strengths and weaknesses in teaching pragmatics. The book will return frequently to the realization that it is simplistic to view NTs and NNTs as homogeneous groups, since, as outlined above, teachers may differ greatly in terms of their knowledge of the TL and of other languages that they speak, their teaching experience and the context in which they are teaching the TL. The book will also look at the many ways that NTs and NNTs can provide relevant and informed information on the pragmatics of the TL. For example, attention is paid to the potential role of digital media and other means to provide models for pragmatic behavior. What makes this a unique topic for a book is that volumes have started to appear that go beyond a review of the research literature to suggestions for pedagogy. But, unlike other books that do not really acknowledge potential similarities and differences between native-speaker (NS) and nonnative speakers (NNS) status in the teaching of pragmatics, this book deals directly with the issue, starting with an acknowledgement that NNTs may have both advantages and challenges when assuming the role of instructor regarding L2/FL pragmatics. NTs may also have advantages and challenges. The book will also explore the extent to which there are similarities and differences between these two groups of teachers.

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

It needs to be pointed out that the focus in this book is not on L1 pragmatics, which has been written about in other books. It is possible, for example, to find studies that have looked at the acquisition of pragmatics in young children in their L1 and how they deal with metaphor, irony and implicature (Zufferey, 2015). This volume is also not focused on pragmatic theory. Other books deal rigorously with the theoretical underpinnings and principles of pragmatic meanings across languages, such as LoCastro (2012). The goal of this volume is to take a close look at issues regarding the teaching and learning of TL pragmatics, and the research associated with the two. The intention is to ensure that this volume provides material of interest to all teacher educators and researchers, as well as to both NTs and NNTs, regardless of the norms that they use to determine what constitutes appropriate pragmatic behavior for a given context. Let it be noted here that norms for sociocultural behavior vary. Therefore, when norms are mentioned in this book, what will be implied are the more idealized norms for how to expect people to behave in the given situation in the given context. What is problematic here is that since variation pervades whatever pragmatic behavior is found in any speech community (see, for example, Felix-Brasdefer & Koike, 2012), so-called norms are unlikely to be universal within any given group. Rather, they are an ideal about what ought to be said, written or performed nonverbally, rather than an accurate yardstick for what people will inevitably do in a given situation. So any mention of norms in this book is actually referring to idealized norms, even if this is not stated explicitly. The book is intended to appeal to NT readers who welcome the opportunity to look more closely at an area of instruction where they have perhaps overly relied on their intuitions rather than on empirical evidence from research and other sources. It should also appeal to those NNTs who may from time to time experience the discomfort of feeling that they are not expert enough in the pragmatics of the TL, despite having expert proficiency in numerous aspects of the language. While there are likely to be areas in which NNTs feel very comfortable teaching by virtue of having had to figure out how to learn it themselves and then teaching it, there may be other areas of pragmatics where they may feel less comfortable as the instructor. So whose pragmatics is this book interested in focusing on? One approach is just to look for commonalities in the pragmatics of language communities around the world. But is this realistic, given that pragmatic aspects of language and nonverbal behavior are often dependent upon specific contexts that defy one-size-fits-all interpretations? This is definitely true of humor. Therefore, the approach adopted in this volume is that of providing examples of pragmatics as played out in a number of different languages and cultures. My sense is that while there are clearly universals in pragmatic behavior, the differences far outweigh the commonalities. For this reason, learners need to be open to learning about

An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers

5

language- and culture-specific pragmatic behaviors, especially those that could lead to pragmatic failure if they are not attended to. 1.2 Definitions and Topics

This section will provide defi nitions and descriptions for major concepts discussed in this volume, beginning with the very notion of pragmatic ability. 1.2.1 Pragmatic ability and speech acts

Pragmatic ability is the ability to deal with meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader) and to interpret people’s intended meanings, their assumptions, their purposes or goals, and the kinds of actions (e.g. making a request) that they are performing when they speak or write (Yule, 1996: 3–4). Pragmatics includes politeness/ impoliteness, speech acts, conversational management and interactional competence, humor, sarcasm, teasing, cursing, discourse markers, conversational implicature and deixis (see Cohen, 2017). (More will be said about efforts to define ‘pragmatic ability’ in Chapter 2, Section 2.1.1.) One may ask why there a need to explicitly teach language learners about pragmatics, since it might be assumed that learners just pick up pragmatics by osmosis. The reality is that they often do not. Rather, research and practice have demonstrated that learners do benefit from being aware of the situationally-appropriate utterances in a given TL situation, namely, what can be said, to whom, where, when and how. There is a powerful influence working against the appropriate use of the TL – namely, how we do it in our native or dominant language. It is not enough just to know a host of vocabulary words and how to inflect the verb for even complex tenses like the pluperfect. Rather, it is crucial to know when and how to use this vocabulary and these verb forms, among a host of other language-related issues. The following are areas of pragmatics worthy of attention in the TL classroom: • •

• • •

How to be polite and also impolite. How to make requests, how to apologize, how to compliment and respond to compliments, how to complain, how to criticize people (for their behavior and appearance), how to perform greetings and leave takings, and how to express gratitude. How to perceive humor, sarcasm and teasing, and how to tease, be humorous and be sarcastic. How to express emotions through the TL, such as in cursing. How to manage conversations (e.g. how to get and keep the floor, take turns and give appropriate listener responses).

6

• • •

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

In both conversations and in written messaging, how to recognize and make use of discourse markers such as ‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘so’, ‘I think’, ‘on the one/other hand’, ‘frankly’ and ‘as a matter of fact’. How to detect the implied meaning in conversations (conversational implicature), drawing on context and on knowledge of how conversation works. How to interpret words and phrases such as ‘there’, ‘this/that’, ‘his/ her’ and ‘you’ from context (referred to as deixis).

One of the mainstay features of pragmatics is the speech act. A speech act refers to oral or written language that performs a function in communication. We perform speech acts when we offer a greeting, express our gratitude, make a request, issue a complaint, extend an invitation, give compliments, or refuse a request or invitation. In reality, most speech acts perform more than one function. The performance of common speech acts usually involves choosing from a set of possible strategies, some of which may involve the use of what could be viewed as other distinct speech acts, and for this reason the term speech act set was introduced some years ago (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983). For example, in complaining, you could include a threat, which constitutes a speech act distinct from complaining (e.g. ‘OK, then. If you won’t turn your music down, I’ll call the police!’), or in apologizing, you could also add criticism (e.g. ‘Sorry I bumped into you, lady, but look where you’re standing!’). The realization of a given speech act in a given context, then, involves the use of a minimum of one strategy from the speech act set to the selection of numerous strategies from that set. In the case of an apology, for example, the strategy of expressing an apology could be performed just through the strategy of expressing an apology (‘I’m sorry’, ‘excuse me’ or ‘I apologize’), or offering repair (‘Here, let me pick these up’) or could involve a combination of them, such as expressing apology, acknowledging responsibility and offering repair. In fact, there is a set of at least five semantic formulas that seem to apply to apologizing in a variety of different languages (Cohen, 2014b): (1) Expression of an apology: a word, expression, or sentence containing a verb such as ‘sorry’, ‘excuse’, ‘forgive’ or ‘apologize.’ In American English, ‘I apologize…’ is found more in writing than it is in oral language. An expression of an apology can be intensified – in American English, usually by adding intensifiers such as ‘really’, ‘terribly’, ‘awfully’, ‘so’, ‘very’ or some combination of them – for example, ‘I’m really very sorry.’ (2) Acknowledgment of responsibility: the degree of recognition of fault. This strategy includes a continuum: accepting the blame: ‘It’s my fault’; expressing self-deficiency: ‘I was confused/I didn’t see/You are right’; lack of intent: ‘I didn’t mean to’; implicit expression of responsibility: ‘I was sure I had given you the right directions’; not accepting

An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers

7

the blame/denying responsibility: ‘It wasn’t my fault’; or even blaming the listener: ‘It’s your own fault.’ (3) Explanation or account: a description of the situation that led to the offense, serving as an indirect way of apologizing. This explanation is intended to set things right, as in ‘The reason I stumbled into you is that I have MS and so my balance isn’t so good.’ At times it is interpreted as an excuse, such as ‘The bus was late’ or ‘My alarm just didn’t go off.’ (4) Offer of repair: a bid by the apologizer to carry out an action or provide payment for some kind of damage which resulted from his/her infraction (e.g. ‘Let me pick those up for you’, ‘I’ll be there in half an hour’). This strategy is situation-specific and is only appropriate when actual damage has occurred. (5) Promise of non-recurrence: a commitment by the apologizer to not have the offense happen again (e.g. ‘I’ll never forget our anniversary again’). This strategy is situation-specific and less frequent than the other strategies. Note that contrary to what is suggested by the term, semantic formulas are often not formulaic (Bardovi-Harlig, 2006: 4). Hence, we will refer to these strategies as speech act strategies. At least one of these strategies needs to be selected for use in the performance of a speech act in a given speech community for the speech act to take place. Whether strategy (3) above, ‘explanation or account’, is sufficient in a given context depends on the speech community. In some speech communities (such as in regions of Cuba like Cienfuegos) this may be a more acceptable way of apologizing than in others. Since in such contexts public transportation may, at times, be problematic, arriving late to a university course session and telling the professor that the bus was late (without an expression of apology as in (1)) might be perfectly acceptable. In other contexts, the student might use strategy (2), acknowledging responsibility (‘I really should have allowed more time for the bus ride’) and strategy (4), offering repair (‘I’ll get notes on what I missed from a classmate’). Finally, in some contexts (e.g. in a college classroom in the US) the very act of saying anything upon arriving late to class could be inappropriate since the teacher might see it as disrupting the class. The time to say something to the teacher would be at the break. Looking closely at speech acts, we see that there are some strategies which are relatively unique to that particular speech act set, such as the offer of repair in an apology. In addition, there are strategies that can be applied to various speech acts, such as an opener consisting of a greeting like ‘Hi’ serving as an attention getter. This opening might be found in requests, complaints and numerous other speech act sets. In this volume, the term ‘speech act’ will be used to refer to what is actually a speech act set or a potential component of the set.

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

One fi nal caveat is that since speech acts are given labels such as ‘requests’ and ‘invitations’, it is important to see how they actually function, and whether, in fact, the intention of the speech act – that is, the illocutionary meaning – is consistent with this label. Bardovi-Harlig (2016b) pointed out, for example, that requests to perform an academic service are often dressed up as invitations, in which an institutional representative asks a faculty member to perform a professional service for the benefit of the field. The rationale for why such requests are referred to as invitations is that then the recipients feel good to be invited (especially young scholars). Likewise, the colleagues seeking the often free services get to perceive themselves as benefactors rather than as supplicants. Bardovi-Harlig also noted that calling such requests invitations makes it easier to scold the invitee for a late response. The use of particular strategies in a given speech act situation (e.g. an apology after an altercation) depends on a series of factors: • • • • •

the language and culture; the particular subculture; the particular interlocutors; style preferences and personality; and willingness to conform to the speech community’s norms for language behavior.

Therefore, looking at apologies in Hebrew in mainstream Israeli culture, let us say we are focusing on the subculture of secular Israeli teenagers. Let us assume that the particular interlocutors are two 18-year-old males who are good friends, both relatively outgoing. If they are native to the culture, they may be less likely to use any apology strategies at all to each other (e.g. expression of apology, acknowledgment of responsibility or explanation) for some relatively minor infraction (such as arriving late for a get together) than would NNSs, say from the USA, who have been taught to be apologetic about such matters. The Hebrew second-language (L2) speaker might offer an expression of apology (‘Sorry to keep you waiting’) and may also use another strategy like an explanation (‘I just missed the bus and had to wait for another one’) (Figure 1.1). The Hebrew first-language (L1) teenager, on the other hand, may not see the need to apologize given that problems getting around are seen by their peer group as a normal part of life and also time is not viewed so much like a commodity as it is in the USA. Also with regard to defining speech acts, Bardovi-Harlig (2016a) has pointed out that in pragmatics there are different uses of the term formula. One use of the term, as noted above, is in semantic formula where it describes a component of a speech act. In this case, it is not necessarily formulaic in nature, so it is better to refer to semantic formulas as speech act strategies. Another meaning of formula refers to recurrent and often formulaic social expressions used by a speech community for specific

An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers

9

Figure 1.1 Unnecessary apology between teenage friends in Israel

pragmatic  purposes, such as ‘you know’, ‘no worries’ and ‘I dunno.’ Bardovi-Harlig would question just how formulaic either of these types of so-called formulaic language expressions actually are. She would contend that it depends on the speech act, the culture, the language and the context, and how they interact with other factors such as degree of imposition and social distance among the interlocutors. She backs up her argument with reference to a corpus-based study demonstrating that more formulaic language is used in encounters between shopkeepers and customers in Syria than in France. Whereas in Arabic there is a formula for acknowledging the request for the product as well as the acceptance of the product – including both markers of friendship and of deference, in French the receipt of the item is generally not expressed in a formulaic way (see Traverso, 2006). 1.2.2 The so-called ‘native speaker’

Since reference has been made to the NS, let us consider what constitutes an NS. Arguments have been put forward advocating the abandonment of any reference to ‘native speakers’ in deference to consequent discrimination suffered by NNSs due to the use of the NS term (see Davies, 2003). The argument starts by rightly pointing out the actual continuum that NNTs might represent. They differ in terms of their areas of TL control for numerous reasons, as enumerated above. In his book chapter on the decline and fall of the native speaker, Llurda (2009) contended that the NT-NNT distinction remains elusive. He called for descriptive studies of how English is actually taught by NTs and NNTs in classrooms around the world. The truth is, however, that notions about NTs and NNTs abound all over the world and have some reality with regard to the perceptions of

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

teachers in both categories. For example, a survey of the benefits to being an NT or an NNT showed that the NTs viewed the NNTs of English as a foreign language (EFL) as more competent at language teaching than the NNTs viewed themselves to be (Tajeddin & Adeh, 2016). The responses to a questionnaire came from 100 NTs from the USA and the UK and 100 NNTs from Iran and Turkey. There was consensus among NTs and NNTs alike that NTs had correct pronunciation and intonation, an intuitive knowledge of correct language, a deep awareness of the target culture, confidence in using English, an ability to teach informal English and understanding of nuances in language usage. Discrepancies were found, however, with regard to how the two groups perceived the NNTs. According to the NTs in the sample, NNTs were perceived as tending to have a more solid background in teacher education and consequently exhibiting better teaching practices, as capable of explaining grammar rules more effectively, as having greater understanding of L1 interference problems and as being more sensitive to the students’ problems given their greater familiarity with the context and culture of the learners. While NNTs agreed to some extent with this perception, they tended to view themselves as being at a deficit due to their limitations in English proficiency. The survey called up the issue of teacher self-perception and the problematic nature of making such comparisons, given the probable strengths and weaknesses of both NTs and NNTs in the given context. Another study focusing just on NTs in an FL context suggested how complex the matter of teacher perceptions may be. A qualitative study of Chinese teachers of Chinese in Finland provided insights into the experiences and perceptions of NTs in an FL context (Liu & Dervin, 2016). A critical intercultural perspective was taken in an effort to understand the experiences and positions of 20 Chinese teachers of Chinese, teaching various levels of Chinese in different types of schools or organizations in different cities in Finland. Data from group discussion and researchers’ notes provided insights into how these teachers constructed their experiences and how these constructions were influenced by factors that went beyond teaching tasks. It was found that the teachers perceived themselves as being treated as inferior to Finnish teachers of Chinese, because they were not certified to teach Chinese and because they had an economically advantageous position as teachers sent to Finland by a Chinese institution (the Confucius Institute). It also did not help their image that they had differing educational backgrounds, teaching qualifications and proficiency in Finnish. The Chinese teachers’ attitude that they were seen as inferior was reflected negatively in the intercultural discourses that they had on Finns and Finland. They perceived themselves as talkative and the local Finnish students as silent. Furthermore, the model for teaching Chinese was dominated by a traditional pedagogic approach, with an overemphasis on teacher-centeredness, grammar and textbook language, and a view of culture as rigid and essentialistic (i.e. with the emphasis on Chinese products

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and their origins, such as moon cakes, red envelopes and festivals). The study highlighted problems that may arise for NTs in an FL context. In this case, professional development was provided to these NTs of Chinese so that they would embrace a more intercultural approach to viewing their situation – namely, that culture was pluralistic in nature (i.e. comprising numerous cultural identities), changing, adaptable and co-constructed. The intervention entailed having the NTs recognize the multi-voiced nature of the self and other and analyzing the relations between them. It allowed the researchers to identify positioning, potential contradictions about cultures and identities, and ‘-isms’. In this case, the multiple voices of the NTs were as a Chinese person, as an uncertified teacher and as a teacher of Chinese in Finland. The position taken in this volume is not to dismiss the NT-NNT distinction out of hand, but rather to explore in depth the similarities and differences among NTs and NNTs in how they handle the teaching of pragmatics. In so doing, the exploration itself should help to clarify ways in which the so-called NT may be predisposed to have an easier time teaching TL pragmatics instruction and by the same token ways in which NNTs may also have an easier time. Such an exploration will point up areas where neither group of teachers is seen to have an advantage over the other. 1.2.3 Intercultural vs. cross-cultural pragmatics

The learning of TL pragmatics, either as an L2 or an FL, involves a meeting of language and culture, in an often intertwined way. A productive way of looking at this meeting is through intercultural pragmatics, namely, looking at the way that the language system is put to use in social encounters among people who have different L1s, communicate in a common language and usually represent different cultures (Kecskes, 2014: 15). Intercultural communication, then, is the coming together of both social and cognitive elements in a dynamic interplay of personal, behavioral and contextual factors. What can make the outcomes of these encounters so unpredictable these days is the very globalization of the people’s experiences given the ease of travel, as well as the growth of the internet. Consequently, as suggested above, traditional norms are giving way to new interactive patterns. Intercultural pragmatics really has in it the suggestion that when languages and cultures meet, there may be a subtle or even not-so-subtle shifting on the part of both parties to accommodate to each other’s needs. While a cross-cultural approach to pragmatics looks at pragmatic behavior from the two language and cultural perspectives separately, perhaps with predictions as to what might be the expected behavior of each, an intercultural approach in contrast would look at the two languages and cultures in contact, and the actual results of these encounters. While the cross-cultural approach can be valuable in alerting learners to potential

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

similarities and differences in how people deal with greetings, apologies, complaints, compliments and so forth, in a language, the argument could also be made that some of these contrasts have been overstated, given emergent intercultural patterns. In short, the cross-cultural approach is predicated on predictions of behavior based on similarities and differences between cultures, whereas the intercultural approach is based more on complex realities that may belie such comparisons. 1.2.4 World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF)

The shifting ways that languages and cultures present themselves could also have an impact on what are considered the pragmatic norms for given speech communities. English has been receiving a fair amount of attention of late since movements have sprung up that stress the importance of recognizing diversity among English speakers around the globe, especially those not engaged in English as a second language (ESL), but rather EFL (Ishihara, 2017; Kirkpatrick, 2015). In passing, it may be useful to point out that at the K-12 levels, the US Department of Education is making reference to ‘English as a new language’ (ENL) (NBPTS, 2010). This nomenclature serves as an alternative term for ESL. Perhaps this terminology has some advantages in that it puts the emphasis on newness rather than on ‘secondness’. They use ENL/ESL as a way to represent this. It is fair to say that the current volume emphasizes the teaching and learning of language by adults rather than K-12. Nonetheless, many of the concepts and suggestions contained in this book are relevant to K-12 language instruction, especially for high school (HS) students. For years, the model for appropriate pragmatics in English was unquestionably the same model as for EFL, namely, a model based on idealized norms of US or British English. The WE movement would suggest that while the US and the UK present standards for pragmatics, it is important to acknowledge other varieties of English as well (Galloway & Rose, 2015). Rather than looking disparagingly at the pragmatics used in English by Chinese, Japanese, Korean and others in their local communities, native speakers of English should rather acknowledge these varieties for what they are. However, as Kirkpatrick (2017) points out, rigorously determining the features of the local WE variety would first entail, among other things, distinguishing characteristic features of a local variety from occasional performance errors. In addition, one might expect verification as to the frequency of these features in a corpus representative of the given speech community, as well as determination as to who in that speech community uses these features and the extent to which the features are accepted by whom. Aside from the intra-national use of English encompassed by the WE movement, there is the inter-national use of English to facilitate

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communication among speakers from different linguistic backgrounds who share English as a common language. This approach is referred to as the ELF movement (Kirkpatrick, 2017). ELF sees nonnative English as different rather than deficient (Jenkins et al., 2011). Whereas EFL has its theoretical roots in theories of L1 interference and fossilization, ELF prefers theories of language contact and evolution. As a result, while in EFL code-switching is regarded as evidence of a gap in an NNS’s English knowledge, in ELF it is viewed as a bilingual pragmatic resource. Users of ELF are seen as skilled communicators who make use of their multilingual resources in ways not available to monolingual NSs, and who prioritize successful communication over notions about using English ‘correctly’ (Jenkins et al., 2011). Differences from native English that result in successful ELF communication are not regarded as deficiencies, but as evidence of linguistic adaptability and creativity (Jenkins, 2015). So whereas a WE variety may be associated with a desire to express identity within specific communities, ELF communication has as its primary goal to facilitate international communication with English as the medium (Kirkpatrick, 2017). In the EFL literature, it has been noted that pragmatics has tended to view miscommunication as something negative (Pitzl, 2010), which is a valid point since the pragmatics literature does implicitly or explicitly put a value on the avoidance of communication failure. The assumption is that such communication failure can be embarrassing or frustrating for NNSs and perhaps irritating to the addressee(s), and may even discourage the NNSs from making efforts to communicate. The ELF position taken by Pitzl (2010) is that since communication and miscommunication are intricately linked, miscommunication can have positive effects and thus should not be regarded as a negative phenomenon, but rather as an intrinsic part of any interaction. To make her point, she presented ELF data from two business meetings, one meeting involving three Germans working for an international forwarding agency in Luxembourg and a Dutch sales executive representing an airline that was shipping cargo to destinations in the Middle East and the Far East, and another meeting involving three German L1 employees of a food company in Austria and two South Korean businessmen who distributed the products in their country. It was found that the majority of instances of miscommunication in the analyzed data from these two business meetings did not disrupt the flow of communication, since they constituted local non-understandings or misunderstandings, and since the interactants usually resolved these communication problems succinctly through repetition or reformulation. Apparently, there were just a few instances in the three hours of analyzed data when it was necessary to engage in complex negotiation sequences (i.e. lasting for a minute or more). The researcher interpreted the data as showing that these ELF interactants were skilled in formulating responses that immediately cleared up any communication problems that arose,

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

such as through identifying different possible interpretations and potential causes of the lack of understanding (Pitzl, 2010). She concluded that even if after clarification there still remained ambiguity, this was accepted if it was deemed to be inconsequential for the further progression of the interaction. Hence, rather than having miscommunication interfere with their interactions, the ELF interactants were found to engage in negotiation which, if anything, helped to create a bond between them. Of course, it is important to bear in mind that not all EFL teachers necessarily embrace the tenets of ELF. There are those who continue to teach toward an idealized native speaker norm, even if they pay lip service to ELF. For example, a study by Asmari (2014) of over 200 predominantly NNS EFL teachers in Saudi Arabia found that the majority of NNTs favored the use of ELF, which could mean exposing their students to NNS varieties of English. Yet in their actual language instruction the teachers apparently adhered to a NS norm, whether British, American, Canadian or Australian, especially in written work. Among other things, they reportedly strove for a nativelike pronunciation. The focus in this study was not on pragmatics, but on English in general. Another study focusing on English in general found that Japanese students who were studying in Singapore in an effort to learn English in an expanding-circle location preferred nonetheless to learn English from inner-circle NSs of English (Kobayashi, 2011). The WE paradigm is also concerned with the implications of the spread of English beyond its earliest contexts of use. It also sees the emergence of ‘new’ Englishes developing in their own right as a means of expressing their NNS sociocultural identities instead of conforming to the norms of, say, US or British users of the language (Seidlhofer, 2009). A main area of contrast between WE and ELF is that while WE research has been interested primarily in the study of NNS varieties of English, the position of ELF research is that the world has become so interconnected, and English so bound up with processes of globalization, that a traditional varieties orientation is no longer viable, and that we should, instead, focus on English as fluid, flexible, contingent, hybrid and deeply intercultural (Dewey, 2007). For the purposes of this volume, where the focus is on all languages of the world and not just English, WE will be used as the umbrella acronym for the various world Englishes. The WE movement has appeal in that its principles are consistent with an intercultural approach to pragmatics. There is a problem, however, in that usually pronouncements about WE are not accompanied by models of just what that actually means. Rather, the rhetoric is somewhat vague, suggesting that teachers are to give examples in class of different accents, and of different varieties of language and cultural use in context. The problem is that telling teachers to go ‘beyond static and monolithic representations of the language, as is still largely the case in ELT’ (Vettorel & Corrizzato, 2016: 505), barely scratches the surface and treats a real issue

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with superficial depth. What are lacking are clear guidelines for how to proceed at the instructional level of teaching the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of a given WE. Therefore, how does this relate specifically to pragmatics? If, say, local Japanese or Koreans are conversing among themselves in English, do they transfer their own L1 pragmatics to their interactions in English? One might assume so. Especially if they are not based in the English-speaking world, whose pragmatics are used? Most likely they would each transfer to some extent from their own L1 pragmatics for the interaction. And what if one of the two speakers had learned US English and the other UK English? While the study by Pitzl (2010) referred to above would suggest that at least in the business world, interactants give each other ample room to negotiate meaning, this may not always be the case. In their book on WE, Galloway and Rose (2015) highlight those pragmatic strategies used in conversation in order to enhance message comprehension by making sure that they are clear and adequately explicit. These strategies include topic negotiation, clarification, rephrasing, repetition, self-repair, reliance on metadiscourse and the use of silence. With regard to silence among students in the classroom, a study at the high-school level revealed how a teacher from New Zealand in Japan misread his students’ silence in class as lack of knowledge rather than as cultural deference (Kidd, 2016). A study at the college level, focusing just on silence in the Japanese classroom, found that EFL students did view silence as an acceptable option for cultural reasons (Harumi, 2011). While there were other factors that students saw as contributing to their silence, such as gaps in linguistic knowledge or a lack of confidence, there were cultural factors as well, such as expectations about turn-taking and the importance of maintaining group harmony among peers. The same study also found English NTs were somewhat more likely to perceive the use of silence as a cultural phenomenon among their students than were Japanese teachers of English. Therefore, perhaps a feature of Japanese English pragmatics would include allowing for silence in English-language interactions in a Japanese way, not according to US or British norms. Presumably, adjusting to these patterns would enable EFL classroom activities in Japan to be more amenable to Japanese cultural practices. Some of the earlier writing on WE referred to what was termed pragmatic fluency in dealing with discourse. House (2003), for example, enumerated a number of areas where ELF interlocutors were shown to exhibit pragmatic ability in their use of strategies in conversational management to signal non-understanding so as not to disrupt the flow of the exchange and yet provide enough information to the interlocutor for the intended meaning to be conveyed: • •

using discourse markers (e.g. ‘first’, ‘finally’, ‘it would appear that’, etc.); initiating and switching topics;

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•

using turn-taking strategies in order to maintain the flow of conversation; giving appropriate responses in a conversation (e.g. anticipating the end of turns via latching and overlapping); indicating appropriately the uptake of information; maintaining an appropriate rate of speech; using repetition, paraphrasing and repair; code-switching and the use of cognates; generating their own idioms; knowing how to engage others in collaborative talk; and using fi lled and unfi lled pauses.

• • • • • • • •

The main point to consider from the above listing of strategies is that the effective use of such strategies in conversational management can help interlocutors maintain a conversation even if their actual English language skills are somewhat limited.

1.2.5 Variation within and across NSs and NNSs

At the same time that efforts are extended to learners to help them approximate TL pragmatics – whatever norms are used – cognizance needs to be given to the reality that NSs of the TL themselves display variation in their pragmatic behavior. Pragmatic behavior may vary for a given speaker with regard to the same speech act depending on the moment (e.g. a kind apology vs. an abrupt, insensitive one), and across speech acts, depending on age, socioeconomic background, personality, momentary mood and other factors. At times their pragmatics will be more consistent with preferred normative behavior than at other times. Just as pragmatic behavior may vary among NSs in their own language, how they perform TL pragmatics may also vary. For example, not all Japanese learners of English will predictably carry over their patterns of dealing with silence to their interactions in English. For various reasons such as time in the TL culture and degree of awareness of normative behavior, some learners may be more sensitive to TL norms than others. Just as there is variation in World Englishes, there is also variation in World Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and French, among other languages. Undoubtedly these regional varieties affect what is considered pragmatically appropriate. The real issue is whether it is appropriate for teachers to be prescriptive in teaching idealized TL pragmatics – that is, pragmatics held in high esteem – as opposed to calling the learners’ attention to the existing language variation in a descriptive fashion. In this approach, it is left up to the learners to determine the stance that they will take and the pragmatic norms that they will embrace. An argument that can be made for not teaching learners the variety of TL pragmatics that they are already using – based to some extent on transfer from their own L1

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culture – is in order not to teach them what they are already doing. On the other hand, they may be using features of this variety without being aware of it. If so, there may be benefit at least in calling to their attention what they are doing so they can make more a choice in the matter.

1.2.6 Pragmatic ability as encompassing both politeness and impoliteness

While the traditional literature has tended to describe politeness as a phenomenon aimed at seeking harmony among the listeners, more recent literature has pointed out that speakers may also be interested in achieving a certain degree of self-harmony (Fernández-Amaya et al., 2012). Attaining this self-harmony may mean being purposely impolite. This current approach takes full account of the hearer’s position, encompasses both politeness and impoliteness, and provides a more dynamic, bi-directional view of the social-individual relationship. It also looks beyond isolated speech act occurrences to looking at (im)politeness in longer stretches of discourse. A caveat with regard to interpreting whether a communication is more polite or impolite is that judgments as to what is polite or impolite are based on an implicit standard of behavior that is shared by members of the given speech community – their conception as to the moral order. This being the case, then, it is possible that people with different normative expectations may not evaluate someone’s behavior in the same way. A corpus study focusing just on compliments, for example, demonstrated that Peninsular Spanish responses to compliments were sometimes elaborate and not as formulaic as English ones, in order to avoid coming across as immodest or even rude (Maíz-Arévalo, 2012). An example would be this negotiated compliment between two women friends (Maíz-Arévalo, 2012: 5): A: Perdona el retraso, es que acabamos de salir. ‘I’m sorry I’m late. We’ve just gone out.’ B: Tú tranquila. ‘Don’t worry.’ A: Estás guapa. ‘You look pretty.’ B: Qué va, con lo que he ido al curro hoy. ‘Come on, same clothes I’ve worn for work today.’ A: ¿Y qué? Estás guapa. ‘So what? You look pretty!’ B: ¡Gracias! Voy muy hippy, ¿eh? ‘Thanks! I’m very hippy, aren’t I?’ B: Tú estás muy lustrosa. Te sienta bien el embarazo. Dicen que cuando es niña te pones más guapa. ‘You look brilliant. Pregnancy suits you well. They say that one looks even prettier when it’s a girl.’ A: Eso me dice todo el mundo. ‘That’s what everyone tells me.’

There is a delicate back and forth, involving a rejection of the compliment the fi rst time around, followed by a somewhat deflected acceptance of the compliment and the use of humor, followed by a return

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

compliment. The point is that at every speech turn, the NNS response might in certain situations be interpreted as impolite if B were to reject the compliment with ‘Come on!’ or ‘No way.’ Also, it may be a delicate matter to try to compliment A on how she looks pregnant without sounding impolite. Just as the performance of compliments can be complex, so gratitude can be shown in different ways. For instance, if the recipient of a ‘thank you’ believes that gratitude is best conveyed not by words but by returning the favor later on (as may be the case in certain situations in Japanese culture), this person’s evaluation of the expression of gratitude could be viewed accordingly. Hence, evaluations of (im)politeness are inevitably associated with cultural norms and expectations. Haugh (2016) would add to the equation that the norms could pertain to the specific social unit, be it an intimate couple, a family unit, a group of friends, a local community of practice, a larger cultural group or even a whole society. In the current increasingly hybrid, globalized world, traditional norms for how to behave are giving way to alternative views and approaches. This is the case in a vignette that Haugh (2016) reports, where the wife, Kayoko, in a Japanese family chooses to disobey her father when he tells her to fetch the newspaper for her husband to read. Rather than conforming to the normed behavior of kisukai ‘attentiveness’ to her husband’s needs, she responds to her father’s directive by claiming that her husband should get his own newspaper. The husband could view his wife’s behavior as impolite or understand that times are changing, and that his expectations need to change to accommodate to his wife’s perception of appropriate behavior in a marital relationship. 1.2.7 The pragmatics of displaying emotions: Cursing

Moving from politeness to the notion of emotional displays and their ramifications, again pragmatics has a telling role to play. A good example can be in the case of showing anger, which is usually the case when someone attempts, say, to curse in a TL. A study comparing learners of Chinese with NSs found that NNSs of Chinese did not sound nativelike in their efforts to emote anger (Jian, 2015). In a study conducted in Taiwan, 16 native English-speaking learners of Mandarin were found, among other things, to use a lower pitch in expressing anger in Mandarin than 16 NSs of Mandarin. In addition, the learners of Chinese were found to use a similar intensity range for all emotions, whereas NSs tended to vary the intensity with the different emotions that they were asked to display, namely, joy, anger, sadness, fear and neutrality. What makes the study of emotion even more interesting in Chinese is that tones are already being used simply to distinguish among words, since Chinese requires a mandatory use of four tones (high, rising, falling then rising and falling) and a fi fth neutral tone. Therefore, NNSs of Chinese may sound silly cursing if

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they do not know how to express the emotion of anger properly and their attempts at cursing – even if they know when to do it and the forms to use – may be counter-productive and even humorous if they are delivered with the wrong pitch and intensity. In a book on emotions in multiple languages, Dewaele gave an anecdote about how his Spanish friends were using the f- word joder all evening, but that when he tried it, they responded with stunned silence and told him not to use it. He wondered why he did not share the same pragmatic and discursive freedom that they had (Dewaele, 2010: 7). Perhaps not so surprisingly, then, when Dewaele was upset about missing a Spanish flight, he chose English to express his anger to the airline representative rather than Spanish (Dewaele, 2010: 13). The main point from these examples by Dewaele with regard to cursing in Spanish and from Jian’s research on expressing emotions in Chinese is that it may not be easy to be pragmatically appropriate when attempting to curse in a TL. It entails knowledge of whether it is appropriate for the speaker/writer to say or write the given message, and of what language forms to use, if it is appropriate. This leads us nicely to the next section that deals with the development of pragmatic ability. Although a controversial topic, especially among many traditionallyminded teachers, it has been suggested in the TL pragmatics literature that learners can benefit greatly from being explicitly taught the significant curse words and how to perform them. The main point is that cursing fulfills a variety of functions – not just rudeness or being impolite – but also familiarity and intimacy, among other things. Learning about it expands learners’ communicative repertoire while alerting them to its appropriateness and degree of tabooness in given contexts. Having a grasp of how to swear has been seen by study abroad (SA) students as a sign of a nuanced TL pragmatics competence – a sign that they have arrived (Fernández, 2017). A study of Americans at an SA institute in Argentina found that lower-level students only received hints at swearwords and that even the upper-level students did not attain sufficient metapragmatic control to understand how to use such expressions in interactions with peers (Fernández, 2017). If anything, many of the students had an incomplete and sometimes erroneous understanding of the use of these words, which often led them to be discouraged from using them. Fernández recommended having cursing as part of the curriculum, with learners coached in when and how to engage in this behavior appropriately. 1.2.8 What is actually entailed in developing pragmatic ability?

Developing pragmatic ability means gaining skill at discerning in a TL just how intentions are conveyed and interpreted in communication – both in the reception of messages and in the production. This ability entails facility with whatever tones and intonation are used to convey meaning,

20

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

attitudes and emotions, as needed in perceiving the degree of politeness displayed. So it is truly a tall order for anyone to master all aspects of the pragmatics of a TL. The particulars of a given TL can present special challenges. As suggested above, for example, providing appropriate intonation in speaking Chinese is a somewhat daunting undertaking, given that tones are already assigned to each and every word. Not so surprisingly then, the Jian (2015) study on efforts by learners of Chinese, for example, to display emotions found NNSs to be less proficient at it. In fact, TL learners of Mandarin might be expected to have pragmatic failure in their efforts to emote in Mandarin, not coming across as joyful or angry in Mandarin when that is their intention. Likewise, as noted above, there are challenges faced by NNSs in attempting to curse in the TL in that they face the scrutiny of NSs who may fi nd the curse inappropriate simply because it is delivered by an NNS, regardless of how well they do it (Dewaele, 2010). Beyond issues of expressing emotions, learners are faced with the challenge of handling a host of speech acts in context, as well as other pragmatic behavior. In the real world of language use, learners do not have the luxury of just delivering a request, for example. Depending on the TL culture, it may be appropriate to initiate an interaction with an office worker by means of an apology for disrupting whatever was going on. It may then be advisable in the given speech community to compliment the person’s appearance, congratulate the person for reaching a milestone birthday or whatever. Then fi nally, the speaker can proceed with the request. Of course, if there were a problem with the elevator or with the parking structure, it may also be necessary to lodge a complaint as well. It is not so surprising that it takes time to approach truly nativelike pragmatic ability. A classroom teacher, then, has to set their sights rather modestly, attempting perhaps to raise students’ awareness through teaching about the sociocultural norms in the TL community and the appropriate language forms to use in the given situation, and providing them opportunities to reflect on their own language use and the consequences of not performing in a nativelike way. In some cases, it may behoove them to be nonnative-like, such as in cultures where NNSs are given slack, as in Japan. The term sociopragmatics has been popularized as a label for the norms governing what is appropriate pragmatically in a given speech community. For example, is it appropriate to ask an acquaintance what her monthly income is, whether she is trying to get pregnant or whether she has plans to go on a diet? Sociopragmatics deals with what is acceptable as a topic, given the norms of the particular speech community. This may in part be determined by the relative age and gender of the interlocutors, their social class and occupations, and their roles and status in the interaction. A companion term that has been used to refer to the actual language forms used to realize the interaction is pragmalinguistics. These terms

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were coined by Leech (1983) and popularized by Thomas (1983). Although Thomas stopped using them several decades ago, the terms continue to be popular in the field and prominent in numerous doctoral dissertations. One problem with the terms is the fuzziness in determining whether given pragmatic behavior is an example of sociopragmatics or pragmalinguistics, or a combination of both, perhaps in a continuum.

1.3 The Organization of the Book

This fi rst chapter has focused primarily on what pragmatics entails, namely, intended meanings, assumptions and actions in both oral and written language (especially as used in texting and emailing). Chapter 2 takes a closer look at what the development of pragmatic ability actually means, problematizing some of its elements, such as the impact of the TL environment, the role of pragmatic transfer and the motivation that learners have to deal with pragmatics. More is also said on sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics in the chapter. Chapter 3 concerns the handling of pragmatics by native and nonnative teachers, taking a close look at the NT-NNT distinction, and suggesting the advantages and possible challenges associated with being one or the other. It considers the role of the particular community in which the TL is taught, the length of time that the teachers have been in the profession, their interest in pragmatics and their skill as an instructor. The chapter provides the underpinnings for the comparison between NTs and NNTs that continues throughout the book. Chapter 4 constitutes the major source for insights regarding the NT-NNT comparison and provides fi ndings from an original survey of NTs and NNTs of a variety of languages. The survey was conducted in the summer of 2015, and entailed the collection of data from NTs and NNTs worldwide concerning the following topics: • • • • • •

The extent to which they teach about the various areas in pragmatics. The extent to which they feel comfortable serving as a resource for information about the specifics of pragmatics in their language of instruction. What they do when they encounter classroom moments when they do not feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics. How they assess their knowledge of the language and of the sociocultural contexts in which the language is likely to be used. If they consider themselves FL teachers, the extent to which they think their students’ development of pragmatic ability is influenced by their not living in the TL community. If they consider themselves L2 teachers, the extent to which they think their students’ development of pragmatic ability is influenced by their living in the TL community.

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

•

Their methods of teaching pragmatics – explicitness of instruction regarding rules for pragmatic behavior, and their handling of regional and dialectal differences in pragmatics. How they motivate their students to learn about the norms for TL behavior. Depending on whether they are teaching in an FL or an L2 situation, the activities that they have found helpful in teaching pragmatics. What they do when they notice that a student has deviated from accepted norms for TL pragmatic behavior. How they handle it in the classroom if they perceive their students’ deviations from TL norms are on purpose – namely, an expression of their self-identity (sense of agency). What areas of pragmatics they would you like to have more information about. The areas of pragmatics for which they would be interested in seeing the results of research.

• • • • • •

The fi ndings provide valuable insights as to just how both NTs and NNTs cope with gaps in their knowledge about pragmatics in the TL classroom. Chapter 5 focuses on how best to teach pragmatics in the TL class and on raising teachers’ awareness of this issue. Since textbooks tend to underplay pragmatics, it becomes the motivated teacher’s job to complement and supplement the curriculum with pragmatic materials and insights – well beyond what the given textbooks provide. The chapter also considers the inclusion of pragmatics in teacher development programs, the search for appropriate pragmatic materials, helping to make teacher talk more intelligible to learners, assisting learners in becoming more savvy about TL pragmatics in preparation for SA experiences. The chapter demonstrates how teachers can enlist students as data gatherers in fi nding out from NSs what the local norms are, and in addition helping learners determine just how they will deal with TL norms, since they are ultimately at choice in the matter. Chapter 6 considers the pragmatics materials themselves – sources for material, analysis of these materials with regard to the pragmatics content and the choice of pragmatics tasks to have learners perform. The chapter also considers ways to motivate learners to want to learn this material – with insights coming both from NNTs’ and NTs’ responses to the survey described in Chapter 4. Chapter 7 takes a look at the role of innovative technologies in teaching and learning pragmatics, and ways that teachers and learners can make use of technology for enhancing pragmatic development. The chapter considers the respective role that can be played by corpora, social media sites, telecollaboration, digital classroom interventions, fi lms, specially designed websites for pragmatics and a pragmatics wiki. This wiki

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was created by the author and launched in 2016. As the chapter indicates, the goal of this wiki is to make the collection of L2 pragmatics information more varied than the University of Minnesota’s Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) pragmatics website currently is – by including information on more speech acts and other areas of pragmatics, examples from more languages, as well as more information about language variation across users and dialect variations as well. Chapter 8 showcases the role that language learner strategies can play in dealing with TL pragmatics. Guidelines and suggestions are given for how to make this happen, with an emphasis on the use of strategies that are specific enough so that they have an impact on the handling of pragmatics. Examples are given of situations in which strategies can have an important or even crucial role in both the input and output sides of what is comprehensible pragmatically, and suggestions are given as to strategies that learners can use in order to make the input and output more comprehensible. Chapter 9 looks at the role of assessment of what has been taught. The chapter provides teachers with ideas about how to determine what their students do and do not know regarding pragmatics, and specifically with regard to the pragmatics included in a given unit of instruction. The chapter discusses different ways to assess pragmatics and offers suggestions as to what both NTs and NNTs can do to make classroom assessment work for them. Chapter 10 provides ideas on how to conduct pragmatics research. To make the chapter more concrete, a study is proposed that investigates what a genuinely intercultural context might look like with regard to NTs and NNTs, and how this might influence the pragmatics behavior that emerges. Various options are provided and discussed in order to illustrate that the design and execution of any research project entails making choices. This approach is taken in order to demonstrate just how challenging it is to conduct a pragmatics study effectively, especially given that numerous variables are in flux, rather than fi xed.

1.4 Discussion and Conclusion

This chapter has provided an aim and scope statement for the volume, has given attention to some basic issues in pragmatics that are dealt with in the book as well as providing defi nitions of terms, and has given a brief synopsis of each of the chapters. Issues discussed in this chapter include pragmatics and speech acts, the so-called NS, intercultural vs. crosscultural pragmatics, WE and ELF, variation within and across NSs and NNSs, pragmatic ability as encompassing politeness and impoliteness, the pragmatics of displaying emotions such as cursing and what is entailed in the development of pragmatic ability.

24

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Since so much of the volume deals with the teaching of TL pragmatics and the distinction between NTs and NNTs, it would seem appropriate to end this chapter by providing a rationale for why I personally would endorse the explicit teaching of TL pragmatics. I have studied 12 languages beyond my native English over the course of my lifetime. While I have achieved relative pragmatic control in, say, four of these, I have the sense that even with these languages I am capable of pragmatic failure (see Cohen 1997, 2001). It is more my pragmatic failures than my pragmatic successes that have made me acutely aware that pragmatic performance benefits from explicit instruction – that learners tend not to acquire rules for pragmatic appropriateness through osmosis. It would appear that the research literature backs me up solidly on this point. Many important elements in the pragmatics of a TL need to be explicitly taught to learners if the intention is to have them incorporate these elements into their own performance. Here is an example from just one of the languages that I have dealt with: when studying Japanese I learned that I could fi ll my pauses with eeto or ano, and so I did my best to fill as many pauses as I could that way. Then, eventually my Japanese tandem partner at the time pointed out to me with all due deference that I was overusing filled pauses. She explained to me that natives preferred to use silence or nonverbal cues more. Something else I did not realize until it was pointed out to me was that there was a tendency among Japanese speakers to distinguish eeto from ano pragmatically. Eeto is more likely to be used at sentence boundaries when pausing before trying to express relatively large amounts of information and planning complex constituents. Ano tends to be used when facing problems at the conceptualization level, such as when speakers need to pay attention to linguistic forms as when speaking to a stranger or when needing to provide a non-preferred response (Watanabe, 2003). As the above example about fi lled pauses suggests, the real challenge for learners is that pragmatic behavior can be complex. So the issue is how to simplify this complexity enough so that learners do not get discouraged and do gain facility with at least some of the more crucial pragmatic behaviors, especially the ones that could readily lead to pragmatic failure if not performed appropriately. That is why I personally see advantages in having learners focus on idealized pragmatic behaviors, rather than the ones that are highly authentic as found in corpora. To date, a number of studies have shown the advantages of explicit instruction in TL pragmatics. The research results on explicit as opposed to implicit teaching of pragmatics are by and large positive. While one meta-analysis had inconclusive results attributed to too much variation in the details of how each study operationalized these two kinds of instruction (Jeon & Kaya, 2006), two meta-analyses had positive results in favor of explicit teaching of pragmatics (Rose, 2005; Taguchi, 2015). With regard to individual studies, one case study (Riddiford & Holmes, 2015)

An Introduction to Pragmatics for Learners and Teachers 25

and a host of other studies found explicit teaching of pragmatics to be more effective than implicit teaching (e.g. see Eslami-Rasekh et al., 2004; Eslami et al., 2015; Fukuya & Martínez-Flor, 2008; Ghobadi & Fahim, 2009; Hasler-Barker, 2016; Martínez-Flor, 2016; Mugford, 2016a; Nguyen et al., 2012; Tateyama, 2001; Vyatkina & Belz, 2006). The Nguyen et al. (2012) study, for instance, looked at the relative effectiveness of two types of form-focused instruction on the acquisition of the speech act set of constructive criticism by Vietnamese learners of English. Over a 10-week course, one group received explicit consciousnessraising activities, along with explicit metapragmatic explanation and correction of errors of forms and meanings. Another treatment group received pragmalinguistic input enhancement and recast activities, without explicit instruction in how to provide constructive criticism. The pretest and posttest measures included a discourse completion task (DCT), a role play and an oral peer-feedback task. A delayed posttest with the same production tasks measured long-term retention. The results revealed that while both treatment groups significantly improved in the immediate posttest over the pretest and maintained their improvement in the delayed posttest, the explicit group performed significantly better than the implicit group on all measures. In addition, both groups outperformed a control group. While realizing that learners are not identical in terms of their learning style preferences, and that consequently some learners benefit more from explicit instruction than others, there nonetheless appears to be overwhelming evidence that the explicit approach has benefits. Chapters 5 and 6 in particular will offer numerous examples of just how this can be played out in the TL classroom.

2 The Development of Pragmatic Ability1 with Lauren Wyner2

The aim of this chapter is first to problematize the defi nition of pragmatics that was provided in Chapter 1. Then three factors that contribute to the development of pragmatic ability will be considered. The first factor is the role that the L2 and FL environments actually play in the development of learners’ TL pragmatic ability, given individual differences in learners. The second factor is the role of pragmatic transfer, particularly as it appears in FL as opposed to L2 contexts. The third factor is the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability.

2.1 Problematizing Pragmatics 2.1.1 Efforts to define pragmatic ability

Attempts to defi ne pragmatic ability have been problematic given the inherently fluid nature of this construct – namely, the fact that pragmatics manifests itself in context-dependent ways (Grabowski, 2009). Pragmatic ability entails knowing the extent to which an utterance is acceptable and appropriate to other users of the language in conveying the speaker or writer’s intended meaning. But here is where the defi nitional problems start. Whose pragmatics serves as the benchmark? What pragmatic behavior would be appropriate to teach a largely homogeneous class of collegelevel EFL students in China? What norms for pragmatic behavior should be taught to a multi-ethnic class of college-level Spanish FL students in the USA? If it were possible to identify a more-or-less ‘mainstream’ pragmatics to teach these two sets of students (i.e. with reference to the prestige varieties of the language from a sociocultural perspective), would it make sense to do so? Especially with regard to English, as pointed out in the opening chapter of this book, there are mounting pressures to promote diversity and to respect students’ wishes to express their own self-identity (e.g. see Marlina & Giri, 2014; Matsuda, 2012b). The case is eloquently made by various authors in these publications that there is a need to recognize regional 26

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varieties of English in their own right (e.g. Japanese English), without applying US and British norms or standards for what is considered acceptable. For example, if Japanese and Korean business associates are conversing among themselves in English in Seoul, it is reasonable to assume that they may rely to some extent on their own L1 pragmatics. There are also increasingly common situations in Inner Circle countries such as the USA, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and Australia where L2 speakers of English need to interact without any L1 speakers around (Matsuda, 2012a). Not only is it the case that English is no longer the sole property of Anglophone countries, but rather L1 speakers of English may be in the minority compared to L2 speakers of English in certain Inner Circle speech communities (Rossner, 1990). Whose pragmatics should be used in such situations? This is clearly an important issue for consideration. In the USA alone, there are always likely to be classroom contexts that vary pragmatically according to region, the age of the instructor and of the students, the socioeconomic status of those involved, and the domains of language and cultural interaction (e.g. hobbies, sports, schooling and religion; cf. Boxer, 2002). In addition, the intellectual and emotional mindset and aspirations of the individuals play a role. Certain students may, for example, desire to adopt a new or different identity as a coping mechanism. The intensive summer language courses off ered by the Concordia Language Villages in Minnesota, for example, encourage K-12 students to change their name to whatever TL name they would like, partly to have this new persona learning the language. The villagers in many of their programs design their own wooden nameplate, which they hang around their neck (Hamilton et  al., 2005: 22). This approach is intended to reduce the students’ feelings of self-consciousness since any vulnerability is shifted to this ‘new’ person. Many EFL programs around the world adopt a similar system, allowing students to pick an English name for the class. This practice is not without criticism, however. When contributor to this chapter, Wyner, worked at a private English language school in Vietnam, many fellow teachers felt the adoption of English names within a classroom was more for the benefit of a teacher unschooled in the pronunciation of Vietnamese tones, rather than to aid learners in adopting a TL persona. It is therefore evident that the real purposes of such practices should be conveyed to the students who are meant to benefit from their adoption. Whereas occasional mention is made in this volume to younger language learners and to high-schoolers, the primary focus is on adults at the college level and beyond. Consequently, these are learners who make their own decisions about the pragmatics that they will learn and how they will do it (e.g. see Kasper & Rose, 2002, chapter 8 on individual differences in TL pragmatic development). In principle, learners are expected to learn what they are taught, but time and again this expectation has not been borne out in reality. Learners make certain choices on

28

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

their own, especially when it comes to pragmatics and in particular beyond the classroom. In fact, mention will be made in this book to learner subjectivity or agency with regard to pragmatics throughout the book, starting in Section 2.5.1. 2.1.2 Identifying what is normative in pragmatic behavior

Returning to the issue of pragmatic norms, what variety of the TL has the classroom teacher selected for instructional purposes? And are the norms for pragmatic appropriateness based on this variety? This is not only a teaching issue, but an issue for assessment as well. Are efforts made to assess all that is taught? And to what extent are the norms relied upon in the instructional materials similar to those that abound in the popular media for learners studying in the community where the language is spoken (i.e. L2 learners) and for learners studying outside of this community (i.e. FL learners), presumably at some distance, in another country? 2.1.3 A closer look at sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics

As mentioned in the opening chapter, certain pragmatic behaviors have been further categorized dichotomously in the research literature into sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics. According to Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983), sociopragmatics, refers to the sociocultural realm of pragmatics – to appropriate social behavior in the TL community. Sociopragmatic failure takes place when language users, say, choose to employ a speech act such as complimenting someone in a context where it is inappropriate within the given cultural context to do so. For example, I found out fi rsthand that complimenting the departmental secretaries for doing a job well was not positively received at a major university in Israel where I was teaching at the time, since secretaries considered it their responsibility to do so and consequently there was no need to comment on it. Pragmalinguistics, on the other hand, is intended to refer to the linguistic resources needed for communicative acts or speech acts (e.g. requests, apologies, compliments and complaints), and pragmalinguistic failure may occur when interlocutors use inappropriate language forms. It may seem trivial, but use of a given language form may be what irks an NS. So, for example, a young NNS of English accidentally bumps into an elderly lady doing holiday shopping, causing the lady some physical discomfort. Taking a line from the textbook, the NNS says, ‘I’m very sorry’. The disgruntled shopper is not assuaged by the apology because she would expect at least ‘I’m really sorry’, if not an offer for repair since it conveys more concern. The problem is pragmalinguistic since it is a question of choosing appropriate intensifiers for expressing an apology. A study that I was involved in some years ago found that Americans intensify their regret in an apology

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with the intensifier ‘really’ and use ‘very’ in cases of etiquette (e.g. ‘I am very sorry to have to cut you off now but…’) (see Cohen et al., 1986: 69). It was perceived as a sociopragmatic violation in November of 2014 when a Republican staffer criticized former US President Obama’s daughters for their dress and their expressions of boredom at a White House turkey pardoning ceremony. 3 Even the staffer’s fellow Republicans felt that she was treading on dangerous ground, since the children of a sitting president are considered ‘off limits’ when it comes to criticism. The Republican staffer chose Facebook as her platform to vent. While this internet tool allows for asynchronous communication, it lacks the anonymity of other internet arenas (e.g. YouTube comments), and so her diatribe and the inevitable fallout were visible to the general public in a way that previous sociopragmatic failures would not have been. The backlash from this pragmatic failure resulted in her resignation. Thus, the consequences of sociopragmatic failure can include losing a job, depending on the mode of communication used in delivering the message. In addition, the conditions determining sociopragmatic appropriateness are not static, but rather in flux. For example, there have been norms for what candidates for the US presidency can and cannot include in a spoken or written message (a tweet) while running for office. The then Republican candidate in the 2016 election, Donald Trump, challenged the then norms by his many unbridled statements that delighted his followers, but which antagonized others, partly due to the norms for presidential behavior that he violated in making these statements. Changes in sociopragmatic appropriateness are partly due to normal changes in societal discourse, but are also a result of a surge in the use of various social media to get political messages disseminated. For Donald Trump, posting on Twitter has been a preferred mode of communication. Of particular concern to learners of a TL with regard to sociopragmatics are those topics that are considered to be taboo. The problem is that this can vary depending on the subgroup within a culture. For example, in a given subculture can you ask someone how much they make a month or how much they paid for their new car? Whether or not it is acceptable could depend in part on the age of the interlocutors, the closeness of their relationship, their gender and the context in which the question was asked. While these questions are asked all the time in the Middle East, they are asked sparingly in the USA since, depending on the circumstances, the topic may be considered private information or even taboo. For example, it may well be considered inappropriate to ask a married couple in the USA whether they are trying to have a baby and whether they are using in vitro fertilization (IVF) to do so. This question would be sociopragmatically acceptable, however, if asked in Israel, especially since the government usually pays all expenses for IVF, and it is therefore part of a larger public discourse. Then there are the speech acts that have to be performed indirectly, if at all. For instance, public complaints are rarely used in Japanese culture.

30

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Figure 2.1 Complaining in a restaurant in Japan

Performance of the speech act calls for an awareness of the sociopragmatic norms regarding its use in the given context (e.g. do you complain in a restaurant in Tokyo about the soup not being hot enough? See Figure 2.1), and also the pragmalinguistic norms regarding the acceptable language structures to use if a complaint is possible in that context. It may be necessary to perform the speech act in a most obsequious, indirect manner (e.g. ‘I am so, so sorry to trouble you, but do you think it be possible to heat my soup up just a little more? I would be so appreciative.’). In such situations it can be crucial to have a good handle on pragmalinguistic forms, because only with the proper use of them, coupled with the proper intonation, is a speech act such as a complaint likely to work effectively in a sociopragmatically delicate situation. At a trendy restaurant in Palo Alto, California, a friend of mine made a request to two different waiters that they turn the overlyloud rock music down a little so that we could better hear each other at our table. Neither waiter acted on the request, so it may have been seen by the proprietor as an unreasonable request. The waiters and the other patrons were probably quite happy with the loud music. A study was conducted that looked at the appropriateness of broaching political topics while on study abroad (SA) (Diao & Trentman, 2016). In the context of this discussion of sociopragmatics, what SA students encountered when they attempted to discuss politics in China and in Egypt was that this was not necessarily a viable topic for discussion.

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The study included insights gained from analyzing microdata from ethnographies of American SA students in Egypt (2009–2011) and China (2012). As for the Egyptian data, the American students abroad encountered what appeared to be apathy with regard to politics, especially among women, since the norms of the society held that women were not expected to publicly express political views that they might have. With regard to the Chinese data, there was a reluctance for a Chinese roommate to discuss the ousting of a top Chinese official. In this case, owing to restrictions on what could be said publicly without recourse, citizens were seen to be cautious about what they say to whom. I personally experienced a Chinese colleague’s reluctance to discuss politics in the lobby of a university building in Xi’ian – as if our conversation might be overheard and have repercussions for her. How representative these examples are (especially currently) of the sociopragmatic reality in these respective countries with regard to discussing politics is an empirical question. The only point being made here is that a learner of a TL needs to test the sociopragmatic waters, rather than making assumptions about the topics that can be broached. 2.1.4 Determining where sociopragmatics ends and pragmalinguistics begins

As suggested in Chapter 1, if pragmatics is about interpretations of intentions, the sociopragmatic-pragmalinguistic distinction is a good case where much depends on the person doing the interpreting. The outcome of an utterance or written message may be interpreted at face value as the violation of some sociopragmatic norm, but the speaker or writer’s intention may have been to abide by the norms rather than to willingly violate them. For example, let us say that learners innocently overgeneralize a phrase ‘you’re welcome’ in a situation where local norms call for some other pragmalinguistic equivalent. This unknowing overgeneralization of a TL phrase to a situation where it is not applied could, as happened to me in Japan, result in a sociopragmatic failure. Once, I said doiteshimashite, ‘you’re welcome’, upon leaving a restaurant in the Japanese hills on the way to Kusatsu and the proprietress gave me a funny look and my colleagues laughed at me. On the face of it, this pragmatic failure could be interpreted solely as a sociopragmatic breach of the norms regarding what to do upon leaving a restaurant in Japan. But in reality, it was sparked by a pragmalinguistic misstep. I was unaware of the acceptable things one can do upon leaving a restaurant in Japan once the proprietress has said arigato gozaimashita, ‘thank you so much’ – namely, say domo ‘thanks’, gochisousama ‘the food was tasty’, give a half bow or say nothing at all. It is true that some explicit pragmatics instruction could help a student to avoid sociopragmatic failure. Such instruction, then, would attend to the pragmalinguistic material as well since,

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

as we see in this example, inappropriate pragmalinguistic choices can lead to failure at the sociopragmatic level. Let us say that a male nonnative university student tells the professor, ‘I demand that you show me last year’s exam’ as opposed to ‘I would like to see last year’s exam.’ Is the fi rst utterance an example of a sociopragmatic violation, where the student is being out of line by ignoring the convention of civility with the professor, or is it a case of the student simply not understanding that in this context the use of ‘demand’ as opposed to ‘would like’ makes it rude. In the one instance, the interpretation would be that the student is being disrespectful (hence, an example of a sociopragmatic violation) and in the other he is simply using the wrong verb for the context (hence, an example of pragmalinguistics). Perhaps the correct interpretation would be obtained by collecting verbal report data from the student in his L1 as to what his intention actually was (see Section 10.3.1 under ‘Elicited data’ and Cohen, 2013, for more on verbal report). A study focusing on sociopragmatics asked nine British university lecturers to evaluate the appropriateness of Italian EFL graduate students’ written messages in a testing setting, involving three speech acts – offers (e.g. to bring along to a meeting with a friend a sibling who is an expert on interior design), requests (e.g. to do a test make-up with last year’s test since the syllabus has changed this year) and thanks (e.g. for getting a virus off of a computer) (Gesuato, 2016b). The researcher asked the lecturers to express their subjective/judgmental reactions as interlocutors receiving those messages and to rate the messages in their role as teachers. One finding was that students’ being too direct, abrupt, pushy and insincere (in the case of expressing gratitude) could potentially jeopardize the relationship with the lecturer, such that the lecturers would want to keep their distance from the given student and even tell the student to fi nd another adviser. Messages that triggered such responses from the lecturers were too formal or too informal, had mixed registers, were too wordy, used capital letters (which came across as bossy), had flagrant grammar mistakes (e.g. misuse of pronouns), flawed use of idioms or spelling and punctuation errors. Again, through the use of verbal report, it would be possible in a study like this one to determine the extent to which what irked the lecturers were sociopragmatic issues (e.g. making a request to take the previous year’s exam as a make-up) vs. pragmalinguistic ones (e.g. using the phrase ‘I demand that…’ vs. ‘Would it be at all possible…?’). 2.2 Learning Pragmatics in an L2 vs. an FL Environment

The consequences of pragmatic failure (both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic) can be serious in a variety of domains. In formal international politics, translation errors can impede diplomacy. For instance,

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in 1974, the then Prime Minister of Japan, Mr Sato, when asked by President Nixon whether he would agree to self-imposed restrictions on the export of fabrics to the USA answered ‘Zensho shimasu.’ This Japanese expression was literally translated into English as, ‘I’ll take care of it.’ When used by politicians, however, this expression actually constitutes a polite refusal in Japanese. Nixon became angry when the Japanese subsequently did nothing (Takahashi & Beebe, 1987: 133–134). Likewise, interpersonal interactions among friends can go array simply because of the form that a refusal takes, for example. It has been noted, for instance, that Japanese refusals to American friends in English may sound too formal and that excuses used in the refusals are considered too vague (Takahashi & Beebe, 1987: 134–135). If pragmatic ability is an important ingredient in successful communicative language ability, what effect does the context – whether L2 or FL – have on the development of this pragmatic ability? To date, most studies have shown greater pragmatic awareness among L2 students than among FL students (e.g. Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998; Schauer, 2006; Tagashira et al., 2011), thus indicating that the TL environment has a positive influence on the appropriate use of sociopragmatics. It is assumed that L2 learners receive more pragmatic input in their daily lives. The classroom also provides a setting for learning about pragmatics to the extent that teachers usually model and demonstrate how to perform tasks in a pragmatically appropriate way, and the L2 classroom is generally viewed as more of a window onto the TL than the FL classroom. In addition, questions about language use in context naturally arise in a ‘safe’ L2 classroom environment when students bring in their outside experiences, for example, and ask why something happened to them in a particular way when communicating with an NS, or just what the sociocultural implications are for using a given word or phrase in a given situation. For example, after learners make an extreme claim and the NS friend says sarcastically ‘Yeah, really’, would the learners incorrectly interpret this reply ‘I agree with you’ or correctly as ‘I don’t really agree’? Some studies have yielded fi ndings that not only challenge previous research, but defy the common-sense assumption that living in the TL environment with exposure to authentic input would better lead to development of pragmatic ability among these L2 learners than would being in an FL environment (e.g. Niezgoda & Roever, 2001; Taguchi, 2008b). These studies shed light on the notion of individual differences in motivation and in the willingness to use pragmatic transfer (both positive and possibly negative) – individual differences that can result in successful learning of pragmatics, despite the fact that the learning is taking place in an FL rather than in an L2 context (Schumann, 1986). These conflicting research results may also suggest that in an increasingly globalized, hybrid world, the L2-FL distinction may be overly simplistic. Is it not the case that some L2 students lack the pragmatic awareness that they presumably were to

34

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

have acquired from being in that TL setting? And could it not be the case that FL learners do, in fact, acquire pragmatic awareness without having direct contact with L2 contexts? A goal of this chapter is to think more about the actual role that the L2 and FL contexts play in L2 learners’ pragmatic ability and whether individual differences can somehow offset constraints inherent in the given language learning context. First, the effect of the context on developing pragmatic ability will be considered, given the potential role of pragmatic transfer. The effect of motivation on pragmatic knowledge will also be taken into account when considering the fi ndings from various studies, as well as methodological issues in measuring pragmatic ability in L2 and FL settings. A caveat for the descriptions of research in this chapter has to do with the SA context. Not all SA situations are equal. First, within the same country study-abroad experiences may be vastly different. This was illustrated by Kinginger (2008) in her case study description of US students’ SA experiences in France and how, for example, there was much variation in the students’ handling of pragmatics in the forms of address, such as in the second-person pronominal tous/vous distinction. Also, a study of 16 Mexican students who had a three to five-month stay at a summer camp in the USA found that contrary to expectation, the students were actually socially secluded, spending the bulk of their time interacting with fellow Mexicans, speaking their L1, Spanish (Flores-Salgado, 2016). In this case, it was not length of residence that was a contributing factor in the acquisition of the ability to hedge when giving advice to higher- and lower-status individuals. Rather, it was the intensity of the interaction that proved to be more of a determiner. In addition, a study of US students in SA language classes in Argentina, involving classroom observation, field notes and interviews with both students and instructors, found that instructors exposed their students to colloquial vocabulary differentially (Fernández, 2017). Although the instructors used colloquial vocabulary in the classroom, they only did it at the upper levels, in an ad hoc manner (i.e. in response to student questions with no advanced preparation), and without providing students with sufficient metapragmatic information to understand and use it meaningfully in interactions with peers. All the more reason, then, to be cautious in making comparisons between the experiences of Irish students in an SA program in Germany and that of US students in Spain, Israel or Jordan. There are most likely going to be some notable differences, just as there are notable withinprogram differences. 2.3 The Role of Pragmatic Transfer

One factor which may or may not be beneficial in the development of TL pragmatic ability is pragmatic transfer, the ‘influence of the learners’

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knowledge of other languages and cultures on their pragmatic use and development on the use of the L2’ (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014: 78–79). There are cases where a particular sociopragmatic behavior is more or less universal (Ochs, 1996), such as in conveying condolences to someone on the loss of a loved one. While the pragmalinguistics appropriate for conveying condolences may vary – both verbally and nonverbally – the speech act is usually performed. The qualifier ‘usually’ is added since, for example, when sitting shiva as a way to mourn with the family of a deceased at their home in Israel, it is not necessary to say anything. I found out from personal experience that being present was enough of a (nonverbal) statement of condolence. So perhaps an American attending such a shiva might run the risk of being perceived as overly talkative. Then there are numerous instances where sociopragmatic behavior transfers effectively between two or more language and cultural communities. This may just be the result of commonality across the two groups, such as in the example of a request that a friend babysit in the USA or in Israel. The two societies clearly share numerous pragmatic commonalities, while they differ strikingly in other areas. In this instance of babysitting, such a request to arrange for a babysitter would still likely to be seen in Japan as countercultural in numerous families. Instead, some family members (say, a grandparent) would most likely be expected to provide the childcare, obviating the need for a babysitter which would possibly be anathema to many families in Japan. There are also those sociopragmatic instances that are associated with one language and culture more than with another. For example, in Japanese culture, it may be totally inappropriate to compliment professors by saying that they gave a good talk since the talk attendees are presumably not in a position to evaluate the quality of the professors’ talk?4 Issuing this type of evaluative compliment (instead of ‘I got a lot from your talk’) would be an example of negative transfer from US culture where professors would be pleased to receive positive feedback regarding the quality of their talk. Depending on the particular Japanese professors, they could be annoyed about the behavior, but might also be dismissive since it was performed by a gaijin (‘Westerner’). 5 The tricky thing about positive and negative transfer is that it is not a given that differences between two languages and cultures in the area of pragmatics lead to cultural clashes. It depends on numerous factors. The NNSs may have been explicitly taught the pragmatics and consequently are mindful of the differences. Likewise, while they may not have been taught the differences, they may have somehow figured them out for themselves, such as through the use of social media. There can be other reasons as well for why the NNSs’ pragmatic behavior does not infringe upon NS norms – for example, if the norms are in flux or if the particular interlocutors have more globalized reactions to norms. On the other hand, there are the numerous cases where violations of the norm are both noticed and

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negatively received, resulting in pragmatic failure. In those cases, it is then a matter of what the NS response will be – whether to dismiss the behavior as understandable and trivial, or irksome, annoying and a cause for social friction. The main question in the latter instances is whether the NSs will voice their annoyance to the NNSs. So what does the research literature say about pragmatic transfer in FL as opposed to L2 situations? One of the earliest investigations into the differences in pragmatic awareness between ESL and EFL populations was Takahashi and Beebe’s (1987) qualitative study with Japanese learners of English as the TL. The researchers sought to find evidence of pragmatic transfer while investigating the effect of proficiency level and of environment. The researchers analyzed the written refusals of both Japanese ESL and EFL learners, compared to Japanese and American NSs’ refusals. All of the participants completed a DCT where participants had to provide an appropriate refusal in interactions with interlocutors of different status. The situations involved requests, invitations, offers and suggestions.6 After examining the typical order of formulas for Japanese NSs and American English NSs, Takahashi and Beebe (1987) compared the refusal data of the ESL and EFL participants, and found evidence of pragmatic transfer in both the ESL and EFL contexts, as well as at two different proficiency levels. In particular, there was more evidence of pragmatic transfer in the EFL context than in the ESL context, despite the EFL learners’ higher average proficiency. The tendency toward pragmatic transfer was explained by the fact that the EFL learners had fewer opportunities for authentic input, causing them to rely more heavily on their L1. Alternatively, the ESL respondents’ greater directness in their refusals (which was more TL-like) was seen as a function of their lower proficiency and lack of knowledge of more indirect and complex expressions. Nonetheless, the EFL learners appeared to have less pragmatic ability than their ESL peers because they used their more advanced TL skills to convey expressions and sentiments consistent with how they would do it in their L1. While this study has historical value since it was seminal at the time, it was conducted almost 30 years ago. The globalized world we are now in might mean that Japanese EFL students are receiving more ESLlike exposure, given regular access to the internet and to US sitcoms, among other things. Another study of negative transfer in the performance of refusals was conducted with nine ESL learners (Yamagashira, 2001). A DCT and a follow-up interview were used to study how participants reacted to refusals and to determine whether pragmatic transfer occurred when Japanese speakers refused in English, whether time spent in the TL community affected pragmatic transfer and whether explicit metapragmatic instruction had an effect as well. As in the Takahashi and Beebe (1987) study, lower-proficiency participants tended to transfer more often than their higher-proficiency peers. However, results also indicated that increased

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time spent in the TL environment caused participants to respond in a more TL-like fashion, thus indicating that the length of exposure in the environment had an effect on transfer. In addition, explicit instruction in pragmatics – whether in the formal classroom setting or through interactions with NSs where attention was directed to pragmatic norms and their violation – allowed participants who took advantage of such instruction to become more pragmatically competent. Since most SA research uses a single semester as the timeframe, a study involving two semesters (Barron, 2003) added the dimension of a prolonged stay in the TL community to the development of L2 pragmatic ability. The researcher focused on a group of 33 advanced Irish L2 learners of German over a 10-month SA period in Germany. Barron performed a quantitative analysis in the form of production questionnaires administered before and after the SA experience, as well as a qualitative analysis focusing on retrospective interviews. Data were elicited three times over the year abroad and comparison was made to responses from 34 German NSs. The study showed that exposure to L2 input helped many participants achieve more TL-like pragmatic ability. The Irish learners’ increased use of pragmatic routines was attributed to an increase in fluency. which in turn increased their potential for gaining membership into the L2 speech community. The NS norm, however, was rarely reached. Data revealed that many of the learners ‘associate(d) language use with an individual’s personality and identity rather than with the foreign language itself’ (Barron, 2003: 349). Given that the participants reportedly felt secure in their own personalities, they did not see any reason to change their L1 language use patterns as they transferred (either consciously or not) their L1 sentiments into the L2. Therefore, pragmatic transfer had a mostly negative effect on these participants, who, in addition, may not have taken full advantage of the SA experience by not establishing deep relationships with NSs (Schmidt, 1993), thus failing to either notice or be motivated to change their speech behavior. Like Barron (2003), Shimizu (2009) chose to study the development of L2 pragmatic ability in a language other than English. He investigated responses to compliments as produced by learners of Japanese as an FL (JFL) and as an L2 (JSL) when administered an oral DCT. He opted for the oral version of the DCT because he felt that it generated more natural and spontaneous speech production than written DCTs. The oral DCTs were analyzed for compliment response strategies, patterns of semantic formulas (speech-act-specific strategies) and lexical/phrasal characteristics to determine adherence to Japanese pragmatic norms. He found that although JSL and JFL participants differed from Japanese NSs in their use of positive and negative strategies, the JSL group used responses that were more TL-like. Only the JSL participants used TL-like strategy of avoiding comment about the compliment in their responses, while JFL learners at three different proficiency levels favored the strategy of denying the compliment.

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Interestingly, Shimizu (2009) found that unlike in Takahashi and Beebe’s (1987) Japanese ESL and EFL data, his JSL and JFL responses differed significantly from the American NS responses, thus implying that L1 transfer alone does not account for the deviations from the Japanese norms. Shimizu suggested that it was the effect of instruction and instructional materials that could account for the emphasis on denial strategies (see Ishihara & Cohen, 2014: 84–85). The researcher contended that the teachers and textbooks encouraged learners to overuse the response strategy of denial, consistent with the modesty maxim in Japanese culture (Shimizu, 2009: 182). Follow-up participant interviews confi rmed his assumption that it was more the influence of the textbooks that led to the overuse of the denial strategy than simply transfer from L1 sociocultural norms, although this influence would certainly give the learners a predisposition to favor modesty. Importantly, it is possible that the JSL learners’ interactions with NSs gave them opportunities to modify the knowledge gained from textbooks. In line with both the Interaction Hypothesis (Long, 1996) and the Noticing Hypothesis (Schmidt, 1993), the JSL participants noticed that Japanese NSs used the strategies of either agreeing with the compliment or avoiding comment about it more frequently than had been taught in JSL classes. This fi nding would speak in favor of having teachers use more authentic, real-life examples of language use and not rely on textbooks to provide accurate pragmatic instruction, given that textbooks often include oversimplifications in terms of pragmatic instruction (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014; Vellenga, 2004). Shimizu added that this conclusion would be especially relevant to EFL learners who have ‘little opportunity to engage in authentic interaction and revise their hypothesis about the target pragmatic norms formed through transfer of training’ (Shimizu, 2009: 187). The fi nding that the context had a defi nite but complex role to play in the acquisition of pragmatic ability led Taguchi (2008b) to investigate whether there were differences in the development of speedy and accurate comprehension of implied speaker intentions between learners in ESL vs. EFL contexts. Her study included 60 Japanese EFL learners in Japan and 57 ESL learners in the USA, all college students between the ages of 18 to 28. Importantly, three of the EFL students had 9 to 11 months prior residency in a TL country, thus making them unique in comparison to the EFL participants in previous comparison studies. Nonetheless, both participant groups had beginning-level proficiency based on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) scores obtained at the start of the study, thereby eliminating proficiency as a factor. The researcher administered a computerized listening task that measured the ability to comprehend indirect refusals (e.g. providing an excuse for not honoring a request without explicitly rejecting the request) and indirect opinions (e.g. expressing a negative opinion of a movie by saying, ‘I’m glad the movie is over,’), and analyzed the results for speed and

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accuracy to provide a developmental account of pragmatic comprehension. The task was administered to each group twice, before and after approximately 120–130 hours of classroom instruction. Results indicated that the EFL learners made many more gains in accuracy than speed, while the ESL learners greatly improved their speed, but only minimally improved their accuracy. In particular, the EFL group made significantly more improvement than the ESL group in the accurate comprehension of indirect refusals, but not indirect opinions. Taguchi provided two interpretations for the EFL-group fi ndings: the fi rst was that refusals tend to be learned before the giving of opinions and the second was that it might have been an instance of pragmatic transfer. Both Japanese and English share certain patterns for making refusals (e.g. providing a reason for refusing an invitation), but not for stating indirect opinions. Based on the EFL learners’ wide gains over their ESL peers in the realm of indirect refusals, it seems that pragmatic transfer had more of an effect on the development of pragmatic ability than context in this instance. As Taguchi put it, ‘[t]he actual environment of learning may thus be of secondary importance as long as it affords sufficient instruction and practice to promote general listening skills’ (Taguchi, 2008b: 443). Taguchi speculated that it may not have been the context (ESL vs. EFL) that had an effect on pragmatic competence in this study, but rather what she referred to as ‘depth of interaction’ that led either to the development of pragmatic ability or to an awareness of the importance and relevancy of transfer. Consequently, Taguchi argued that length of residency alone was not necessarily a deciding factor in the development of pragmatic ability. In addition, as there were greater pragmatic gains among the EFL participants, it is important to note that these students were studying in an English immersion program in Japan, a rather unique EFL scenario. These particular EFL students expressly chose this specific institution because of their strong motivation to study English at an advanced level. The results of these studies investigating the effect of transfer on pragmatic ability appear to demonstrate that failure to acquire L2 pragmatic ability cannot be fully accounted for by proficiency or by length of stay alone. Rather, there are likely to be mitigating variables as well. A review of 28 studies looking at the relationship between language proficiency and ability in TL pragmatics, taking into account length of stay in the TL community, showed just how challenging it can be to determine such relationships given the host of variables that come into play (Xiao, 2015). For example, increased proficiency was not found to guarantee a nativelike performance in TL pragmatics owing to the fact that the impact of proficiency varied depending on the pragmatic features targeted for analysis in the given study – for instance, the types of speech acts (degrees of directness and conventionality), the modalities of pragmatic performance (comprehension and production) and the social variables involved in task situations (i.e. social status, social distance and the power relationship) (Xiao, 2015).

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A recent study investigated Taiwanese EFL learners’ developmental patterns of pragmatic transfer in the speech acts of giving and responding to compliments (Wu & Takahashi, 2016). The study examined the validity of the hypothesis that lower-proficiency Japanese learners of English lack the fluency to demonstrate negative transfer because they are simply not able to encode translations of socioculturally appropriate Japanese patterns. Rather, they would be expected to resort to a strategy of simplification. More advanced learners, on the other hand, would be expected to generate English phrases that would reflect Japanese norms of politeness or perhaps indirectness, possibly causing negative transfer in their EFL pragmatics. Then with very advanced learners, the amount of transfer would again decrease because they would reach near-native proficiency. So the researchers would expect a skewed bell curve. The study by Takahashi and Beebe (1987) had indicated that higher proficiency ESL learners were more subject to L1 transfer than lower proficiency learners. The corpus of this replication study involved 249 participants: 132 Taiwanese learners of English in Taiwan (TET) (45 low, 60 intermediate and 27 advanced learners), 85 Taiwanese-speaking Chinese in Taiwan (TCT) and 32 American English NSs in the USA (AEA). A DCT with three situations for complimenting (appearance, possessions and ability) was used to collect the TET’s interlanguage pragmatics data and the TCT’s and AEA’s normative data. The results indicated that the Taiwanese EFL learners’ developmental patterns of pragmatic transfer supported the ‘bell curve’ hypothesis by Takahashi and Beebe (1987). Furthermore, the study also found: (1) compared with the AEA, both the TET and TCT were more likely to ask questions when giving compliments; and (2) in addition to L2 proficiency levels, the types and contents of semantic formulas (e.g. culture-specific vs. structure-based) affected the developmental patterns of pragmatic transfer. The results of the study, particularly based on the responses by the intermediate TET group, supported the fi rst hypothesis of the study, namely, that the TET participants displayed characteristics unique to Chinese compliments and compliment responses and were more likely to ask questions (e.g. about how much something cost) when paying compliments or responding to compliments than the AEA participants. The frequencies of the distinctively Chinese (L1) speech-act-specific strategies clearly exhibited a dominant pattern: the amount of L1 transfer increased from the low to the intermediate level and then decreased from the intermediate to the advanced level. The following is one item from the DCT: Situation 1: Jacket You run into your classmate on campus. S/he is wearing a new jacket. You compliment your friend on the jacket.

The TCT’s responses in this situation suggested that when native Chinese speakers paid compliments, they tended to comment on the item (93%)

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more than its owner (5%). Most of the TCT participants typically used phrases (with the jacket being the subject), such as Nǐ de wàitào hǎohǎo kàn ‘Your jacket looks good’ or Zhè jiàn wàitào hěn shìhé nǐ ‘This jacket suits you very well.’ On the other hand, many fewer AEA participants (38%) used the jacket as the subject when giving compliments. Almost half of them (47%) preferred using ‘I’ as the subject such as ‘I like/love your jacket,’ which the TET group rarely did (1%) (Wu & Takahashi, 2016). With regard to the speech act strategies used in a compliment, the TCT group sometimes asked questions relating to monetary matters (18%) such as Duōshao qián? ‘How much did it cost?’ or Hěn guì ma? ‘Was it very expensive?’ which the AEA group never did in English. With regard to compliment responses, some TCT respondents (14%) avoided accepting compliments directly by replying Zhēn de ma? or Shì ma? both meaning ‘Really?’ in English. Such questions never appeared in the AEA’s responses; 84% of the participant English speakers started their answers with ‘Thank you’ or ‘Thanks’. A recent study highlighted deviations from TL normative request behavior owing to L1 transfer (Cunningham, 2017). The study focused on requests in synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). It consisted of a multifactorial analysis of L1 and L2 request production occurring during eight one-hour web conferences between 17 L2 learners of German for professional purposes and five L1 German professionals. Findings indicated that while both groups of speakers used predominantly direct requesting behavior, L1 speakers used significantly more internal modification devices (either syntactic: conditional clause, subjunctive mood; or lexical: politeness marker, downtowner, understater, appealer) than did L2 learners. Also, there was a difference in the pragmalinguistics. With regard to the lexical model modification device for understater, the learners preferred to use ein bisschen (‘a little bit’), whereas the experts preferred to use kurz (‘briefly’). While the studies reviewed in this section tended to support the view that L1 transfer plays a significant role in TL pragmatic performance, especially for FL learners, it leaves the door open to the view that interactions both in class and beyond can offset this pattern and may provide clues to the nature of how pragmatic ability actually develops. The next section will focus directly on the role of motivation in developing pragmatic ability in L2 and FL contexts. 2.4 The Role of Motivation in the Development of Pragmatic Ability

Evidence from language classrooms has supported the position that motivation is a key factor in successful language learning (Brown, 2001). It is no surprise then that many studies in the last few decades have focused on the relationship between TL learning contexts and motivation as

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regards pragmatic ability. Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) seminal study, for example, showed the advantage of the ESL over the EFL environment in attaining pragmatic ability, and much of this advantage was attributed to the motivation that positive experiences in the TL community gave to the ESL learners. The study involved 708 participants. A first sampling was comprised of 173 mixed-proficiency ESL students in the USA and 370 EFL students in Hungary, as well as 28 NS ESL teachers and 25 Hungarian EFL teachers. A second sampling consisted of 112 Italian EFL teachers. The authors developed a video with contextualized grammatical and pragmatic judgment tasks to measure sentences that were pragmatically appropriate but ungrammatical, ones that were grammatical but pragmatically inappropriate, and ones that were both grammatical and pragmatically appropriate. The speech acts under study included apologies, refusals, requests and suggestions. Participants also completed a questionnaire about their language learning background and their current language proficiency. The findings were that both the EFL learners and their teachers identified and ranked grammatical errors as more serious than pragmatic ones, while ESL learners and their teachers did the opposite, ranking pragmatic errors as more serious. Both the Hungarian and Italian EFL students rated the grammatical errors as more significant than the pragmatic ones, and as the two groups had different language backgrounds but were both in an EFL environment, their ratings were attributed to their environment. One reason for the difference in reaction between the ESL learners and the EFL learners both in Hungary and Italy may have been the nature of the EFL tests, since they tended to focus on form rather than on communicative ability (Hudson et al., 1992). Nonetheless, the Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei (1998) study provided evidence that the ESL and EFL learners in the study related to pragmatic knowledge differently. One obvious factor was proficiency, as a learner with limited grammatical knowledge might not have had the resources to select alternative utterances. On the other hand, even with a sufficient command of TL grammatical and lexical knowledge, adult FL learners often are incapable of producing pragmatically appropriate language (Koike, 1989). Put humorously some years ago by Takahashi and Beebe (1987: 151), they alluded to the dangers of having high proficiency without pragmatic ability: their fluency gave them ‘the rope to hang themselves with’ – i.e. the control over English vocabulary to express Japanese sentiments.

Another issue raised by Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei (1998) was residency, as the length of stay in an English-speaking country had been seen in numerous cases to have at least some impact on perception of pragmatic appropriateness. The authors found that the longer an ESL student lived in the USA, the higher their awareness of pragmatic errors. This fi nding was

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interpreted as a function of time spent outside of the classroom in Englishspeaking contexts interacting in the TL, as well as the result of more hours spent in the classroom with NS teachers of the TL and having to deal with administrative tasks for successful residency in the TL community. Most importantly, Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) results underscored Schmidt’s (1993) Noticing Hypothesis that in addition to salient input, the motivational factor of wanting to establish relationships seemed to lead to pragmatic awareness. According to Schmidt (1993: 36), ‘those who are concerned with establishing relationships with the TL speakers are more likely to pay close attention to the pragmatic aspects of input and to struggle to understand than those who are not so motivated.’ A replication of the Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) ESL-EFL comparison study was conducted with ESL learners in Hawaii and EFL learners in the Czech Republic (Niezgoda & Roever, 2001). Specifically, the authors wanted to test Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s results by seeing whether learners in an EFL context were inevitably at a disadvantage, or whether a group of particularly advanced students could ‘overcome’ these effects (Niezgoda & Roever, 2001: 63). The ESL participants comprised 48 L2 learners of various proficiency levels studying English at a private language school in Hawaii. Participants came from six different countries and had been living in the USA for an average of 4.7 months, close to the 5.3 months’ residence average for Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s ESL participants. The 124 Czech EFL learners, however, represented a particularly advanced group of students studying to become English teachers, who all received 14–20 hours of monolingual English instruction weekly for the duration of their five-year program, providing them with a more ESL-like input environment than in the traditional EFL scenario. Using Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) video instrument and questionnaire, Niezgoda and Roever (2001) obtained fi ndings that contradicted those from the original study. The EFL participants in this second study recognized more pragmatic errors than the ESL learners, and rated those errors as more severe than did their ESL counterparts. In addition, the low-proficiency learners in both ESL and EFL environments recognized more pragmatic than grammatical errors, and rated the pragmatic infelicities as more severe than the grammatical ones. Niezgoda and Roever did, however, observe one important similarity when compared to Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s original results: the ESL participants also rated pragmatic errors as more severe than grammatical errors. Based on their results, Niezgoda and Roever (2001: 76) concluded that environment ‘may not be the most important factor accounting for learner’s pragmatic awareness,’ given that pragmatic ability was acquired in their Czech EFL setting. Furthermore, they asserted that their fi ndings could be attributed to ‘an interaction between exposure to grammatical and pragmatic input and individual learner characteristics, specifically the degree to which learners actively attend(ed) to input’ (Niezgoda & Roever,

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2001: 77). The authors pointed out that the Czech EFL students, as developing English teachers, were highly motivated to gain pragmatic awareness and they speculated that this motivation may have accounted for their increased sensitivity to pragmatic errors. That same year, another pragmatics study appeared that used different degrees of input enhancement to determine Japanese EFL learners’ development of the ability to make requests (Takahashi, 2001). While there were four different treatment groups, only one received metapragmatic instruction. All groups completed pre- and posttest DCTs, engaged in communicative practice, supplied written retrospectives and responded to follow-up questionnaires measuring motivation. The group receiving metapragmatic instruction outperformed all others in the development of pragmatic ability. The self-reports, however, revealed that the more motivated learners noticed and readily adopted TL norms, thereby gaining confidence in their accuracy, while less motivated learners were more resistant to abiding by these norms. The lack of motivation then caused the input enhancements themselves to be less effective teaching tools in the development of pragmatic ability. Takahashi’s findings thus took Niezgoda and Roever’s (2001) belief that motivation had a crucial role to play in directing learner attention to pragmatic input one step further by suggesting that motivation was perhaps the most significant variable in directing learner attention to TL cultural perspectives. In addition, her study revealed the potentially positive value of explicit metapragmatic instruction. A subsequent study then corroborated these findings (Takahashi, 2005). A group of Japanese college students first completed a motivation questionnaire and a proficiency test. They then took part in a noticing-the-gap activity as the treatment task. The degree of the learners’ awareness of the target pragmalinguistic features was assessed through a retrospective awareness questionnaire administered immediately after the treatment. The results indicated that the learners differentially noticed the target pragmalinguistic features, and the learners’ awareness of the target features correlated positively with motivation subscales, but not with their proficiency. In particular, the learners’ intrinsic motivation was found to be closely related to their pragmatic awareness. In another replication of the Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) EFL vs. ESL study, Schauer (2006) allowed participants to correct errors in post hoc interviews, thereby providing a link between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic production, or proof of ability. She used BardoviHarlig and Dörnyei’s videotape instrument and questionnaire, and, unlike Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei or Niezgoda and Roever’s (2001) replication, she conducted original post hoc interviews. There were 53 university participants in total: 16 German ESL students studying in the UK, 17 German EFL students studying in Germany to become interpreters and translators – none of whom had ever lived in an English-speaking

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country – and 20 British NSs. However, unlike Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s study yet similar to that of Niezgoda and Roever, the EFL students received much more classroom-based input because of their accelerated language program. Thus, Schauer sought to determine if mixed-proficiency ESL students exhibited more pragmatic awareness than their advanced EFL counterparts. The interview component was an important addition in this study because it allowed the researcher to discover whether the participants had selected a true error or a ‘false error’ (Schauer, 2006: 272), as well as to shed light on their decision-making process and their experiences interacting with NSs. These interviews were recorded in the participants’ L1 and were later translated. Her data, which were further corroborated by qualitative interviews, confirmed Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) original fi ndings and did not support Niezgoda and Roever’s (2001) opposite results, as the EFL participants were less aware of pragmatic errors than their ESL counterparts, and EFL students perceived grammatical errors to be more salient than did the ESL students. The researcher found the EFL results disturbing because the implication was that ‘individuals who are studying to explicitly help people to be effective in intercultural communication are less aware of one of the central building blocks of successful communication – pragmatic rules and regulations’ (Schauer, 2006: 307), echoing Takahashi and Beebe’s (1987) fears about the severity of pragmatic failure. Lastly and most importantly, the length of residency in the UK had a positive impact on pragmatic awareness for the ESL students in the study because of exposure to authentic input, as indicated by Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei (1998). The ESL students’ pragmatic awareness continued to improve during their time in the TL community, particularly because they had rich opportunities to observe everyday NS interactions and become aware of their own output, thus allowing them to modify their language (Schauer, 2006). Motivation not only to become aware of their language use, but also to try to adapt it to the TL norm appeared in this study to contribute to the ESL participants’ development of more TL-like pragmatic ability. A study that was primarily looking at sociolinguistic variation in French among study-abroad students to France also produced results that bore on issues relating to motivation, namely, personal investment in the language learning effort and motive for learning (Kinginger, 2008). The researcher studied 24 American learners of French over the course of one semester and assessed gains through a pre- and post-semester interview that attempted to measure learner knowledge of address forms, colloquialisms and other speech acts (e.g. leave-taking expressions). While the TL context allowed all participants to gain significant pragmatic knowledge, qualitative data revealed that the learners who were most invested in the SA experience and had a motive to learn the language in consort with NSs

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

in that environment made the most gains. Interestingly, while access to NSs and therefore the theoretical potential to establish relationships was available to all participants, those who had host families who engaged them more in their lives developed more pragmatic knowledge than their peers who did not have these interactions and who, instead, used their host-family time to maintain relationships with friends and family back home through the internet. Kinginger’s findings underscored the potential for students to become discouraged and consequently not take full advantage of the SA context as a constant learning environment in which to develop NS-like pragmatic ability. Yet another study taking as its departure point the work by BardoviHarlig and Dörnyei (1998) focused its attention solely on the relationship between motivation and pragmatic awareness among Japanese EFL learners (Tagashira et al., 2011). This study set out to take a close look at just how motivation related to pragmatic development. The sample was comprised of 162 Japanese university EFL learners who were all at an intermediate proficiency level in English. Participants completed a questionnaire that helped to group them according to four motivational levels: • • • •

Moderate motivation (e.g. such as the average EFL student might have). Self-determined (e.g. intrinsic) motivation. Lack of motivation (e.g. when learners were simply fulfilling a course requirement). Externally-regulated motivation (e.g. extrinsic motivation, such as when motivation was more for a grade than for acquisition of knowledge).

The researchers also used Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s (1998) original questionnaire, although, for practical purposes, they did not employ Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s video format and instead converted it into a written questionnaire. In addition, they changed part of the original answer sheet to separate items for pragmatic and grammatical appropriateness to overcome the vagueness that Schauer (2006: 272) reasoned might account for a ‘false error’. The results showed that motivation accounted for differences in recognition of pragmatic errors, but not for grammatical errors. Additionally, the self-determined or more intrinsically-motivated learners showed the keenest perception of utterance appropriateness once they had decided an error was present (Tagashira et al., 2011: 19). While it was not exactly clear to the researchers how motivation affected the learners, they speculated that it affected selective attention in that motivated learners seemed to value pragmatic aspects of language use more and ‘to be inclined to detect the stimuli containing pragmatic information and utilize this information for more elaborate analysis’ (Tagashira et  al., 2011: 20). Their study thus tended to confi rm previous assumptions (Niezgoda & Roever, 2001; Takahashi, 2001) as to the effects of motivation on pragmatic awareness.

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Another study of pragmatic development and its relationship to motivation was conducted by Taguchi (2011), who looked at requests and opinions in a SA context. The participants were 48 Japanese EFL students in an English immersion program who were tested on their ability to produce requests and opinions three times over an academic year using a computerized oral DCT. A subset of 12 participants also provided qualitative analyses in their L1 three times during the second semester. The qualitative data revealed that variation in the quantitative results was closely linked to the students’ motivation to interact in the TL. As all participants were part of the immersion program with ample access to TL input, every participant made some gains in pragmatic ability. However, in line with Schmidt’s (1993) reasoning on the importance of developing relationships in the TL, it was the participants who actively sought TL contact and experiences (e.g. through email with NS teachers who provided explicit feedback) who saw the most consistent quantitative gains. A more recent study sought to determine if familiarity with the cultural features of the TL environment and an interest in learning those features were the main factors in determining how well learners understood the pragmatics of the given culture (Rafieyan et al., 2013). The subjects were 32 learners of English from countries where it was an FL, studying in two intermediate-level classes at a language academy in Malaysia. They studied English through a textbook series that contained a wide range of topics and dialogues featuring the cultural and communicative features of American English. The textbook material was supplemented with videos depicting those cultural features. The researchers collected data through a Likert scale attitude questionnaire and two pragmatic comprehension tests adapted from Taguchi (2008a) – a pretest and a posttest after 48 hours of instruction. Results indicated that a positive attitude toward learning the TL culture led to better understanding of pragmatics. There was a strong statistical correlation between interest/ motivation in learning about the TL culture and success on the pragmatic comprehension tasks. The L2 learners who had a ‘neutral’ attitude toward learning about the TL culture scored in the middle range of the implicature tasks, while those who expressed ‘positive’ or ‘highly positive’ attitudes performed significantly better. In addition, the majority of the L2 learners agreed or strongly agreed that some cultural components should be part of every language class, and they felt encouraged to take classes in American culture. These fi ndings suggested the benefits of explicitly teaching about positive features of the TL culture. This section has demonstrated the important role that motivation can play in pragmatic development among both FL and L2 learners of a TL. While pragmatic awareness appears to have benefitted from length of residence in the TL community and from studying the language as an L2 and not an FL, motivation would seem to play an essential role.

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2.5 Discussion 2.5.1 A summary of the issues

Kasper (1996: 148) describes three conditions to attain pragmatic knowledge: ‘There must be pertinent input, the input has to be noticed, and learners need ample opportunity to develop a high level of control.’ The studies reviewed in this chapter demonstrate that input alone is insufficient for the development of pragmatic ability. Rather, learners must notice how the pragmalinguistic forms are used, an activity that is easier to engage in when learners are living and functioning in an L2 rather than an FL context. However, while most studies indicate that length of stay in the TL environment has a greater effect on pragmatic ability than proficiency level, a rigorous analysis of research results suggests that individual factors – such as the learners’ willingness to engage in positive pragmatic transfer from the L1 and strong motivation to learn the TL – can somewhat offset the challenge posed by being in an FL context. A purpose for this in-depth analysis contrasting L2 with the FL context was to gain insights as to why learners in one or another of these contexts are more savvy about TL pragmatics. One obvious factor is the access to authentic input and, in principle, this access is more extensive in an L2 environment, but in reality, this may not be the case. In fact, if an FL learner has greater intensity of interaction with NSs, whether live or over the internet, this can lead to the kind of noticing that results in pragmatic awareness. The temporal factor of an extended stay in the TL community is an insufficient variable in and of itself in developing pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Taguchi, 2008b). Being in the TL context does, in principle, provide easier access to TL speakers than does an FL context, but there is no guarantee that such contacts will take place on a regular basis, which is what is needed for pragmatic awareness to develop. It depends on the learners’ willingness to have this happen, on programmatic features in SA experiences that make such opportunities readily available and enjoyable, and numerous other factors. Even homestay in and of itself does not ensure rich interactions with TL speakers, especially if the hosts provide their home more as a bed-and-breakfast facility and purposely keep contact with the SA student to a minimum – as was the case for our son in his homestay experience during study abroad in Quito, Ecuador in 1999. Contributing author for this chapter, Wyner, found when living in Vietnam that it was primarily the male EFL teachers with a motive to date Vietnamese women who made an effort to really learn Vietnamese. Nearly everyone else, even those who wished to form deep friendships, just picked up bits of the language. I saw in Israel that numerous EFL teachers who had lived there for many years often tended to interact with other English speakers, and consequently did not necessarily develop good Hebrew skills. When Wyner was a student at the University of Cape Town, she

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remembers in an address to the international students at orientation that a dean suggested that if they truly wanted to experience the culture fi rsthand and learn about its values and pragmatic norms, then it would behoove the students to consider having an amorous relationship with a local South African. While this dean felt that creating personal relationships with TL speakers would both heighten pragmatic awareness and potentially lead to increased language ability, we must bear in mind that this aim is best achieved if the TL speakers do not know the L1 of the student or if they are willing to refrain from using it for the most part. A second major determiner of pragmatic development was seen to be either positive or negative transfer from the L1 language and culture (Barron, 2003; Takahashi & Beebe, 1987; Yamagashira, 2001). Therefore, the learner can successfully carry over patterns that also work in the TL and culture (Taguchi, 2008b), or use patterns that are inappropriate for the TL situation. Sometimes, what presents itself as negative transfer is the willful use of material that is counter to the norm because learners are exercising their agency and resisting the NS norms out of an effort to maintain their own L1 identity. As demonstrated by a study using conversational role play to examine responses to compliments in American English, Korean and Korean English, the exercising of agency may show up as somewhat subtle (Yun, 2017). The researcher found that learners may seemingly accommodate to TL norms, but at the same time abide by their own L1 normative behavior as well. Yun gave an example where the Korean learners of English responded to a compliment about their dress with ‘thank you’, but then followed up with a deflection – ‘but your dress is more beautiful’. Through retrospective interviews, the researcher confirmed that the learners were exercising their agency. Many of them explained that they wanted to give a ‘correct’ answer to native speakers, but at the same time they did not want to be rude according to Korean norms. Another possible detractor to TL pragmatic development is the transfer of classroom instruction or course materials to the TL situation, usually involving some overgeneralization/overuse of a given form. An example is with respect to keigo or honorifics in Japanese, and the fact that classroom teaching has tended to overemphasize the desu/masu forms of the verb in the textbook, rather than the casual form. Contrary to the textbook version, which teaches learners that Japanese honorifics work on a simple lexical level to indicate politeness, the reality is that honorific discourse involves the interplay of social identities and speaker negotiation within a given activity in complex ways (see Shibasmoto-Smith & Cook, 2011). Consequently, some current approaches to Japanese TL instruction focus on getting learners to develop a conceptually-grounded, nuanced understanding of Japanese addressee honorifics (Tsujihara & Ohta, 2017), and there is interest among researchers in describing just how keigo usage actually plays itself out among advanced classroom learners of Japanese (Takeuchi, 2017).

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Especially in FL learning situations, learners are likely to have less of an opportunity to notice their misguided overgeneralizations based on the instructional input because of their limited interactions in the TL environment (Shimizu, 2009). I can think of an example from my FL classroom learning of Japanese at the University of Hawaii where I learned that ano and eeto were forms to use for fi lling pauses when in discussion, rather than the ‘uh’ or ‘hmm’, which Americans are likely to insert into their utterances when speaking other languages. I had not learned in class nor from the textbook, nor had I observed that Japanese speakers do not fi ll their pauses as much as Americans do – that they allow for silence, often without the other interlocutor jumping in to fill the pause. I also had not learned that eeto is more likely to be used when pausing before trying to express relatively large amounts of information and that ano tends to be used when speakers need to pay attention to linguistic forms such as before providing a non-preferred response (e.g. a refusal). As pointed out in Chapter 1, I had been using both ano and eeto extensively and indiscriminately, until a Japanese tandem partner informed me that I was filling my pauses too much – that NSs did so far less. Neither the textbook nor the teacher had warned me of this possibility. A third major determiner of pragmatic development emerging from the research literature is motivation to learn the TL and keen interest in its mainstream culture(s). High motivation was shown to help learners overcome the obstacle of being in an EFL environment with scarce opportunities for authentic TL interaction (Niezgoda & Roever, 2001; Rafieyan et al., 2013; Tagashira et al., 2011; Taguchi, 2011; Takahashi, 2001). Of course, there is the cart and the horse issue. Is it motivation that compels learners to become more pragmatically aware or is it pragmatic awareness that makes learners more motivated to learn pragmatics, or is it a combination of both? My motivation to continue learning Mandarin (now in my seventh year of study) seems to come from deep inside. My Chinese tandem partners sometimes ask me how I can be so motivated to learn the language in an FL context. My motivation has limits in that I do not feel compelled to check my language for pragmatic accuracy most of the time because the need is not present. I do not need to worry about pragmatic failure since I am not performing in front of Chinese speakers other than my two tandem partners who are most tolerant of any pragmatic infelicities I may utter or write in my weekly Mandarin blog. Also, I do not need to teach Mandarin. If I were studying to be a teacher of Mandarin in the USA, then I would certainly spend more time developing pragmatic awareness in the language. 2.5.2 Limitations in the studies reviewed

As is frequently the case with applied linguistic research (see McKinley & Rose, 2017) the studies described above could be criticized for their

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various methodological shortcomings, more with regard to the issue of the L2-FL contrast than to that of motivation. In some of the studies, one could question the comparability of the L2 and FL settings both with respect to the learners (i.e. their backgrounds, their L1, their gender, their proficiency levels, the number of hours they had spent in class and their familiarity with the pragmatics tasks that they were asked to perform) and with respect to the language learning context (i.e. the institutional goals, the pedagogical approaches employed and the background of the teachers). In some studies, the designated proficiency levels were probably only a rather inaccurate measure of the actual performance levels of the learners, depending on how these levels were determined. One factor that can make the drawing of a line between L2 and FL a bit of a challenge is that learners may well have a mix of both in their language experience. This would be the case, for example, of FL learners who have studied abroad for varying lengths of time and then have returned home. As observed in a study on L2 Spanish refusals (Félix-Brasdefer, 2004), the perceptions about TL norms and social status may be based on reflections after returning home from SA and after having had the opportunity to compare and reflect. The result may well be a hybrid mix of L2 and FL elements. With regard to the relationship between grammar and pragmatic ability, perhaps it is circular, but if grammatical proficiency is a major determiner in proficiency level, then it has already been demonstrated over the years that grammatical ability does not directly equate to pragmatic ability, as research on speech acts in EFL settings has indicated (Bouton, 1988; Boxer & Pickering, 1995; Kasper, 1997; Kasper & Rose, 2002; Yamagashira, 2001). Even grammatically proficient or advanced learners are likely to encounter pragmatic failure. FL learners are prime targets for this because they may have learned grammar rules sufficiently well so as to obtain high grades in their course work, but may not have had ample opportunity to try out their performance of pragmatics in high-stakes situations. Moreover, even L2 learners can get the grammar right and the pragmatics wrong. One possibility is that just as grammar errors may fossilize, so might inappropriate pragmatic choices. L2 learners may not have been corrected on their errors, the corrections may not have taken or they may have been given insufficient corrections from inexperienced teachers. After all, performing effective correction is an art unto itself (see Cohen, 1975, for one of the earlier treatments of the myriad of challenges associated with correcting student learners). The result of faulty correction is pragmatic fossilization, especially with respect to pragmalinguistics. Therefore, for example, the learner says, ‘I’m very sorry’ after smashing into someone at the grocery store – a situation in which an English NS in the USA would say, ‘I’m really (awfully/terribly/so) sorry.’ Another methodological limitation of these studies concerns the structure of the research task itself. Written DCTs often assess pragmatic comprehension or awareness along with a projected measure of speaking,

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while oral DCTs assess pragmatic production more directly. Some studies indicated that higher pragmatic awareness did not correspond directly with oral production (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998; Taguchi, 2008a). Importantly, awareness of pragmatics and ability to perform it are often conflated in the studies, even though the former is a necessary condition for the latter. Much of the research does not address this issue. Nor is it clear from these studies if comprehension and production occur simultaneously or if there is even a directional or linear relationship between the two that is worth researching. While both comprehension and production tasks assess pragmatic knowledge, a direct comparison cannot therefore be made so easily between the responses elicited through the two kinds of measures. The relationship between pragmatic awareness and production among L2 learners has thus not been addressed in these studies. There is the further problem that written answers on DCTs, for example, serve at best as an indirect, projected measure of oral production, disregarding the relatively common variation across language skills, as well as the potential for writing fatigue or worse – that the respondents perceive the tasks as a form of test-taking. (More will be said about DCTs in Chapters 9 and 10.) Another problem perhaps with any elicited measure of pragmatic ability is that of agency. Respondents may deliberately choose to avoid approximating NS norms (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014). As noted in the studies where L2 learners used the L2 to express L1 sentiments (Barron, 2003; Takahashi & Beebe, 1987), the refusal to give up aspects of one’s linguistic identity may make an L2 learner appear less pragmatically competent than may objectively be the case. Any study that compares L2 speakers to NSs assumes that the L2 speakers wish to emulate their NS peers, and that this is the group whose pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic choices they should adopt. L2 learners, however, may deliberately diverge from the norm so as not to identify with the L2 community and instead retain their L1 identity (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014: 86). Studies situated in a controlled research scenario that lacks the authenticity of online, real-world interaction often ignore the conflicting concepts of respondents’ differential willingness to adhere to another group’s norms (e.g. adopting slang). On the other hand, there is the real possibility that the NS interlocutors may hold negative views of the learners’ L2 pragmatic ability. For example, Janicki (1985) has shown that NSs often dislike L2 learners’ use of in-group membership speaking styles, such as slang, obscenities or very informal speech. Therefore, given that the NSs may harbor negative attitudes towards NNSs trying to sound too much like the in-group, it may paradoxically be to the learners’ benefit not to sound too nativelike and hence not to attempt to get the pragmatics right. Thus, ironically, not sounding too much like members of the TL group may work to the benefit of learners. This is an issue that obviously extends to NSs where a black woman may not appreciate a white woman’s use of African-American Vernacular English because it is not perceived as hers to use.

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Lastly, as students do not always make use of potential positive pragmatic transfer (Kasper, 1997), the studies that were reviewed characteristically lacked detailed interviews or think-aloud protocols to allow the researchers to fi nd out just why the participants employed a particular strategy, or if they were even cognizant of their choices. Since some of the measures used in the reviewed studies called for responding to online or videotaped measures, it is important to note that in responding to an offline questionnaire, learners have more time to think about their answers and are not overloaded by stress or other factors that tend to hinder online data collection (Barron, 2003). Nevertheless, it remains unclear what effect the off-line questionnaire itself has on the measurement of pragmatic knowledge, and the extent to which the results from it are comparable to those of an online one. 2.5.3 Further research

For those readers who are interested in research projects on pragmatics, one area of further research is along the lines of the international survey to be reported on in Chapter 4 – that of exploring among NTs and NNTs their handling of pragmatics in both L2 and FL contexts. Such research would be directed at the teachers’ knowledge of the TL pragmatics, as well as their perceptions and beliefs – investigating what teachers’ views are with regard both to L1 pragmatic transfer and to the teachers’ role in motivating learners to become more pragmatically aware. FL teachers may not necessarily view the pragmatics of language interaction as important, since it occurs infrequently for them. The responsibility for abiding by pragmalinguistically appropriate word choices may in numerous cases be left to the textbook, rather than the teacher. The survey could also explore the case of teachers who shy away from both teaching and assessment of pragmatics – why this is the case and what to do about it. The survey reported on later in this volume only included for the most part teachers who dealt with pragmatics. The level of learner motivation to actively notice their own pragmatic transfer (whether positive or negative) or to take full advantage of explicit instruction in pragmatics is an issue in need of research with a robust number of subjects over a prolonged period of time. A researchable issue, for example, is the development of motivation to perceive and produce NS interactions in FL scenarios. More studies are also needed to investigate the specific relationship between learner motivation and pragmatic acquisition. Specifically, it would be helpful to the field to have more studies such as the Tagashira et al. (2011) one that investigated the intersection of pragmatic awareness, cognitive processes associated with noticing and motivation in order to account for learners’ transition from simply noticing to actually comprehending pragmatic inappropriateness. Chapter 10 proposes a series of research options to describe both NTs and NNTs

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teaching pragmatics in their classrooms. Such studies could certainly include observation of teachers’ efforts to motivate their learners. In addition, more attention could be given to the role of pragmatic transfer in both L2 and FL contexts to determine how it is related to awareness and the pedagogical implications of helping students become aware of universal transfer. This is of particular importance in an FL context where students may be more prone to draw on preconceived cultural stereotypes (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014), which can be further reinforced by lack of authentic interaction in the TL with NSs (Barron, 2003). Rafieyan et al. (2013) demonstrated that the problem of negative transfer could be mitigated when learners were familiarized with and motivated to learn about the L2 culture. Furthermore, additional research is needed to account for how much of learners’ positive transfer is intentional, how much is luck and how much relates to the learners’ desire to adapt to the NS norm, to express an L1 identity in the L2 or to adopt a new L2 identity solely for L2 communication. Attention could be given both to structured responses, as on a DCT, and to real-time interaction. Sometimes, people just parrot what they have heard and always have a chance of it being correct. It can be difficult if not impossible to measure if they have actually learned anything or are just mimicking what they hope is correct. This calls for systematic follow-up over a prolonged period of time to determine how well the learners have control over this pragmatic behavior. Perhaps it may be possible with a large-scale study to better identify, describe and predict which learners are likely to gain greater pragmatic awareness than others, especially among learners at more advanced levels. Such studies could potentially reveal nuances about the nature of pragmatic transfer. The question is how best to conduct such studies, as through online surveys, the completion of real-time production tasks and other means. Again, Chapter 10 looks at different avenues for research on TL pragmatics. The motivational factor requires closer attention, since it relates to how aware learners are about the sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics associated with the given TL. Furthermore, goals and motivation for learning a TL differ widely among individuals. Some learners, particularly in an FL setting, may learn the TL only for a specific purpose, such as reading trade articles, thus rendering the bulk of pragmatic knowledge ‘superfluous’ (Barron, 2003: 77). Since pragmatic ability ‘containing cultural aspects and features of social context and conventions cannot be conceptualized without a target language and culture in mind’ (Timpe, 2012: 171), future research would benefit from making explicit how the TL features to be measured are tied to the TL culture at hand, and what effect deviations from the pragmatic norms have on overall communicative ability, as well as their relationship to both pragmatic transfer and motivation. Iranian researchers, for

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example, observed that their EFL learners are highly motivated to acquire means for using language appropriately and that their high pragmatic motivation can be a strong impetus for their noticing ability (Tajeddin & Zand Moghadam, 2012: 367). Another research concern is that most current research is crosssectional rather than longitudinal. More longitudinal studies are needed to measure pragmatic awareness and production prior to, during and after residence in an L2 context (Barron, 2003), and to study the evolution of the TL learners’ attitudes toward the NS norms. Especially amenable to longitudinal study would be case-study research, such as that looking at specific interactions between NNS and NS colleagues where the NS is a mentor to the more junior NNS colleague. This research could track the junior colleague’s efforts to use appropriate TL norms in email exchanges, the type of help offered by the mentor and the consequences of getting the behavior wrong from time to time. 2.6 Conclusion

The fi rst aim of this chapter was to problematize the defi nition of pragmatics. The terms sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics were seen to help in conceptualizing the different types of norms learners need to grapple with in gaining control over TL pragmatics. Nonetheless, it was pointed out that what may appear to be sociopragmatic failure may actually be pragmalinguistic in nature – that the learner had every intention of abiding by the norms, but perhaps overgeneralized the use of some language form incorrectly to the given context. Then, three factors that contribute to the development of pragmatic ability were examined in depth. The fi rst factor is the role that the L2 and FL environments actually play in the development of learners’ TL pragmatic ability, highlighting the possibility that individual factors may offset the advantages that learners have by being in the L2 context while they are learning. The second factor is the role of pragmatic transfer, particularly as it appears in FL as opposed to L2 contexts. Just as in the early days of contrastive analysis back in the 1980s, it may well be that predicted areas of negative transfer, especially in FL contexts, do not occur and for numerous reasons, not the least of which being that the learners are especially mindful of the need to avoid making such transfers from the L1. The third factor is the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability. The literature review simply underscored the complexity of this variable, again leaving the door open for highly motivated learners to achieve results against supposedly insurmountable odds. After pointing out problems with trying to compare one study to another, suggestions as to further research in the field were also offered. While L2 contexts generally afford more opportunities for pragmatic development than FL settings, the dynamic relationships among context,

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pragmatic transfer and motivation all indicate that individual differences have a greater role to play than just exposure in the TL community. Thus, future theorizing, research efforts, and, most importantly, language pedagogy will need to evolve in order to address the complexity of factors contributing to TL pragmatic development. Notes (1) Contributor to this chapter, Lauren Wyner, is currently the Academic Manager at the Brooklyn School of Languages, Brooklyn, NY. (2) In this chapter and in Chapter 5, where Wyner is a contributing author, references will be made to her in the third person, Wyner. (3) A more recent example is the criticism by the Daily Caller of Barron Trump’s outfit, which sparked a rebuke from Chelsea Clinton: https://www.reuters.com/article/ususa-trump-chelsea-idUSKCN1B31TC (accessed 6 October 2017). (4) See: http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/Compliments/FeedbackEx1. htm for a summary of compliments to a professor in Japanese and for references as to the sources (accessed 7 January 2018). (5) The popular press in Japan makes it clear that Westerners are treated differently from locals: see, for example, http://www.japantoday.com/category/lifestyle/view/5-reasons-foreigners-fi nd-it-hard-to-become-friends-with-japanese-people (accessed 17 January 2017). (6) Comments will be made in Section 6.2 as to possible drawbacks associated with DCT data.

3 The Handling of Pragmatics by Native and Nonnative Teachers1

3.1 The NT-NNT Distinction 3.1.1 A sparse literature on the NT-NNT distinction

The literature comparing NTs and NNTs in their handling of TL pragmatics has been rather scant (e.g. Rose, 1997). The approach taken in the literature has tended to be that of downplaying whether the language instructor is an NT or an NNT, considering it a lesser issue in effective pragmatic instruction (Akikawa, 2010). The position holds that the key to a teacher’s success is having critical awareness and acceptance of pragmatic diversity. This allows teachers, whether NTs or NNTs, to help their students develop cultural sensitivity and tolerance so that they can observe and analyze pragmatic norms different from their own and make their own pragmatic choices (Akikawa, 2010; see also Ishihara, 2010). The view taken in this volume is that there is value in considering the similarities and differences between NTs and NNTs regarding both their knowledge about the TL’s pragmatics, their propensity to teach this material and their views regarding how to do it. Akikawa (2010) asserts that being an NT or an NNT is not a major variable, but rather demonstrable linguistic and pragmatic competence along with solid professional development are the primary sources of competent teaching. According to her, competent teachers should possess critical awareness of the variability of pragmatic norms and remain open-minded as to what constitute acceptable forms regardless of whether they themselves use them. Drawing on the work of Ishihara (2010), she would suggest that it is impossible for teachers to become familiar with all permissible pragmatic options in a given context, especially considering all the varieties of a TL. Instead, having critical awareness and acceptance of pragmatic diversity allows teachers to help their students develop cultural sensitivity and tolerance so that they can observe and analyze pragmatic norms different from their own and make their own pragmatic choices. Aslan and Thompson (2017) found that ESL learners 57

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do in fact appreciate the professional qualities of their teachers regardless of their NT or NNT status. Nonetheless, rather than assuming that the handling of pragmatics in the TL classroom by NTs and NNTs is a nonissue, my preference is to assume that it may be an issue in sometimes subtle ways, and hence, that there is room to address it. 3.1.2 Teaching the pragmatics of WEs

Perhaps English teaching is a good place to start. With regard to the pragmatics of EFL, there are language educators and classroom teachers who see the NT-NNT distinction as largely irrelevant in that appropriate norms for pragmatic behavior in the TL should probably be more local ones (i.e. in Japan, having EFL pragmatics based on Japanese English norms, rather than US or British ones). Especially with regard to the teaching of World Englishes (WEs), the stance is taken that NNTs are as well-positioned or even better at teaching the TL than are NTs (Mahboob, 2010). See, for example, recent volumes that describe and promote the status of World Englishes (Marlina & Giri, 2014; Matsuda, 2012b). The case is eloquently made in various chapters in these publications that there is a need to recognize regional varieties of English in their own right (e.g. Korean, Malayan, Thai English and so forth), rather than applying US and British standards for what is considered acceptable. For example, if Japanese and Korean business associates are conversing among themselves in English in Seoul, it is reasonable to assume that they may rely to some extent on their own respective L1 pragmatics. That said, I have yet to fi nd any guidelines for how to actually teach one of these WEs, which would presumably include teaching its pragmatics. For instance, there does not appear to be textbook material expressly written for the purpose of teaching Japanese English pragmatics to Japanese speakers. As pointed out in Chapter 1, research has shown that teachers may pay lip service to the importance of acknowledging and even promoting local nonstandard varieties of English. Yet, as reported in a study with L1 Arabic teachers of English in Saudi Arabia (Asmari, 2014), the reality was that teachers taught according to the English of the textbook, which in that specific case was British English. In Saudi Arabia, for example, would teaching the pragmatics of an Arabic variety of English mean that ritualistically polite flourishes in greetings and other speech acts would be a part of English language instruction? What might entries in a local English textbook actually look like if the intention were to reflect the pragmatics of the local Arabic-speaking community in terms of catering to local norms for, say, handling service encounters in shops? Would an EFL textbook make an effort to cater to norms for formulaic patterns for service encounters as they might occur in Arabic, in Arabic countries, where – as mentioned above (see Section 1.2.1; Traverso, 2006) – shopkeepers might be expected to adhere to ritualistic means for

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acknowledging a customer’s interest in a product, followed by a ritualistic way to acknowledge the actual purchase? Since current textbooks do not cover pragmatics very much under any circumstances, perhaps modifications to cater to Arabic English pragmatics would be modest. Probably it would still be the role of the instructor to augment the textbook with material on pragmatics. 3.1.3 Acknowledging the influence of the learners’ L1 pragmatics in their dealing with norms for TL pragmatics

It is increasingly prevalent to fi nd literature that problematizes the traditional pattern to teach toward US or British norms for pragmatics. The roots for this ideological approach can be found in language policies promoted by the British Council, as well as by the Educational Testing Service in the USA as to what constitutes normative English-language behavior. As indicated in Section 1.2.4, the WE and ELF movements would endorse greater attention to and acceptance of more local norms for TL pragmatics, based on how pragmatics is done in the language community of the learners. The consequence of this thrust is that educators are suggesting that we not be overly dependent on the language norms that are based on the prestige varieties of the given language, as in the case of English. However, can the same case be made for languages that – unlike English or Spanish – do not function as a lingua franca in the world? This would certainly include the Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Filipino and many others. Rather than actually teaching this pragmatic behavior to learners, since they already know it, a preferred approach would be to familiarize NTs who are their instructors in classrooms with how their students’ pragmatics may be influenced by their L1. 3.1.4 Advantages in being an NNT with regard to pragmatics

NNTs of numerous TLs in the world have advantages in teaching certain areas of pragmatics for those languages. For example, they may be very knowledgeable with regard to the role of TL grammar for the pragmatics of that language, given that they may well have studied assiduously the grammar of the language formally. In addition, NNTs who have many years of experience teaching pragmatics may be more effective in teaching TL pragmatics than those NTs who rely to a certain extent on their intuitions. Furthermore, NNTs with a rich multicultural background may fi nd that this background provides them special insights into the teaching of TL pragmatics that NTs may not have. The results of a case study with an NT from New Zealand, teaching 10- to 12-year-old Japanese EFL learners in Japan would suggest that in some ways local Japanese NNTs might well have an easier time in

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classroom management with the pupils in that context, given their ability to empathize better with the students than the NT (Kidd, 2016). The study meticulously detailed what were seen as the NT’s pragmatic missteps: his misinterpretation of peer collaboration (i.e. by berating the pupils for talking too much), his leading of classroom tasks that his pupils saw as inconsistent with standard classroom behavior in Japan, his use of Japanese in the classroom, which at times was seen as offensive, and his inability to fully understand the various roles that silence played for the pupils. It is likely that local NNTs would have had fewer such crosscultural clashes with their students in a Japanese EFL classroom. The fi ndings by Kidd (2016) are consistent with previous fi ndings from a study by Chun (2014) in which Korean NNTs of EFL were judged more effective than NTs in helping students with psychological aspects of language learning and in having sensitivity to students’ needs coming from their shared L1 and experience as language learners. There are probably numerous examples in the world of NNTs fi nding true rapport with their students because of the shared L1 identity and cultural background. A Turkish L1 speaker, Erhan Aslan described to me his experience teaching English as a NNT in a K-12 setting in Ankara along with NTs (Email communication, 26 May 2016). He found that the NTs in Ankara needed constant guidance from NNTs regarding classroom management. Some students would not take them seriously and sometimes would act out in the classroom more so than in classes with NNTs. In contrast, NNTs would be able to handle these students efficiently because of the impact of the warnings given to the students in a pragmatically appropriate way in the L1.

3.1.5 Advantages in being an NT with regard to pragmatics

Just as it is important in this volume to acknowledge and even highlight the advantages of being an NNT, it is necessary to likewise acknowledge possible advantages that NTs might have in some areas of pragmatics over NNTs (other than perhaps truly expert NNTs). For example, research has shown that NSs are more adept than learners at knowing the local norms for managing turn taking in a conversation. A conversational analysis of L2 learners of Peninsular Spanish conversing with each other and with their teacher-researcher illustrated the difficulty that the NNSs had in actively maintaining turn-by-turn talk in the sequential environment of topic closings (García, 2015). The study highlighted how the pragmatics of taking the initiative in topic management and changing the course of a conversation called for complex skills among language learners. The Spanish L2 learners deviated from normative behavior in various ways: (1) they opted to allow the topic to fade, rather than collaboratively and smoothly terminating it or shifting topics;

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(2) they maintained the topic, rather than initiating a new topic, even after exceeding topic boundaries; and (3) after a misunderstanding, they simply remained silent. An NS would be likely to provide a summary assessment, a final comment and other forms of collaborative disengagement or interactional work, rather than simply terminating or abandoning the topic. Therefore, while NNTs can certainly learn how to teach the ins and outs of TL conversational management, presumably NTs have the advantage of being more likely than the NNTs to have more experience with conversational management in a wide range of turn-taking situations in the TL. NTs may also be better at giving feedback in a conversation so as to sound sincerely engaged. While they may not always provide an appropriate listener response (especially if they are looking at the screen on one of their devices, rather than paying full attention to the interlocutor), they will know the sounds that they need to make, as well as the words and phrases that indicate that they are following what is said. NTs are also likely to be better at perceiving (and teaching) humor and teasing, and quicker than NNTs at getting the punch line of a joke. Likewise, NTs are probably better at knowing how to use discourse markers like ‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘so’, ‘I think’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘frankly’ and ‘as a matter of fact’. Clearly, knowing about TL pragmatics issues such as those enumerated above and knowing how to teach this information in an effective manner are two separate things. For that reason, being an effective teacher is crucial as well. Still, it is likely that in an FL instructional context especially, teaching pragmatics according to the TL norms can be less of a challenge for NTs than for NNTs. NNTs are more likely to inadvertently or perhaps even knowingly teach TL pragmatics with an overlay from the local language and culture. Therefore, if American teachers of Spanish as an FL in the USA were to teach their students how to make requests in Spanish based on how they might make the request in English, it could look like this: A Spanish-speaking American tourist asks a passenger on a local Uruguayan fl ight to exchange seats with him, so he can sit next to his girlfriend: Perdóneme, señor. ¿Sería posible de cambiar asiento con Ud.? ‘Pardon me, sir. Would it be possible to change seats with you?’

While there is nothing grammatically wrong with this request, it is not likely to reflect the pragmalinguistic norms that a Hispanic NS would be likely to follow. For example, a Uruguayan would probably say something such as Disculpe señor, rather than Perdóneme, but then just ¿No me cambia de asiento? ‘Can we change seats?’2 rather than using the more elaborate conditional, which an NS might be inclined to do in English. This would be seen as the result of L1 influence (or negative transfer) in the use of the TL (Figure 3.1).

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Figure 3.1 Request to exchange seats on a plane

If the NNT encourages the FL learners to have extensive interactions with NSs (whether face-to-face, through the internet or in some other manner), perhaps this might help to offset the disadvantage of not being in the TL context where learners have easier access to the language since it is spoken by the locals and is readily available in the media. Perhaps these interactions could lead to the kind of noticing that results in pragmatic awareness. Unquestionably, the individual learner factor can play a key role in an FL context. As pointed out in Chapter 2, some FL learners are able to beat the odds through their own determination to learn the pragmatics of the language. It may also be that NNTs are well versed at instilling in their learners strong motivation to learn the TL, which offsets the challenge of being in an FL context, removed from easy contact with the TL. 3.1.6 NNS subjectivity regarding TL norms for pragmatics

There is a slightly subtle element that needs to be considered in this focus on NTs vs. NNTs, which helps to explain, for example, the problems with classroom management that NTs have encountered, namely, personal choices made by the students who are learning the TL. As Ishihara (2010: 33) observed: Although the native-speaker model may be compatible with naïve sentiments of some uncritical or uninformed language learners (Timmis, 2002), it fails to view learners as sociocultural beings who bring their subjectivities (e.g. worldview, their identities, values, beliefs, morals, and personal principles) to the language classroom.

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Rather than focusing on the NS teacher model, another approach has been to take a close look at what learners do, and how they may well reject NS pragmatic language in favor of their own subjective language use, which may entail sticking to L1 norms on occasion (see Ishihara, 2010). If this is the case, they may not be so receptive to NTs’ efforts at teaching TL pragmatics, however authentic the pragmatics material might be. Aslan (2014) provided a case study of a Turkish advanced learner of English in the USA who rejected the idealized NS norm in the acquisition of English phonology. Ishihara (2010) gives two examples of agency or subjectivity at work, one of an American, Jason, who had worked in Japan for 20 years, and the other of a Japanese woman, Nabuko, who had worked in the USA for 20 years. Jason, in his exchange with a colleague in Japanese, chose to remain silent when he was addressed by his last name, as a way to protest this level of formality that irked him. One might ask about the numerous times that Jason accommodated to the formality used in addressing him, as well as formality in many other types of L2 encounters. With regard to Nabuko, she is reported to have expressed herself truthfully to student athletes that she coached. She knowingly deviated from L2 norms by requesting that members of the volleyball team at a US university address her more formally. In so doing, Ishihara described Nabuko as negotiating her own subjectivity. But one would wonder how many times she conformed to the more informal interactional norms common at American university campuses. Ishihara used these two anecdotes to segue into her position that while the pragmatic use of language that NSs model may be useful in providing a range of community norms and thus assist learners in the development of receptive pragmatic skills, these NS pragmatic norms may not be the sole model for learners’ own production. I would wonder whether the issue is somewhat overstated since for the most part, Jason and Nabuko apparently abided by the L2 norms without openly defying them. The likelihood is that while purposely ignoring perhaps a few TL norms in their daily interactions, these NNSs adhered to most of them. I would question whether these few examples (or anecdotes) are representative of the rule or the exception for these NSs. In fairness to Ishihara, she was careful in qualifying that NNSs may not see the NS model as the sole one. That seems a more reasonable position – one where learners complement adherence to TL pragmatics with some isolated examples of the exercising of agency. The extent to which NTs and NNTs are on a par when it comes to the teaching of TL pragmatics remains an empirical question. It is likely that NTs have advantages in certain areas and NNTs in other areas. For example, lest it be presumed that NTs automatically have easier access to normed behavior in the TL, might it not be the case that such norms are more implicit or automatized for them, and so not so readily accessible for instructional purposes? Rather, they may have to study the material just

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as NNTs would. Might it also be the case that for NNTs, the TL pragmatics knowledge is explicit to them and readily retrievable since they needed to study it more formally? If so, might they not have handy access to the pragmatic options for what to say or write in a given situation to produce the intended meaning? Of course, just as NNSs may choose not to abide by norms (especially if like Jason and Nabuko they have lived in that TL community for over 20 years), NNTs may decline to teach some aspects of the TL because they do not support them. 3.2 NTs vs. NNTs in an FL Context

Teaching the TL in a genuinely FL context would mean that the learners do not have regular contact with NS speakers of the TL. In such cases the teacher may be the main source for pragmatics. The assumption might be that an NT would be the best resource in such a teaching situation. But what if the teachers are NTs, but ones who have lived for many years in a community where the L1 of the learners is the dominant language and where the local culture is in many ways dominant? It may be that these NTs may experience some negative transfer from this dominant language and culture in their performance in the TL, perhaps without being aware of it. When I studied accelerated Japanese at the University of Hawaii in 1996, my native Japanese-speaking teacher had lived in Hawaii for 22 years at the time. It would be an empirical question as to how much her teaching about Japanese pragmatics was influenced by her many years in the USA. When I once asked her about the practice of bowing in Japanese society, she dismissed the practice by saying that Japanese people bow too much. Here is a case of the teacher using her own agency to determine what she wanted to teach us about in the TL. In this instance, perhaps NNTs with a keen knowledge of the pragmatic norms in the TL would be a better source of information on how to bow in Japanese culture, since they might take a more objective view. Obviously, one has to be careful about making such pronouncements, since there is variation among teachers. That is why, as stated above, the influence of the FL context on the NT is an empirical question. Let us say that NNTs of Spanish have just come back to the USA after several years in Ecuador. One might expect that these teachers would be mindful as to the appropriate formality expected in requests to service providers in Ecuador. By the same token, if they had been in Spain or in Chile, they may be attuned to just how to be more informal in such requests. Regardless of how formal such requests were in a Spanish NT’s country of origin, it is possible that an NT of Spanish living in the USA for many years may prefer to teach a more informal variety of requesting regardless of that used in their home country, owing to the influence of English requests in the USA. Often the negative transfer effects of years in

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a nonnative culture are subtle and therefore the individual is unaware of having made a behavioral shift. I remember when I was at a conference at a Hilton Hotel in San Francisco after being in Israel for six years, I was in a hurry to get to a session down a narrow corridor clogged with other conference goers. I unconsciously used the Israeli pushing that I had acquired for getting around the Israeli shuk ‘market place’. The response from another conference goer was to shove me back so as to indicate that my level of pushing was unacceptable. It was a wake-up call that I had become countercultural in my use of this approach at getting through a crowd. In addition, my English language use also had features of Hebrew in it, however subtle. One example would be my likelihood to break into a conversation without necessarily saying ‘Excuse me’. The main point is that both NTs and NNTs are likely to generalize about pragmatics based on their experiences and their preferences, unless they draw for their instructional purposes on empirical sources such as corpora, websites about pragmatics or informed textbooks. 3.3 Length of Time in the Profession, Interest in Pragmatics and Skill as a Teacher

NNTs who have been language educators for many years may have explicitly learned or acquired inductively an impressive array of pragmatic material and may do a fi ne job of teaching this to learners – for example, how to compliment someone effectively and how to respond to such compliments. These teachers are likely to be more effective at teaching this speech act and other pragmatic material than NTs who have more limited experience as a teacher and no special knowledge about speech acts in the TL. Therefore, length of time as a teacher may be a powerful factor here. NTs would know, for example, how to make a TL request that a stranger exchange seats with them on an airplane, as in the example above (see Section 3.1.5); but, they may or may not be as versed at teaching this information as experienced NNTs. Another important factor would be interest in pragmatics. It is not a given that every teacher has a keen interest in pragmatics. Some teachers have a fascination for grammar and prefer to teach the rules of grammar more than the norms for using that grammar in pragmatically varied contexts (e.g. using the past progressive to mitigate a request for the future – ‘I was wondering if I could borrow your car …’). Information on grammar rules and general usage is in most grammar texts, whereas information on how to use grammar in a way that is consistent with pragmatic norms is not so easy to obtain. Also, the information in a pedagogical grammar book is subject to change as norms for language use evolve. Consequently, a textbook that focuses on the interface between grammar and pragmatics would make a significant contribution to the teaching of whatever language.

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Ultimately, the skills of the given instructor as a teacher may override other factors. According to Brosh (1996), a good teacher is one who: • • • • • •

has adequate command of the language; prepares and organizes lessons well; motivates students through a variety of teaching techniques; transmits knowledge in a way that is easy to understand and remember; is available to help students after class; and treats students fairly and equitably.

Mullock (2003) would add the following to the list of good teacher qualities: • • • • •

has a thorough knowledge of the subject matter; is skilled in teaching techniques and methods; keeps up-to-date in both knowledge and skills; is aware of individual students’ strengths and weaknesses, and understands their needs and expectations; and treats students with courtesy and respect, and shows empathy toward them.

Of particular interest in this discussion of pragmatics in language teaching is what a good teacher’s ‘command of the language’ actually means. Does it mean precision in teaching aspects of language such as grammar or pronunciation? Does it mean being able to fine-tune semantic distinctions in vocabulary that may have a direct bearing on pragmatic appropriateness? It is reasonable to expect language learners to differ in their views. There are learners who prefer NNTs because they see them as more empathetic and also knowledgeable about glaring issues such as grammar, in that they themselves had to pay particular attention to grammar in order to teach it. Then there are learners who prefer being taught by NTs for the various reasons enumerated in Section 3.1.5 above. Moreover, there are learners who do not have an opinion one way or the other. Three of the characteristics for a good teacher have to do with how the teacher relates to the learners, apart from how knowledgeable they are about the language and how up-to-date this knowledge is. Pursuing the notion of good teaching from a sociocultural perspective, Johnson (2009) would view a good teacher quality as that of emphasizing the fundamentally social nature of learning and conceptualizing language as a constellation of social practices. She would argue that good teachers are consciously aware of the underlying concepts that are embedded in how language expresses social meaning. They recognize that meaning is situated in specific social and cultural practices that are continually being transformed. Their knowledge and skills as instructors would be characterized more as a holistic knowledge base (having pragmatics in it) than as a series of separate domains (e.g. theories about L2/FL development, teaching methods and linguistics). So what does the research literature say on this topic? It is not so surprising that learners’ views about NTs and NNTs vary according to a

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number of factors. For example, in one study upper elementary school learners in the Catalan region of Spain were found to prefer NNTs of English because they could understand them better and because they preferred getting their grammar explanations in Spanish (Madrid & Pérez Cañado, 2004). At the HS level there were both students who preferred the NNTs because they could understand them better, and those who preferred NTs since they tended to use the TL more and did not feel that HS English classes should be taught in Spanish. 3 The college students surveyed in that study were quick to acknowledge that the NTs knew the language better and expressed themselves better in English. They also favored the NTs because they were seen to have ‘a profound knowledge of the language and more self-confidence’ (Madrid & Pérez Cañado, 2004: 133). In another study in the Basque region of Spain, university students tended to prefer NNTs across the grade levels and especially their teaching of grammar (Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2002). As they reached higher levels of school, however, they saw the advantages of NTs, such as their not correcting student errors in oral language unless they affected communication. The results of a similar study in Turkey found university EFL students favored NNTs for their teaching of grammar and for their classroom management skills, whereas they preferred NTs for their ability to teach communication skills and also for other positive qualities that they displayed (Üstünlüoglu, 2007). Then, in contrast to these fi ndings, survey results in a Taiwanese university found that for the most part the students preferred NNTs of EFL as opposed to NTs, since the NNTs were perceived as better able to match their instructional strategies to the needs of the students. The rationale given was that these teachers had gone through a similar educational system and also shared the same cultural background and therefore understood the difficulties faced by local students (Cheung & Braine, 2007). In addition, it was seen as a real plus that local NNS English teachers could make use of the students’ L1, Cantonese, in explaining difficult issues in the English class. It is important to note that in none of these surveys were the respondents asked about pragmatics. They were just asked about oral communication with teachers and were not asked to specify the kinds of insights that NTs provided them. Respondents did indicate that the NTs provided them a useful model, not just for pronunciation but in terms of how the language was to be spoken. Consistent with expectations about NNTs’ strengths, they were given high marks for their control of the TL grammar, as well as for their willingness to teach it through the L1 of the students. 3.4 A Closer Look at the NT-NNT Comparison

In this section we look in greater depth at the NT-NNT distinction, raising issues that have not been given full attention in this chapter so far. Since pragmatics is where language and culture meet, let us start by

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scrutinizing what culture actually means and the significance it has in the comparison between NTs and NNTs. 3.4.1 The concept of culture

Over a decade ago, colloquium presenters did a sterling job of problematizing the use of the term culture in language teaching at the Academic Session of the Intercultural Communication Interest Section at the 2007 International TESOL Convention in Seattle. The following is a synopsis of the presentations, with an emphasis on what was said about culture. Stephan Ryan (Senshu University, Tokyo) started by pointing out that culture is a complicated term in the English language because of the multiplicity of ways it is used (e.g. ‘a culture of violence’, ‘a cultural event’, ‘youth culture’, ‘bringing culture to the masses’, ‘an ancient culture’, ‘learning the language and culture of a new place’, ‘the decline of Western culture’, ‘a cultured person’). He referred to culture as a historically transmitted system of symbols and norms, and noted that it is operationalized in different ways – for instance, by referring to citizens of a nation state, through ethnic or other visible differences in the USA or by means of gender. Ryan asked who would be considered members of a given culture if foreigners, those educated abroad, those who had lived abroad, and ethnic and other minorities were eliminated from the defi nition. He also asked how representative this cultural grouping would then be and of what. He noted that one of the factors contributing to the demise of pure cultures was globalization: the ease of crossing borders and the resulting homogenization of experience. He noted that globalization worked against being able to fi nd clear-cut cultural differences. Dwight Atkinson (University of Arizona) spelled out a series of problems with the notion of culture, also including the effects of globalization on it. He noted that there were perhaps 150 or more definitions of culture – that it was used freely as a term without the user giving it much thought and that cultural stereotyping was big, as was equating culture with ethnicity and race. He then gave arguments in favor of using the term despite these problems: (1) people do live culturally, especially in their formative years; (2) culture can help us understand people better if we get that it is not subtractive or additive but rather complexitive: (3) we now have better ways of studying culture; and (4) avoiding culture does not get rid of it. He suggested that the best way to deal with culture was by understanding that it was a deeply compromised concept, but one that we could not do without. He noted that culture could help us better understand people and their behaviors – reflecting more complex and mobile relations than ever before – and that every human was the product of a vast number of forces, experiences and relationships. Gayle Nelson (Georgia State University) distinguished the teaching of culture with a big ‘C’ and a small ‘c.’ She explained that big C culture

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entailed visible cultural products such as art, music, dance, theater, food, clothing, textiles, literature and architecture; and that small c culture entailed the hidden dimensions of culture that influence daily life – such as cultural values, cognitive styles, learning styles, communication styles, nonverbal communication and styles of conflict. She defined cross-cultural pragmatics as the cultural differences in speech acts and politeness, and noted that speech acts were a marvelous tool for teaching language and culture, since their occurrence always involved the intersection of language and culture. She pointed out the importance of being familiar with the local cultural norms in order to interpret the meaning of a speech act situated in that culture. She gave the example of the question, ‘Did you eat yet?’ which was used as a general greeting among natives in various Asian countries. She went on to characterize the culture of learning and how this could vary from one TL community to another: (1) socially transmitted expectations, beliefs and values about what successful learning entailed; (2) the appropriate roles for teachers and learners and for their interrelations; (3) appropriate teaching methods; and (4) what constituted good work in the classroom. She pointed out that learning style preference measures were actually culturally specific, which could make their use across cultures problematic. Nelson ended her presentation by noting that the essentialist view that saw culture as homogeneous was a minority view in comparison to the non-essentialist view that saw culture as a shifting, ever-changing reality. As the other presenters rightly pointed out, globalization has ensured that the people of a country are not necessarily sharing the same history or language, nor behaving in the same ways. Predictably, they are not homogeneous, except perhaps to some extent in countries which limit immigration, although recent waves of refugees from the Middle East and Africa to Europe, Scandinavia, the USA and Canada are clearly contributing to a new multi-ethnic reality. Finally, Yuzuru Takigawa (Osaka Jogakuin University) asserted that the Japanese held culture to be telepathetic – namely, that there were tacit understandings which did not need to be spelled out. She contrasted this situation with the situation in the USA where cultural values and behaviors might need to be more explicitly stated for people to ‘get’ them. She went on to note that there might still be more similarities than differences among peoples of the world, including the Japanese. Nonetheless, it is true that American scholars of pragmatics often turn to Japan when they want to demonstrate how differently pragmatics, especially speech acts, can show up in different speech communities. For example, it was noted in section 2.3 above that going up to professors in Japan after a talk and complimenting them on what a fi ne job they did may be viewed as an insult, unlike in the USA. In Japan, saying what you got out of the talk is fi ne, but not doing what could be seen as standing in judgment of the professors.

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This section, then, would suggest that the jury is still out as to how to defi ne culture and what it means. Hence, it is somewhat problematic to make general statements about how versed NTs are with respect to the culture associated with the TL as compared with NNTs. It is more helpful to specify the particular kinds of cultural advantages that NTs might have and those that NNTs might have. 3.4.2 Possible advantages for NTs in teaching TL pragmatics

If we take the position that we really do not want to teach pragmatics towards a NS norm, then this might call into question the appropriateness of attempting to make NT-NNT comparisons at all. Assuming, however, that there is interest among learners in at least being aware of a given target speech community’s normative models for pragmatics and also assuming that teachers wish to include a focus on some of these pragmatic norms in their instructional material, then the signaling of areas where NTs may possibly have an advantage – however slight – can be of benefit as an instructional resource among many others. A caveat that needs to be made before suggesting NT advantages over NNTs is that of teaching know-how. Just because the NTs have the pragmatic knowledge does not mean that they will convey this knowledge to learners effectively. This is why this volume is replete with ideas for how to teach TL pragmatics. The only point being made here is that NTs are a potential resource for obtaining insights about TL pragmatics in numerous areas detailed below. So what then are the things that some, if not many NTs may have an easier time teaching learners about TL pragmatics than may NNTs? Based in part on points made by Mullock (2010), NTs’ strengths would include the traits listed below, to be followed by a discussion of how these strengths might play themselves out with regard to TL pragmatics: •

Assuming they have been using their L1 regularly and are in touch with the language, then they would be expected to have: native fluency in their speech, which includes knowing the appropriate rate of speech for the given utterance and knowing when dysfluency works to their pragmatic advantage (e.g. in speaking Japanese, knowing how to stutter a bit when apologizing or rejecting an invitation, so as to appear more humble; and knowing how to use – and not overuse – fi lled pauses with ano and eeto); native skill in listening comprehension, which would include, for example, getting all the words of a song sang rapidly and knowing the connotations of those words in the context of the song, or understanding all or most of the rapid-fi re dialogue in a movie; a sense of pragmatics as reflected in ‘real’ spoken and written language, so that they are quick to spot material in the TL textbook

○

○

○

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that may be inauthentic (whether because the textbooks are out of date or are based on intuition rather than on empirical evidence); a good grasp of what it means to pronounce the sounds of the language natively and of how to use intonation in order to convey genuine concern, humor, sarcasm, skepticism, or approval; wide knowledge of vocabulary, especially of possible slang for use in the given situation (according to age, social group and so forth) and idiomatic expressions that could apply; and knowledge of the relevant (mostly small c) cultural elements relating to the specific TL situation. As NTs, they should not have to rely so heavily on the course textbook, but rather draw more from their NS knowledge and experiences with the language and culture.

○

○

○

•

With regard to the ‘real’ written language referred to above, it would appear that NTs of a language may be better than NNTs at perceiving plagiarism and also at telling when students are not fully in command of a given topic that they are writing about in terms of coherence, cohesion and parsimony. Unfortunately, even after living in Israel for 16 years where I was using the language professionally all the time for teaching at the university level, I was still never able to perceive plagiarism, and I was never able to tell if a student was writing from genuine knowledge or making a pretense of it. So, whereas in English I could tell after reading one or two sentences whether students’ writing was their own or whether they had copied the material from some other source, and I could also tell whether students were in command of the material or simply pretending to be so, in Hebrew I was happy if I could understand the message, but was not able to analyze its authenticity or to determine if it was well written with regard to substance. In all fairness, part of this inability I had in academic Hebrew was attributable to the fact that I did not use Hebrew for my own academic reading nor did I write my academic papers in Hebrew for the most part. I used Hebrew for my class lectures and interactions with students, for course handouts and for administrative purposes. I wrote almost all my papers in English and did my professional reading in English. Therefore, my encounters with the written academic genre were limited primarily to reading and responding in writing to student papers in Hebrew (although sometimes in English, French, Spanish or Portuguese, depending on my students’ preferences). In a study of learners’ perceptions, Kamhi-Stein (2005) found English NTs to be perceived as more knowledgeable of culture. Unpacking that notion a bit, as suggested above, NTs are perhaps considered to have deeper knowledge of the small c elements of culture associated with their L1, whereas NNTs may be as well versed or better in the big C features (holidays, food, clothing and so forth). Unless removed from the TL culture for many years, NTs would be more steeped in just those subtle aspects

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of culture which contribute to giving pragmatic interactions their special character. NNTs teaching the TL as an FL especially, may miss some of these features unless they have received explicit instruction about them. In addition, depending on the language, NTs may have a better sense of how to perform simple speech acts and therefore would have at least a head start in teaching others about them. For example, they may be better at knowing when and how to express gratitude, something that can be a bit problematic in, say, both Chinese and Japanese (see Ide, 1998; Ohashi, 2008, with respect to Japanese; Chuang & Hsieh, 2013; Yang, 2013, with respect to Chinese). NSs may also be better at giving a compliment and at what to do in response to one, because they do not presumably experience negative transfer from another language/culture, unless they are teaching their L1 as an FL in a culture that they have been living in for many years. They can also be better at delicate speech acts such as criticizing someone’s dress or hygiene, assuming that they have a sense of tact, which goes beyond NS-NNS distinctions to matters of personality. In addition, NTs’ ability to perceive and also to produce sarcastic utterances is likely to be better than that of NNTs, although it may even be tricky for NSs to perceive sarcasm, especially when the speaker delivers the utterance in a normal tone. The suggestion of a potential NT advantage here is based on research comparing NNSs with NSs in terms of their perception of sarcasm. While one cross-sectional study suggested that perception of sarcasm in movies improved as learners were more proficient in Spanish (Shively et al., 2008), a more recent study suggested that even advanced learners could fail to perceive the use of sarcasm (Taguchi et al., 2016). It depended on their ability to perceive that the speaker meant the opposite of what was said. In order to get the sarcasm, the listener needed to use logical reasoning effectively by processing the utterance meaning fi rst and working deductively toward the meaning behind the utterance. This process involved using auditory cues to comprehend irony such as any indication of a sarcastic tone encoded in the items, as well as using visual cues such as facial expressions and gestures to comprehend indirect opinions. Whereas many NNTs can do this well, some others may have difficulties. Then the question becomes how comfortable are they at teaching sarcasm in the TL. For instance, if a conversation partner in English says ‘Yeah, really’, even without using a sarcastic tone, NTs would probably pick up on the intended sarcasm from the context. An NNS (and probably some NNTs) may instead assume that the other person is simply agreeing with them. NTs should also be able to deliver sarcasm with aplomb, being able to execute an ‘OK then, I apologize’ with intonation that signals their true intention, which is to make it clear that they are not at all apologetic. By the same token, NTs of Mandarin are likely to be better than NNTs at demonstrating to learners how to express sarcasm in Chinese. Mandarin already has four tones that are used in a mandatory fashion in order to

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convey meaning. Without the tones, there would be a plethora of homonyms in spoken language. So, the popular way to indicate sarcasm in Mandarin is for the speaker to use an elongated or ‘heavy’ tone on the words to be highlighted in order to indicate the opposite meaning from what is being said. For example: (1) Nǐmen dōu hěn máng a ‘You (pl.) are all really busy’ – a sarcastic way to make fun of people tethered to their cellphones. So dōu, hěn, and máng are elongated in pronunciation. (2) Nǐ de Rìwén zhēn hǎo a ‘Your Japanese is really good’ – with the stress on zhen, when the speaker doesn’t think the addressee’s Japanese is any good. (3) A: X hěn hǎo chī ‘X is very tasty’. B: (Not agreeing with A, and in fact thinking A doesn’t know anything about food): HǍO–CHĪ? ‘Tasty?’. (Yu Hsiao-Jung, email communication, 16 November 2015) According to one of my Chinese tandem partners, another way is to add an elongated ‘o’ before the word, as in ooo xiexie ‘oh, thanks’. This would serve to indicate that the speaker does not intend to be thankful at all, such as when someone does not hold the door open for them, but rather lets it shut in their face. It is probable that learners of Chinese may not be aware of how sarcasm is expressed, so teachers can be providing a service by pointing out how it is done. NTs would most likely also be better than most NNTs at perceiving the humor in jokes – whether the jokes involve puns, deep cultural knowledge or an ability to engage in rapid-fire language exchange in the process. Another area where NTs generally excel is in their ability to both understand and produce curses that have an intended impact in a given situation. NTs would probably know which swear words to use, like ‘shit’ or the ‘f’ word and how to use them. NNSs are usually not taught these forms, especially not how to deliver them effectively, and especially in FL situations are even unlikely to hear them spoken, which might make it more challenging for NNTs to teach them effectively. In addition, NTs may be better at teasing in a non-offensive way – so that that the tease is perceived as cute and not abrasive. Likewise, NSs are likely to pick up on a tease aimed at them, such as through nonverbal cues or through intonation, in a way that NNS may not. As to conversational management, NTs may be better at knowing when to break into a conversation and how to do it, and consequently be able to teach this behavior better than NNTs, unless the latter group has studied this behavior carefully. In other words, NTs should have a keen sense of an appropriate moment to do so, such that their entry comes at a more or less natural break in the conversation rather than while another interlocutor is still in the middle of a crucial point. In addition, NTs may be better at giving ongoing feedback in a conversation – so as to sound

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sincerely engaged rather than simply supplying automatic responses. NSs may also be better at the use of discourse markers such as ‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘so’, ‘I think’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘frankly’ and ‘as a matter of fact’, They should have a sense as to the extent to which these discourse markers can be used acceptably in the given discourse situation. NNSs may well overuse them, as well as using them at inappropriate moments. For example, some years ago I had a tour guide on a tour in Hong Kong who punctuated most points with ‘so’, where perhaps half of the uses were inappropriate. In another more recent case, the NNS kept using ‘actually’, where only a few instances of its use seemed appropriate to me in the discourse. NSs are more likely than NNSs to get the implicature associated with a given utterance or written message when it is indirect and therefore not spelled out. Whether NTs might feel more comfortable teaching implicature than NNTs is an empirical question. Roever (2013) examined the use of implicature for the purposes of diagnostic placement testing among high proficiency learners of English and NSs. He used a 10-item multiplechoice (M-C) task to test two types of implicature, idiosyncratic (general conversational) implicature and formulaic (indirect criticism, irony, topic change, scalar) implicature. Here is an example of an item dealing with indirect criticism (Roever, 2013b: 56): Jose and Tanya are lecturers at a university. They are talking about a student, Derek. Jose: How did you like Derek’s essay? Tanya: I thought it was well-typed. What does Tanya probably mean?

(a) (b) (c) (d)

She did not like Derek’s essay. [The correct choice.] She likes it if students hand in their work type-written. She thought the topic Derek had chosen was interesting. She doesn’t really remember Derek’s essay.

The results of the study showed that NSs scored significantly higher than the NNSs on the test of implicature. NSs were found to have a better sense than the NNSs as to what was implied by what was said and not said. The study focused on different aspects of the validity of the instrument, the degree of difficulty for each group according to implicature type, and the amount of exposure that the English learners had to the target culture. In the realm of politeness, knowing how to be appropriately impolite can be just as important as knowing how to be polite (see Mugford, 2008, 2016b). For example, take the case where impoliteness can get something to happen in, say, a service encounter where a more customary polite approach results only in inaction. Although often inappropriate, there are

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moments when rudeness is a virtue. A NS is likely to know how to be rude in order to achieve the desired results. Depending on their control of the TL, NNSs may be more likely to have it backfi re if they try to be rude. 3.4.3 Possible advantages for NNTs in dealing with L2 pragmatics

Now let us reflect on where the NNTs may have advantages. The following is a list based in part both on Llurda (2009) and Mullock (2010): •

•

• •

As NNS learners of the TL, they have a high level of awareness as to the TL, so that they can be a good source of metalinguistic information about it, and can, for example, anticipate the difficulties that students may encounter in the learning process. Having gone through it themselves, they are likely to be more empathetic to the needs and problems of their students than NTs, and hence better positioned to suggest strategies both for learning the language and for using it. NNTs should have a good grasp of the grammar rules in the TL since they had to learn them well in order to teach them. If from the same language and cultural community as the learners: the NNTs’ deep knowledge of the learners’ L1 allows them to use it strategically when appropriate and to act as mediators in flagging the similarities and differences between the learners’ L1 and the TL; the NNTs may be especially sensitive to what their learners are likely to understand and to misunderstand in the TL vocabulary that they encounter and how it relates (or does not) to L1 vocabulary; the NNTs are likely to have an understanding of the L1 culture of the learners as it relates to the TL culture; the NNTs are likely to be more familiar with the local educational context, in terms of syllabus design and issues of assessment; and the NNTs may serve as good role models for TL learning – with the motivation being ‘if they could do it, so can I’. NNTs may excel in their abilities as language teachers and more generally as educators, which more than compensates for gaps in their TL knowledge. ○

○

○

○

○

•

Since a key area in which NNTs may have an advantage is with regard to grammar, let us take a look at why NNTs may have advantages over NTs in the teaching of grammar. As NNSs, they are likely to have studied grammar extensively, especially given their interest in teaching the language as a TL. They may actually have a better handle on grammar at the metalinguistic level than NTs, for whom this knowledge may be more intuitive. They may be better versed at using the metalinguistic terms for describing grammar than are the NTs. A relevant question, then, is the

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

extent to which grammatical knowledge actually contributes to pragmatic performance. As showcased in a textbook on teaching pragmatics, there is an intricate connection between grammar and pragmatics (Kasper & Rose, 2002: 159–190). It is therefore valuable to know how to use grammar in support of pragmatics. In young children learning their native language, the meanings of whole structures are first learned and then the grammar rules are deduced later on based on repeated patterns that the children experience. In other words, pragmatics drives grammatical development in childhood and the grammatical patterns emerge as a function of their efforts at communication (Tomasello, 2003). Whereas it is not clear for NNSs learning a TL whether grammatical knowledge precedes pragmatic ability, there are numerous cases documented in the literature of grammatical patterns not supporting pragmatic needs. NNTs may have an advantage in having better declarative knowledge about grammar, but it is not just a matter of knowing the grammar rules, but also knowing how to use them pragmatically. For example, it is not enough to learn the past progressive in English, such as ‘I was sleeping’, ‘I was eating’ and ‘I was wondering’, but also when to use this tense in its pragmatic function of, say, mitigating a request, as in ‘I was wondering if you might just take a quick look at this paper I wrote’. A now classic case study of a Japanese English speaker living in Hawaii named Wes found that although this subject had poor grammatical ability, his pragmatic skills served him well (Schmidt, 1983). A more recent study would suggest that grammar takes a learner just so far with regard to pragmatics. The study assessed among 79 intermediate ESL learners and 23 expert-level learners their pragmatic knowledge for sociolinguistic and sociocultural appropriateness through role-play performance (Grabowski, 2013). The fi ndings were that the intermediate learners were able to both interpret and convey pragmatic meanings even if they lacked grammatical accuracy. Suggesting that grammar and pragmatics do not necessarily go hand-in-hand, the 23 expert-level learners had an easier time achieving grammatical accuracy than they did in attaining high performance on various pragmatics scales. This fi nding would underscore that grammatical knowledge is certainly helpful in dealing with pragmatics, but not enough at the advanced levels to ensure that the NNSs will perform well on pragmatic tasks. Consistent with the argument being made here that NTs may not be as versed in TL grammar as NNTs who have studied it formally, research has shown that both ESL and EFL students have perceived their English NNTs as more knowledgeable in grammar teaching than NTs (KamhiStein, 2005). Consistent with these findings was the conclusion that NNTs who were long-term US residents were found to be more similar to English NTs in their lack of awareness about grammar. Thus, as NNTs become more like NSs, they may actually become less focused on grammatical

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issues as they affect pragmatics instruction, at least according to learner perceptions. Leaving grammar and moving on to other areas, NNTs may be more savvy about teaching the niceties of formality and of politeness than NTs. NTs may, in fact, choose to disregard to some extent what they consider to be unreasonable practice with regard to conventions of formality. Akikawa (2010) gives the example of a Japanese business person being too informal in a formal Japanese business situation. NNTs may follow the conventions of formality rather strictly, in the desire to adhere to the norms for TL politeness in the classroom. In addition, being multicultural and multilingual may actually make NNTs more adept than NTs at being able to analyze and teach how language is used in specific cultural situations. Akikawa (2010) contends, in fact, that NTs of the TL who have limited cross-cultural experience may never be as effective as teachers who have multilingual and multicultural backgrounds. The NNTs may also have greater familiarity with a given variety of the TL than NTs. This may defi nitely be the case regarding Inner Circles, Expanding Circles and Outer Circles of English. The teacher may be more knowledgeable about the variety of English that is spoken in the given Outer Circle country, such as Pakistan, than, say, an NT of English from the USA (Kamhi-Stein & Mahboob, 2003). In addition, having NS knowledge of a language does not mean automatic facility with teaching about pragmatics, especially speech acts. NTs may have a false sense of security that being a NS will provide them adequate background for perceiving, producing and teaching about pragmatics. Akikawa (2010) shared an example of how as an NS of Japanese she knew what to teach learners of Japanese regarding how to compliment in Japanese FL, but she did not know why and therefore could not explain it to her learners. Furthermore, the NTs’ sense of comfort and self-confidence could sometimes result in hasty judgments and less attention to acceptable pragmatic variations that differed from their own. For instance, Akikawa (2010) shared that in teaching her learners how to respond to an invitation, she needed to be mindful that the appropriate response would depend on contextual factors such as the social status of the speaker relative to the addressee (e.g. an invitation from her classmate vs. one from her boss), their relationship (e.g. a close friend vs. a relatively new colleague) and the importance or significance of the event (e.g. a friend’s birthday party planned a month earlier vs. a spontaneous get together). NTs may automatically take such factors into consideration in their own responses to invitations, but may not have consciously identified them so that they could pass this information on to their learners. Aside from these factors, the teacher would perhaps need to point out to learners that pragmatic norms for behavior – in this case, in responding to an invitation – may differ according to geographic region, as well as according to the gender, ethnicity and age of the participants in the

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

exchange. Again, this could be part of the teacher’s mental checklist, which for NSs may operate largely at a subconscious level and consequently require an NT to raise it to a higher level of consciousness in order to teach it. Learners might be called on to take into account some of these contextual variables in role-play encounters in the classroom. Even beginning learners can exercise some of this knowledge in how, for example, they do greetings. So it may come down to which teacher – the NT or the NNT – is more attuned to these distinctions. Intuition may help some, but knowledge of norms for the given context can be most helpful. Hence, while NTs would appear to have certain advantages over NNTs, effective teaching of pragmatics involves more than an intuitive knowledge base about pragmatics. It involves having the metalinguistic knowledge needed in order to explicitly teach important element of pragmatics to their learners, which may be easier for some NNTs to do. For this reason, it may be ideal if learners are taught by both NTs and NNTs working in consort. It can also help if both NTs and NNTs were to improve their cognizance as to where their gaps in TL pragmatics might lie and make efforts to compensate for them. 3.5 An In-Depth Look at a Teacher who is both an NT and an NNT

So far in this chapter the focus has been on distinguishing NTs from NNTs. But what about teachers who do both – who teach their L1 and another language as the TL? A study by Aslan (2015) explored the interface between NS/NNS identities, teacher cognition, practice and professional identity, by focusing on the same person who was concurrently teaching French as an NT and German as an NNT. The teacher, Ezgi (pseudonym), 26, was born and raised in France. Her BA was in English with a minor in German. She also had an MA in English research and translation, and a PhD in translation and linguistics in France. She had taught French in France for a year and had lived in Germany for a year working as a private German and French tutor, before coming to the USA. At the time of the study she was teaching both German and French at the beginner level at a southwest University in the USA. A qualitative analysis of interviews and classroom observations over six weeks revealed that the participant teacher’s NS French and NNS German identities influenced her teacher cognition. The observations, corroborated by the interviews, indicated that she had different knowledge bases for her NS French and her NNS German, the former being implicit and the latter explicit. In her NNT teaching of German she drew from her high level of proficiency in German grammar in responding successfully to student questions, which gained her respect from the students. In fact, in German class she presented students with morphological

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analyses of words and verb conjugations and tried to elicit grammatical information, and her teacher talk mostly consisted of metalinguistic terms and concepts, such as predicates, prepositional phrases and subject/object pronouns. In the French class, on the other hand, her use of grammatical terminology was observed to be considerably less frequent. In fact, in one of the classes observed, she explicitly stated that she did not want to be asked why a particular grammatical form or feature was an exception to a rule. She had difficulty explaining the grammaticality and appropriateness of some of the utterances that students generated. The teacher reported that her NS intuitions and knowledge of French did not help her much in explaining grammatical phenomena (Aslan, 2015: 257). In addition, differences in the teacher’s cultural awareness and knowledge of French and German led to differences in her classroom practice. Her French classes included more cultural references and elements. She presented French culture through French songs, videos and jokes. In addition, observations showed her to be more confident and responsive when it came to the pragmatic or cultural acceptability or appropriateness of certain phrases and expressions. On the contrary, in none of the German classes observed was the teacher seen to use references or explanations pertaining to German culture. In fact, when asked about her comfort level with regard to the teaching of culture in both languages, she admitted that she was more comfortable with French: ‘[I]f they [students] ask like really tricky questions and expressions, it’s usually expressions, or what we say in everyday life, or more cultural thing, that can be more difficult. I know that I would know more in French than in German’ (Interview 2, 14 October 2012) (Aslan, 2015: 258). With regard to her teaching style and confidence level in the classroom, the teacher seemed to be more fun, energetic, friendly, humorous and confident in French classes than in German classes. The most salient feature of the French class was the fact that she taught a French joke in every class. In addition, her speaking style in the French class was less formal and more relaxed. For instance, when students had difficulty pronouncing some words, she gave them corrective feedback, inserting this humorous remark, ‘Some sounds we just have for fun. We don’t pronounce them’. In the German class, however, her teaching style appeared to be more serious and direct. This study by Aslan underscores precisely the kinds of issues and distinctions being made in this chapter. This single, highly-educated and linguistically well-versed teacher served as her own control in demonstrating ways that NTs and NNTs may differ with regard to their handing of pragmatics. Although we need to be cautious about making generalizations, it is plausible to assume that NNTs who are highly versed in the grammar of the TL will lead with their strength in teaching, and that NTs will lead with their strength in feeling at home with humor and other more subtle aspects of pragmatics.

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

3.6 Conclusions

The conclusion to be drawn from this chapter is that it is difficult to say off hand whether NTs or NNTs have an advantage in handling pragmatics in TL instruction. It depends on a host of factors, some potentially tending to favor the NTs and some potentially favoring the NNTs. So here is the message for readers of this volume: NTs and NNTs alike who really want to deal with pragmatics effectively may wish to take action in order to compensate for possible gaps in their knowledge in some areas. Awareness of the issues on the part of the teachers can go a long way toward compensating for any such gaps. NTs may wish to take a crash course in the interface between the grammar that they are teaching and its role in pragmatics, and NNTs may wish to enhance their knowledge of certain speech acts such as criticizing, and improve their knowledge of how teasing and sarcasm work in the TL. For more on these areas, see Chapters 5 to 8, which deal with more practical aspects of both teaching and learning pragmatics. The next chapter will report on a survey of NTs and NNTs aimed at finding out what they report knowing about pragmatics in the TL and what they report about how they incorporate it into their teaching. Notes (1) I would like to acknowledge Erhan Aslan for his insightful feedback on this chapter. (2) See: Dancing with Words, http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/requests_ and_commands/pns_us_req.html (accessed 7 January 2018). (3) I remember our son, Daniel, complaining about his high school French teacher in Minneapolis conducting the class almost exclusively in English, after he had done an intensive summer of French immersion education at the Concordia Language Villages in Bemidji, MN. At that time he was fluent in French, even if ungrammatical.

4 What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics and What They Report Doing

An interest in exploring both the similarities and difference between NTs and NNTs and the L2-FL distinction with regard to the handling of TL pragmatics prompted the design and implementation of a study to investigate these issues more fully through an international survey.1 This chapter reports on that international survey to probe into the experiences of NTs and NNTs of various languages while teaching TL pragmatics whether as an L2 or has an FL. The survey was intended to provide information on the extent to which teachers reported covering various areas of pragmatics in class (e.g. politeness, speech acts, conversational style, humor and sarcasm). Among other things, respondents were asked to give their opinion regarding similarities and differences between the teaching of FL as opposed to L2 pragmatics, as this traditional dichotomy gives way to a more hybrid reality in an increasingly globalized world. They were also asked about their methods for teaching pragmatics: their level of explicitness in teaching pragmatics, their use of digital media and their handling of dialect differences. The main research question for the study was: What are the reported similarities and differences between native and nonnative teachers in their handling of TL pragmatics in the language classroom? 4.1 The Survey Instrument

An online survey instrument was constructed for NTs and NNTs, consisting of 20 questions. There were minor differences between the NNT and the NT versions. Survey Monkey (https://www.surveymonkey. com/) was used to assist in this effort. The survey instrument was piloted with a mixed group of 15 NTs and NNTs in July 2015, and subsequently 81

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

some changes were made in the questions. The following are representative questions from the survey: (1) How do NTs and NNTs handle pragmatics in the TL classroom? (2) What areas in TL pragmatics are taught? (3) To what extent does the teacher provide explicit instruction regarding pragmatics, use digital media and teach about dialect differences in pragmatics? (4) How comfortable do teachers feel being a resource for TL pragmatics? (5) What do teachers do if they do not feel like an authority on some aspects of TL pragmatics? (6) How knowledgeable do teachers feel they are about sociopragmatic (sociocultural) and pragmalinguistic (language-form) issues relating to the specific TL? (7) How relevant do teachers think the L2-FL distinction is in dealing with TL pragmatics? (8) How might teaching activities differ according to whether it is an L2 or an FL context? (9) How do teachers motivate learners to learn TL pragmatics? (10) In what areas in pragmatics might teachers want to obtain more information/see the results of research?

4.2 The Sampling and Data Collection Procedures

An invitation to respond to the survey was sent to over 100 university professors and graduate students via email. The invitation was also posted on my website, on LinkedIn and on Facebook. The first invitation went out on 25 July 2015 and responses to the survey were accepted until 20 September 2015. Responses to this international survey were on a voluntary basis, with respondents being from numerous countries, including the USA, China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the UK and elsewhere. The teachers were asked to focus just on the language course in which they were most likely to teach about pragmatics and to indicate the extent of coverage that specific areas of pragmatics were likely to receive. The fact that it was a voluntary survey meant presumably that only those interested in the topic and comfortable about responding participated. There were 113 responses altogether, 83 of whom were respondents to the NNT survey. These respondents were NSs of some 23 languages (English – 29, Mandarin – 10, Vietnamese and Persian – 6 each, Indonesian – 4, Japanese and Arabic 3 each, and 14 other L1s). They reported being NNTs of some nine TLs at the university level: English (53), Spanish (13), German (11), and six others. Respondents had been teaching language for an average of 10.6 years (based on 78 responses). They represented teaching

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics

83

at the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels – often teaching at more than one level, with most teaching at least some of their courses at the intermediate level (66%) and slightly fewer teaching at the advanced level (60%). With regard to their background for teaching pragmatics, only one referred specifically to receiving instruction about pragmatics. Six indicated being in relationship with a TL speaker or having lived in the TL country. There were 30 respondents to the NT survey. They were NSs of seven languages: English – 5, Japanese – 5, French – 1, Spanish – 2, Catalan – 1, Chinese – 1 and Danish – 1, and were NTs of five TLs at the university level: English 2 – 21, Japanese – 4, Spanish – 3, Danish – 1 and French – 1. Respondents had been teaching language for an average of 17.2 years, an average 6.6 years longer than the NNTs. They reported teaching all three levels robustly, with 75% teaching advanced-level courses. Many indicated that their NS intuition provided them insights for teaching TL pragmatics. Some noted that learning other languages also contributed. Here is an example: Practical connections came from my experiences learning foreign languages, fi rst Spanish as a HS student, then Mandarin and Mongolian as an adult. Many of my students speak those three languages as their native tongues, so I have a window into their thinking both mechanically (L1 interference in grammar, spelling, and pronunciation), culturally, and emotionally.

Just two respondents mentioned that their teaching experiences made them aware of pragmatics. Here is what one of them shared: I started to understand that formal language skills were not adequate through running into problems in teaching (I started as a teacher before studying L2 teaching), then relating it to ideas I had encountered in linguistics (i.e. Grice) or in studying Japanese (e.g. learning about politeness levels and honorifics). Later I learned the overarching term pragmatics while doing an MA TESL program, but the manner in which it was presented was not terribly practical.

With regard to the language teaching context, 32 of the NNTs taught their TL as an FL and 51 taught it as an L2. As for the NTs, 22 taught their TL as an FL and eight taught it as an L2. Some teachers reported teaching pragmatics in other kinds of courses as well. Such courses included teacher preparation courses, heritage language courses, linguistic courses, language for academic purposes courses and courses focusing on culture writ large, sociolinguistics and special topics within pragmatics such as politeness. 4.3 Procedures for Analyzing the Data

Survey Monkey provided basic statistical analysis (means and percentages) for the closed items. Chi-square (χ2) analyses were performed using

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Social Science Statistics3 to compare NNT and NTs’ reported handling of pragmatics in the classroom, and Pearson correlations using Minitab 174 to see whether number of years teaching and the level at which they were teaching were related to reported coverage of pragmatics and comfort teaching pragmatics. The open-ended responses by the NTs and NNTs were content-analyzed. 4.4 The Findings for the Survey

With respect to the areas of pragmatics that they reported covering, the NTs reported signifi cantly more teaching of criticism (χ2 = 8.28, p < 0.05) and sarcasm (χ2 = 9.39, p < 0.05) than did the NNTs. Whereas neither group of teachers reported very much attention to cursing in their instruction, still NNTs reported more coverage of cursing (χ2 = 9.47, p < 0.05). In other categories, the teachers were relatively similar in what they reported (Tables 4.1 and 4.2). Therefore, the fi nding here was that the nativeness of the teacher had some impact on the reported handling of a few of the more subtle speech acts, such as expressing sarcasm and criticizing. In addition, NNTs in this sample reportedly  taught students how to interpret and deliver curses more than NTs did. For the NNTs there were no significant correlations between years of teaching and reported coverage of pragmatics. In contrast to the NNTs, for the NTs there were four significant correlations between number of years teaching and the extensiveness of reported pragmatics coverage – namely, for apologies (r = 0.39, p < 0.05), complaints (r = 0.40, p < 0.05), conversational style (r = 0.47, p < 0.01) and sarcasm (r = 0.38, p < 0.05). With regard to the relationship between the extent of reported comfort at teaching pragmatics and the coverage of pragmatics, while there were two significant correlations for the NNTs – for politeness (r = 0.37, p < 0.001) and for requests (r = 0.32, p < 0.01), there were no significant correlations for the NTs. For the NTs, there were four significant correlations between number of years teaching and the extensiveness of reported pragmatics coverage – for apologies (r = 0.39, p < 0.05), complaints (r = 0.40, p < 0.05), conversational style (r = 0.47, p < 0.01) and sarcasm (r = 0.38, p < 0.05). Thus, for NTs there did seem to be some relationship between years teaching and reported coverage of pragmatics. As for level teaching, those NNTs teaching higher levels reported more coverage of implicature (r = 0.33, p < 0.01) and those teaching lower levels reported more coverage of greetings and leave takings (r = 0.32, p < 0.01). As for the NTs, those teaching higher levels reported significantly more teaching of criticism (r = 0.38, p < 0.05). We should note that although significant, for the most part the correlations were generally low.

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics

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Table 4.1 NNTs’ reported coverage of TL pragmatics (n = 83) Extensive Fair amount Some Little No Total coverage of coverage coverage coverage coverage respondents Politeness/impoliteness

26% 20

41% 32

31% 24

3% 2

0% 0

78

How to make requests

21% 17

48% 39

26% 21

6% 5

0% 0

82

How to apologize

13% 10

33% 26

35% 27

18% 14

1% 1

78

How to compliment and respond to compliments

6% 5

28% 22

35% 28

29% 23

4% 3

80

How to complain

5% 4

29% 23

24% 19

35% 28

6% 5

79

5% 4

18% 14

32% 25

35% 27

13% 10

78

Greetings and leave-taking

31% 25

38% 30

19% 15

10% 8

3% 2

80

Thanking

28% 22

43% 34

21% 17

8% 6

3% 2

80

Conversational style (e.g. turn taking, appropriate listener responses)

14% 11

35% 28

19% 15

22% 17

10% 8

79

Humor

6% 5

16% 13

26% 21

33% 26

19% 15

80

Sarcasm

3% 2

6% 5

20% 16

30% 24

41% 32

79

Teasing

4% 3

5% 4

13% 10

38% 30

41% 33

80

Cursing

3% 2

3% 2

18% 14

32% 25

45% 35

78

The temporal, discursive, 16% 13 affective and indexical roles of discourse markers such as ‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘so’, ‘I think’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘frankly’ and ‘as a matter of fact’

19% 15

47% 37

11% 9

6% 5

79

10% 8

26% 21

28% 22

30% 24

6% 5

80

How to criticize

Conversational implicature (i.e. the implied meaning as interpreted by listeners based on content and knowledge of how conversations work)

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Table 4.2 NTs’ reported coverage of TL pragmatics (n = 30) Extensive Fair amount Some Little No Total coverage of coverage coverage coverage coverage respondents Politeness/impoliteness

17% 5

37% 11

43% 13

3% 1

0% 0

30

How to make requests

17% 5

43% 13

37% 11

3% 1

0% 0

30

How to apologize

7% 2

27% 8

47% 14

17% 5

3% 1

30

How to compliment and respond to compliments

7% 2

27% 8

27% 8

33% 10

7% 2

30

How to complain

7% 2

27% 8

27% 8

33% 10

7% 2

30

How to criticize

13% 4

27% 8

23% 7

27% 8

10% 3

30

Greetings and leave-taking

30% 9

33% 10

27% 8

7% 2

3% 1

30

Thanking

20% 6

40% 12

33% 10

7% 2

3% 1

30

Conversational style (e.g. turn taking, appropriate listener responses)

20% 6

40% 12

27% 8

10% 3

3% 1

30

Humor

3% 1

13% 4

37% 11

40% 12

7% 2

30

Sarcasm

0% 0

17% 5

23% 7

43% 13

17% 5

30

Teasing

0% 0

10% 3

13% 4

60% 18

17% 5

30

Cursing

0% 0

0% 0

10% 3

50% 15

40% 12

30

The temporal, discursive, 20% 6 affective and indexical roles of discourse markers such as ‘well’, ‘you know’, ‘so’, ‘I think’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘frankly’ and ‘as a matter of fact’

30% 9

27% 8

10% 3

13% 4

30

10% 3

33% 10

33% 10

10% 3

13% 4

30

Conversational implicature (i.e. the implied meaning as interpreted by listeners based on content and knowledge of how conversations work)

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics

87

Table 4.3 NNT methods for teaching pragmatics (n = 80) All of Most of Sometimes Rarely Never Total Weighted the time the time average To what extent do you teach the pragmatics of the target language explicitly?

9% 7

39% 31

43% 34

10% 8

0% 0

80

2.54

To what extent do you have your students access digital media (e.g. movies, YouTube, etc.)?

11% 9

34% 27

33% 26

18% 14

4% 3

79

2.88

11% To what extent do you teach regional and dialect differences 9 in pragmatics (e.g. the ways pragmatics differs in the Hispanic world)?

13% 10

32% 25

32% 25

13% 10

79

3.22

Regarding their reported methods for teaching pragmatics, NTs reported significantly more use of digital media than did the NNTs (χ2 = 12.85, p < 0.01) (Tables 4.3 and 4.4). There was no statistical difference between the two teacher groups in terms of reported explicitness used in their teaching of pragmatics, nor in the extent to which they reported teaching about regional and dialect differences. With regard to their comfort level about serving as a resource for information about the specifics of pragmatics in the TL, 53% of the NTs reported being very comfortable teaching TL pragmatics vs. 37% of the NNTs, with the χ2 close to significance at the 0.05 level (χ2 = 5.28, p = 0.07) (Figures 4.1 and 4.2). Another 55% of the NNTs reported being somewhat comfortable in comparison to 40% of the NTs.

Table 4.4 NT methods for teaching pragmatics (n = 30) All of Most of Sometimes Rarely Never Total Weighted the time the time average To what extent do you teach the pragmatics of the target language explicitly?

13% 4

43% 13

37% 11

7% 2

0% 0

30

2.37

To what extent do you have your students access digital media (e.g. movies, YouTube, etc.)?

27% 8

17% 5

37% 11

20% 6

0% 0

30

2.50

7% 2

20% 6

37% 11

30% 9

7% 2

79

3.22

To what extent do you teach regional and dialect differences in pragmatics (e.g. the ways pragmatics differs in the Hispanic world)?

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Figure 4.1 NNTs’ comfort level at teaching TL pragmatics (n = 83)

The teacher respondents were asked the following regarding their expertise in pragmatics: If you encounter classroom moments when you don’t feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics, what do you do about it? Indicate the extent to which you do the following: (extensively, sometimes, seldom, never) __I acknowledge my lack of knowledge to my students. __I have my students serve as data gatherers. __I teach what I know and hope it is adequate.

(For NNTs) __I use as a point of departure the pragmatics of my first language or of some other language.

Figure 4.2 NTs’ comfort level at teaching TL pragmatics (n = 30)

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Table 4.5 When NNTs do not feel like an authority (n = 83) Extensively Sometimes Seldom Never Total Weighted average I acknowledge my lack of knowledge to my students

43% 35

51% 42

5% 4

1% 1

82

3.35

I have my students serve as data 14% gatherers by checking with native 12 speakers and then reporting back to the class

36% 30

25% 21

24% 20

83

2.41

I teach what I know and hope it is adequate

31% 25

35% 28

23% 19

11% 9

81

2.85

I use as a point of departure the pragmatics of my first language or of some other language

21% 17

41% 34

21% 17

17% 14

82

2.66

As to what the NNTs and NTs reported doing if they encountered classroom moments when they did not feel like an authority on some aspect of pragmatics, both NTs and NNTs reported at least sometimes acknowledgment to their students about their lack of knowledge on some pragmatics issues. The NTs reported a significantly higher likelihood of getting their students to serve as data gatherers (χ2 = 8.25, p < 0.01). Significantly more NNTs reported teaching what they knew and hoping it was adequate 5 (χ2 = 13.44, p < 0.01) (see Tables 4.5 and 4.6). A fair number of NNTs (62%) reported sometimes or extensively using as a point of departure the pragmatics of their L1 or some other language when teaching the TL. Commenting on those moments when they did not feel like an authority with respect to pragmatics, most NNTs said that they would check with NSs, with the internet and with other sources and get back to their students right away. The NNTs’ comments reflected a high level of knowledge about the issues and an impressive array of strategies for dealing with them, perhaps indicating that it was the more knowledgeable teachers Table 4.6 When NTs do not feel like an authority (n = 30) Extensively Sometimes Seldom Never Total Weighted average I acknowledge my lack of knowledge to my students

40% 12

57% 17

0% 0

3% 1

30

3.33

I have my students serve as data 23% gatherers by checking with native 7 speakers and then reporting back to the class

47% 14

17% 5

13% 4

30

2.80

I teach what I know and hope it is adequate

48% 14

24% 7

17% 5

29

2.52

10% 3

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

who were willing to respond to this 20-item survey. Here are some representative comments: •

•

• • • • • • •

I base what I tell students on research and, when research isn’t available, I use my own anecdotal observation – but if my only evidence is anecdotal, I tell students that fact so they don’t overgeneralize. If I don’t know about some pragmatic feature, I say so and tell students I will try to fi nd out. Then I ask native-speaker friends about the feature, if there is no published research available to consult. (English L1, 11 years teaching Spanish) I may explain to students that any aspect of pragmatics can be perceived and practiced differently by different groups of people, or even by different individuals. Thus, that aspect should be seen in specific situations. (Vietnamese L1, 20 years teaching English) I talk to my colleagues whom I think are experts in pragmatics. I also consult books, recent updates on pragmatics as written in journals. (Indonesian L1, 9 years teaching English) I check on the internet to fi nd more information, and I check with some teachers in the US. (Chinese L1, 2 years teaching English) I use research-based information about the pragmatics of the language I teach. (English L1, 11 years teaching Spanish) I confer with native speakers to hear what they have to say about the issue in question. (English L1, 8 years teaching Russian) I check with native speakers from a range of varieties of the language and then report back to the students. (English L1, 12 years teaching Spanish) If I don’t know, I let them know that I am unsure, check with a native speaker, and get back to them the next day. (English L1, 2 years teaching German) Given the diversity within the Spanish-speaking world, I stress to students that they need to be mini-ethnographers and observe the pragmatic norms of the place that they are visiting or where they are studying. I give as an example Carmen García’s miscommunications as a Peruvian in Venezuela – she has an interesting article on how she was not successful in ordering coffee in a cafe. We also discuss María Placencia’s work comparing pragmatic norms in Quito, Ecuador and Madrid, Spain. (English L1, 40 years teaching Spanish)

These comments would suggest that the NNTs who responded to this survey were aware both of research and of strategies for data gathering. As we see from the comments, one issue that emerged was the handling of dialect issues in pragmatics, such as for an English-speaking NNT teaching Spanish. Another issue was that voiced by a highly competent NNT of still not feeling competent enough with the pragmatics of the language to deal satisfactorily with humor. The overriding position was that of ‘when in doubt, ask a native speaker’.

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As for comments by NTs, a fair number commented on their using the moments where they did not feel authoritative as an opportunity to gather data – in other words, as teachable moments. In the first comment below, the NT underscored differences in norms for pragmatic behavior according to dialect, in this case for English: •

•

•

•

I teach in different English-speaking countries (e.g. I am from the United States but currently teaching in New Zealand), so reliability and factchecking of pragmatics is a point shared between my nonnative-Englishspeaking students and myself, a native English speaker but still a ‘foreigner’. (English L1, 10 years teaching English) [If not sure about some issue in pragmatics] I take it as a research moment for all of us – ‘You guys research and I’ll research and we’ll come back tomorrow and discuss/compare results’. (English L1, 20 years teaching English) Usually the confusion is over ambiguities or differences in context, etc. I discuss with the students these differences, then we gather data (I will survey my colleagues, and sometimes also outside my school) and report back. These are ‘teachable moments’. (English L1, 11 years teaching English) I have students check COCA or MICASE6 to look at usage. Or I have students ask friends. A standard assignment in my class is to have students bring in puzzling bits of conversation that they overheard. Some students love this assignment and ask pointed questions like, ‘How do you respond to “You know what I mean?”’ Or they ask about idioms like ‘Let’s not get bogged down’ that are highly frequent in teaching (but which I had never noticed!). (English L1, 45 years teaching English)

These comments by the NTs reveal the similarities between their approaches and those of the NNTs as to strategies for getting accurate information about pragmatics in response to students’ queries, such as through data gathering, rather than relying on their intuition. In addition, the comments reflect the challenges an NT may face either in teaching in a country where a dialect of the TL different from their own is spoken, or in teaching in an FL context where they are losing contact with their L1. The teachers were also asked a question to get at their knowledge of TL sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics: Pragmatics focuses on how the language is interpreted in a given sociocultural context within the target language community. How would you assess your knowledge of the target language and of the sociocultural contexts in which the language is likely to be used? (Mark all that apply.) __Very knowledgeable about both the language and the sociocultural contexts

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

__More knowledgeable about the language than the sociocultural contexts __More knowledgeable about the sociocultural contexts than about the language __Still learning about my language and norms for its use in different sociocultural contexts

There were differences in how knowledgeable the NNTs and NTs reported feeling when called upon to provide TL instruction about sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic issues. While only 37% of the NNTs felt very knowledgeable about both kinds of issues, twice as many NTs reported feeling very knowledgeable (73%) (χ2 = 34.77, p < 0.001). More than half the NNTs reported feeling more knowledgeable about language than sociocultural issues in contrast to the 20% of NTs who reported this feeling (Tables 4.7 and 4.8). The NNTs who commented on their knowledge of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic contexts indicated their wariness at making generalizations in class based just on their experiences, since the norms for appropriate pragmatic behavior could vary according to the sociocultural context, both within and across dialects. Some NNTs added the caveat that what they taught about TL pragmatics related only to interactions by NSs with foreigners. There were also the occasional pragmatics specialists who Table 4.7 How knowledgeable NNTs feel about the language (pragmalinguistics) and the sociocultural (sociopragmatic) context Answer choices

Responses

Very knowledgeable about both the language and the sociocultural contexts

37%

31

More knowledgeable about the language than the sociocultural contexts

52%

43

More knowledgeable about the sociocultural contexts than about the language Still a learner in both the language and the sociocultural contexts within the target community

6%

5

23%

19

Total respondents: 83

Table 4.8 How knowledgeable NTs feel about the language (pragmalinguistics) and the sociocultural (sociopragmatic) context Answer choices

Responses

Very knowledgeable about both the language and the sociocultural contexts

73%

More knowledgeable about the language than the sociocultural contexts

22

20%

6

More knowledgeable about the sociocultural contexts than about the language

0%

0

Still learning about my language and norms for its use in different sociocultural contexts

17%

5

Total respondents: 30

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics 93

indicated acquiring their knowledge from research studies that they and others had conducted and from conferences. Here are some of their comments: •

•

•

Italy is a very diverse linguistic and geographic territory. Although my knowledge is substantial, I can only offer an honest assessment of its extent while reiterating that possibilities of sociocultural contexts are endless. (English L1, 9 years teaching Italian) I would consider myself very knowledgeable about a certain kind of Japanese language, but I would readily acknowledge I am always in the process of learning about more current, informal, or highly dialectical speech. (English L1, 2 years teaching Japanese) I told my students that what I taught them only applied to dealings with foreigners, and even then, that they should follow the norm of what others did towards foreign visitors in the given context. (Chinese L1, 2 years teaching English)

The NTs who commented about their knowledge of sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic contexts indicated that they were constantly learning about pragmatics, especially given how it was always in flux: •

•

•

•

Although I feel very comfortable teaching about the pragmatics of my native language, I acknowledge that great variety exists among the diff erent varieties of Spanish, and I am constantly learning about other sociocultural contexts. (Spanish L1, 7 years teaching Spanish) I’m a native speaker of the language I teach and am very analytical about pragmatics of my own language due to having been a second language learner in another language. Being able to relate to the difficulties my students encounter – particularly when they are unable to explicitly frame the problem beyond the understanding that something is wrong – is probably my most valuable asset. (English L1, 15 years teaching English) Of course I’m still learning and always will be! But having lived almost half my life outside my home state, and almost a decade outside the US, I have become aware (through self-reflection, reading, and conversation) of the different sociocultural contexts for English, and I try to pass on these nuances to my students who may have only spent a month in a native-English-language environment. (English L1, 10 years teaching English) As I was brought up in Japan and lived for 26 years with some working experience in Japan, I’m fairly confident about what I learned from my experience. However, as it has been a few decades since I left Japan and have got accustomed to the life in Australia, I sometimes feel that my knowledge might not be up-to-date any more. Since society and people’s norms seem to have changed to some

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degree in Japan for the past few decades, I always need to be mindful to update my knowledge through various media. (Japanese L1, 25 years teaching Japanese) These comments by NTs about their sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge base simply underscore the previous comments about handling classroom moments of uncertainty regarding pragmatics. Again the issues of teaching in an FL context removed from contact with their L1 and also contending with dialect differences were raised as challenges that many NTs face. These comments also serve as a reminder that especially in FL contexts, NTs are dealing with matters of multilingualism. The teachers were asked the following question with regard to the FL-L2 distinction: It is said that teaching the pragmatics of a foreign language is more challenging than teaching the pragmatics of a second language since in foreign-language learning the learners are presumably not living in the target-language context. In your own experience as a language teacher, does this distinction still work for you? (Yes, Somewhat, No, Explain)

The contrast between NNT and NTs views on the relevance of this distinction did not yield a χ2 with a significant p value. While 61% of the NNTs deemed the distinction fully relevant and 30% somewhat relevant, 50% of the NTs found it fully relevant and 40% somewhat relevant (Figures 4.3 and 4.4). The following were principle activities considered helpful in teaching TL pragmatics in an FL situation: • •

Viewing segments from films, videos (from YouTube and elsewhere) and analyzing them (perhaps with a transcript). Collecting data from TL speakers (in service encounters, in dorms, in cafeterias/restaurants and the like).

Figure 4.3 NNTs’ view regarding the relevance of the L2-FL distinction (n = 80)

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics

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Figure 4.4 NTs’ view regarding the relevance of the L2-FL distinction (n = 30)

• •

Role plays, with the suggestion that they be based on models from film segments and videos. Small-group discussion of TL pragmatics.

The activities reportedly used in the L2 context for teaching TL pragmatics were much the same as those reportedly used in the FL context. There was, however, one activity only reported for the L2 context: analyzing samples of pragmatics in use by TL speakers: I send my ESL students (in the US) out as ethnographers, to observe specific types of interactions: greetings and leave-taking among young men in contrast to young women of their own age group (i.e. hands, voices, feet, proximity, verbal or grunting/shrieking expressions), gift-giving actions and verbal expressions, phone calls, requests for directions around campus, expressions of disappointment, asking for and declining favors. These can be written up, but if possible, videotaped and analyzed. (Hungarian & English, taught German for 15 years as an NNT & English for 12 years as an NT)

There were numerous strategies reportedly used by NNTs and NTs alike to motivate their students to learn norms for TL pragmatics. Here are some individual responses: • •

By saying ‘If you want to make sense, sound natural, and – more importantly – be polite. You need to learn TL pragmatics’. (Farsi L1, 12 years teaching English as an NNT) I fi nd that with my students (intermediate and advanced Spanish learners, in the US) I don’t need to work hard to motivate them to be interested in Spanish pragmatics. They generally fi nd social norms to be fascinating! In part it may be that in other classes instructors don’t talk about pragmatics, so it is novel for them. In addition, there is a clear practical component to learning about pragmatics that I think they recognize. (English L1, 11 years teaching Spanish as an NNT)

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Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

•

Through engaging materials, especially Russian-language music and movies. If they fi nd something they really love, they are motivated to understand it. Also I emphasize how native speakers will react when they behave in pragmatically inappropriate ways, which I hope motivates them to at least be conscious of that dimension of language. (English L1, 8 years teaching Russian as an NNT) I tell them that being a competent speaker requires not only being accurate but also appropriate. (Turkish L1, 3 years teaching English as an NNT) I make sure my German FL students have the opportunity to observe real (if possible, fi lmed) interactions among people who speak the target language; this way, they see that there are people just like them who observe the social and linguistic norms that they have been learning about. (English L1, 8 years teaching German as an NNT) I normally peak their curiosity by using humor or misunderstandings, and start from there. (Italian L1, 9 teaching Spanish as an NNT) I use critical incidents for discussion and interview topics. Also, I sometimes show the videos in which Japanese people comment on NNSs’ responses in potentially face-threatening situations. (Japanese L1, 32 years teaching Japanese as an NT) With inter-cultural and cross-cultural examples. For example, I use service encounter interactions in US English and in comparable settings in Spain and Latin America. My Spanish FL students love the pragmatics of service encounters because they find it quite useful when they travel abroad. (Spanish L1, 20 years teaching Spanish as an NT)

• •

• •

•

It is encouraging to see from these comments that both NNTs and NTs are reportedly engaged in motivating their students to become better versed in the pragmatics of the TL that they are learning. Especially given the often formulaic nature of pragmatics in areas such service encounters, there are advantages if learners are not only grammatically accurate, but also pragmatically appropriate as noted in the above comment. They may get a better price on some item at the market or just have a more enjoyable interaction. The use of humor or misunderstandings as a way for teachers to keep students motivated resonates, since learners not only enjoy being entertained, but can also learn and perhaps better retain what they have learned when the classroom moments are amusing. Both NNTs and NTs alike expressed a desire to have greater access to pragmatics information and research fi ndings in the following areas: • •

Humor, sarcasm, teasing and cursing: These are things that are normally left out of the curriculum but are a huge part of living in a culture. They are often speech acts that motivate students to learn. The expression of sympathy and compassion.

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics

• • • • • • • • • • • • • •

97

Table manners. Interacting with different generations of speakers at, say, a family gathering (meeting their Spanish-speaking significant other’s siblings, parents and grandparents, for example). Euphemisms for referring to age, sex and dying. How to pose questions during class, at conferences and in the workplace. The pragmatics of online discussions engaging several participants using the same language, as in an academic setting such as conferences. The pragmatics of diplomatic communication. Things people are more likely to discuss in the TL and things they are less likely to discuss. Small talk. Invisible culture – behavioral patterns in the TL community that learners do not realize are part of the shared culture, rather than individual idiosyncrasies. ELF pragmatics and especially pragmatics for business purposes. More about the differences in pragmatic behavior that may exist among the varieties of Spanish around the world. The connection between grammar and pragmatics: the relevance of the resources of a language system to speakers’ uses of a language. Distinguishing pragmatic deviations due to lack of TL knowledge from pragmatic deviations by L1 speakers (such as due to boorish or gauche behavior). Prioritizing: What areas of pragmatics should be taught fi rst? What can be skipped if there is limited time?

This fi nal collection of comments demonstrates how savvy the NNTs and NTs were about just what pragmatics can entail – in areas such as table manners, small talk, euphemisms, extending condolences and interacting with people across the age spectrum. Other comments played up areas that can be most instructive for practicing teachers, such as knowing which topics are and are not sociopragmatically appropriate to bring up in the given context (e.g. how much a new house or car cost, how much the monthly salary is and so forth), and also distinguishing normative behavior for the TL community from idiosyncratic (boorish) behavior. 4.5 Discussion and Conclusions

This chapter has presented an issue that has not received extensive attention in the research literature, namely, the ways in which NTs and NNTs compare with regard to their handling of pragmatics in TL instruction. The 30 NTs and 83 NNTs who responded to the survey not only represented many different L1s and TLs, but also many different regions

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of the world. While the NTs and NNTs had similar experiences and challenges in teaching TL pragmatics, there were also certain differences. For one thing, the NNTs felt less knowledgeable about the teaching of TL pragmatics and trended towards feeling less comfortable at it as well. It also appeared that NTs’ intuitions about pragmatics could assist them in teaching learners how to be effectively critical and sarcastic, as well as how to respond appropriately to criticism and sarcasm. The caveat here is that relying on NS intuition may be misleading, which is why both NNTs and NTs in this survey indicated that they gathered data from other sources if they were in doubt about some area of TL pragmatics. The NTs also indicated greater use of digital media, whether because being an NS gave them greater facility at fi nding and utilizing TL media, owing to their many years of teaching experience, or for some other reason. Likewise, NTs indicated a willingness to use their students as data gatherers in cases where they were unsure of some issue in pragmatics to a somewhat greater extent than the NNTs, although both groups reported this strategy. What is encouraging about this fi nding is that it would indicate that at least with regard to this self-selected sample, the NTs were not just relying on their intuition. The NNTs reported more coverage of cursing than the NTs, which can be an important area over that learners would want to have some control. A case in point would be that of female study-abroad students who find themselves in a culture where properly understanding off-colored catcalls may be important for their safety. The NNTs also reported relying on their L1 when they were not certain of the TL pragmatics, which could possibly be a source of misinformation regarding the TL if there were negative transfer in the process (see Ishihara & Cohen, 2014). In addition, the survey provided a helpful listing of activities that could be used in teaching TL activities both in FL and L2 situations. Furthermore, survey responses included helpful suggestions for how to motivate learners to want to study TL pragmatics, as well as an indication as to areas in pragmatics for which teachers would like more information based on both research and practice. See Chapter 6 for specific ideas derived from the survey responses as to the teaching of pragmatics and how to motivate learners. This survey study had its limitations. While international in scope, the sample was still relatively modest. In addition, the NTs had over six more years of teaching experience than the NNTs. Furthermore, since participation in the survey was voluntary, it is likely that only those who were more knowledgeable about L2 pragmatics volunteered to respond. In addition, although the survey was piloted, some of the questions could have been further refi ned. Also, the fluctuation in responses to certain questions would serve as an indication that it is difficult to arrive at consensus in such a survey effort. Another limitation is that the TL proficiency of the NNTs was not measured, a task that would have called for

What Native and Nonnative Teachers Know About Pragmatics

99

instruments in a variety of languages and a willingness on the part of the NNTs to have their knowledge assessed. Having knowledge of just how proficient or even ‘expert’ they were in their respective TLs would have enhanced the interpretation of the responses on sensitive issues such as some of the NT-NNT comparisons. In addition, the relationship between the level at which the teachers were teaching pragmatics and teachers’ report of coverage was not measured. Finally, it must be remembered that report of coverage of certain TL pragmatics issues is not the same as observation of the actual teaching of pragmatics by these teacher respondents. In self-report studies there is always the issue of how reliable the report actually is. In addition, while there was report as to extent of coverage of pragmatics areas, there was no observation of how these areas of pragmatics were actually taught, similar to what Aslan (2015) did in his study of the same teacher, Ezgi, who was an NT in French and an NNT in German (reported in Section 3.5). Despite the various limitations of the survey, it still stands as a useful exercise in an effort to explore the area of TL pragmatics instruction in the classroom. At a time when there is increasing interest in teaching pragmatics, there needs to be a commensurate concern for supporting NTs and NNTs alike to do the best job possible. A comment is in order with regard to the finding that years of teaching were reported to have a positive correlation with certain speech acts for the NTs. Why years of teaching experience correlated positively with reported teaching of certain speech acts for NTs and not for NNTs is a matter of speculation. Perhaps the longer this sample of NTs taught, the more they saw the benefits of introducing information about pragmatics. As for the NNTs, perhaps it was their relative lack of awareness of pragmatics or their intent to simply follow textbook lessons over the years that explained the lack of correlation between years teaching and report of inclusion of pragmatics. On the other hand, perhaps this finding is suggestive of a slight deficit that the NNTs in the sample may have had in their ability to teach TL pragmatics, whether as an L2 or as an FL. With regard to further research, there is undoubtedly a need to broaden the database through more systematic sampling of teacher respondents from all areas of the world, as well as to refi ne the questions that are posed to teachers. In addition, research like this would benefit from going beyond self-report to see the extent to which the report is matched by actual classroom practice. On a pedagogical level, more can be done to develop classroom activities that help in the instruction of TL pragmatics in the less covered and more challenging areas – activities that serve NTs and NNTs alike, both in L2 and FL teaching contexts (see Chapter 6 for concrete suggestions in this area). The findings from the survey reported on in this chapter would appear to support the view that there may well be some NT-NNT differences that show up in TL instruction in the classroom, which warrants a discussion about measures that could be taken to deal with this issue. In all fairness,

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the conversation needs to start by acknowledging NNTs for the fi ne work they do in teaching the TL, and for their often admirable abilities to both performing and teaching TL pragmatics. The concern is in dealing with those areas of pragmatics that are currently outside their comfort zone (perhaps dealing with teasing, sarcasm, humor, cursing and other such areas). Being a NNT may make teachers even more mindful of pragmatics and motivated to educate themselves in this area. Rather than simply denying it is an issue, language educators might wish to make more resources available to NNTs and to NTs as well, so that both groups can teach TL pragmatics with greater comfort and facility. For example, both NNTs and NTs may benefit from synopses of fi ndings from research on TL pragmatic norms, since NNTs may be unaware of norms for some TL behaviors, and NTs, while they have their intuitions, may have an anecdotal, idiosyncratic, or otherwise limited and/or inaccurate understanding of the actual pragmatic norms. And even if the textbooks cover these areas of pragmatics, the coverage may not reflect the current normative behavior (Cohen & Ishihara, 2012). Both groups of teachers may also benefit from comparing pragmatic norms in different dialects, since as reflected in the NTs’ comments, they are not necessarily aware of the TL norms for pragmatics in other countries where their L1 is spoken. Notes (1) One of the early researchers in the pragmatics field, Meryl Siegal (from Laney College, Oakland, CA) provided useful feedback in the early stages of the study design and the construction of the survey instruments. (2) One was a native speaker of Cantonese in Hong Kong, but dominant in English, which he reported teaching. (3) See: http://www.socscistatistics.com/tests/chisquare/. (4) See: http://www.minitab.com/. (5) One NNT took offense at the wording since she felt that ‘explore’ or ‘double check’ should have been used instead of ‘hope’, since she did not teach something unless she was sure of it. Unfortunately, this wording problem was not flagged in the piloting of the instrument. (6) COCA – the Corpus of Contemporary American English: corpus.byu.edu/coca and MICASE is the Michigan Corpus of American Spoken English: quod.lib.umich.edu/ cgi/c/corpus/corpus?page=home;c=micase;cc=micase. See Chapter 6 for more on the use of corpora in learning pragmatics.

5 Basic Issues in the Teaching of Pragmatics with Lauren Wyner1

This chapter opens the discussion as to how best to teach pragmatics in the TL classroom. Among the issues considered in this chapter are awareness raising about pragmatics among language teachers, the inclusion of pragmatics in teacher development programs, the search for appropriate pragmatic materials – especially in the case of teaching in FL contexts, improving learners’ understanding of teacher talk about pragmatics, the potential role of SA in facilitating TL pragmatic development and supporting learners in their choices regarding TL norms. The next chapter will provide numerous specific ideas both for teaching TL pragmatics and for motivating learners to pay more attention to this area. Many of these reflect my expansions upon ideas contained in the responses to the international survey reported on in Chapter 4. How can the research fi ndings presented in Chapter 2 and elsewhere in this book regarding the accessibility of the TL, pragmatic transfer and motivation to learn the pragmatics of the TL be translated into actual recommendations to the classroom teacher? One way to teach TL pragmatics is through a graded approach that caters to learners according to their proficiency level and the nature of the task, with the knowledge that lower-level learners may simply not have the grammatical ability to produce the range of options considered pragmatically appropriate. It is also possible that learners are resisting abiding by TL norms out of a desire to express their own subjectivity or agency. A problem with a graded approach to teaching this material, however, is that learners may need pragmatic routines such as appropriate greetings and requests right away, even if their grammar is insufficient to truly control what is needed in their performance. Therefore, one solution is for the learners to simply memorize essential routines without understanding the role of grammar in them. As it is, many learners do communicate effectively without ever truly understanding the role of grammar in what they are saying or writing. Here is where teacher flexibility is important. When it comes to pragmatics, it may be helpful for teachers – if they are able – to play the role 101

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of diagnostician in order to help unravel reasons for why learners do or do not get the pragmatics right. The variables at play are both the sophistication of the pragmatics information and the amount that is provided by the curriculum, the teacher or the context, and the amount that is accessed by the learners at any one time. Also, learners may have differing needs for pragmatics, depending on what they are called upon to do pragmatically in the given TL. For example, some learners may need pragmatics for functioning in office situations, while others need it more for peer-based social interactions. Also, it can be useful to determine just how high the stakes are for getting the pragmatics correct. In many cases, NSs will recognize that the learners are NNSs and commensurately cut them some slack. It is crucial at the outset of this discussion to maintain a sense of perspective with regard to the so-called NS norms that provide the underpinning for TL pragmatics instruction. Given that NNSs of English the world over, for example, may use English not for interacting with NSs, but for interacting with other NNSs, their needs may be better served by exposing them to various varieties of English and pragmatic forms. Here is where NNTs can be a real asset if they are knowledgeable about different varieties of the TL – especially with regard to pragmatics – and able to provide ready examples. It calls for a keen sense on the part of the teacher as to the real needs of the learners in terms of likely language use. The classroom-focused study of an NT in an FL context mentioned above (Section 3.1.4) demonstrated how confl icts between the cultural perceptions of NTs and the local learners could arise. The study described how Japanese fourth- and fi fth-grade EFL learners wanted to use silence as they would in their Japanese language pragmatics, and how their Kiwi teacher (a resident of Japan for 12 years) incorrectly perceived this silence as a sign of ignorance (Kidd, 2016). The researcher’s conclusion from the study was that raising Japanese learners’ awareness of pragmatic norms other than American or British (e.g. Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese, French and so forth) would make sense. He would want the learners to be mindful of the way Japanese speakers actually tend to interact in English and to use these interactional patterns as a basis upon which to foster cultural awareness, interest and tolerance (pers. comm., Joshua Kidd, 21 March 2016). Another study entailed the conducting of semi-structured interviews with 13 novice Serbian teachers of EFL regarding how they dealt with the issue of politeness in their instruction (Savić, 2016). The results showed that while there was variation in the teachers’ views, their own cultural perspective was seen to have a sizeable impact on the way they dealt with politeness in the FL classroom. The researcher recommended that novice EFL teachers receive both theoretical and pedagogical orientation to pragmatics. But the issue still remains whether such teachers are duty-bound

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to teach the FL norms for politeness rather than more L1-speechcommunity views on the matter. With this preamble, then, the current chapter looks at a variety of issues relating to the teaching of pragmatics, starting with raising the awareness of language teachers about the benefits of teaching their students about it. Next, we consider the advantages of including pragmatics in teacher development programs, the selection of pragmatics materials, strategies for enhancing teachers’ intelligibility, SA as a potential means for development of pragmatic skills and the teaching of TL norms, such as they may be. 5.1 Awareness-Raising about the Teaching of Pragmatics

Awareness-raising about the teaching of pragmatics was proposed by Rose (1997) for NNTs, involving a three-part process: (1) gaining familiarity with the theory and research findings regarding pragmatics; (2) conducting pragmatic analyses in their respective L1; and (3) conducting pragmatic analysis of the given TL. In some ways, NNTs may be more receptive to having their pragmatic awareness enhanced than might NTs, who possibly feel that they can simply rely on their intuitive knowledge of how their L1 works. As indicated in Chapter 3, intuition may be misleading. For example, NTs may attempt to describe how to apologize on the basis of their intuitions about what NSs do, rather than taking a more rigorous approach. The extra rigor may entail fi nding out from the research literature what speech act-specific strategies (also referred to as semantic formulas) actually exist for apologizing, checking the web for information (e.g. the CARLA website2), checking with NS colleagues and seeing how apologizing is handled in TL textbooks – although textbook writers may also be relying on their intuition more than on what TL speakers actually do. A study conducted on how EFL textbooks for secondary-school EFL learners in Germany dealt with apologies, found that while there was some input on apologies in the textbooks, there was a decided lack of variety in apology expressions (Limberg, 2016b). There was also a lack of explanations as to how apologies functioned. In addition, the study found that while German EFL textbooks show learners how apologies could be uttered and under what circumstances speakers use them, much of the material was simply meant to be informative and not intended to be incorporated into the learners’ performance of apologies. Limberg concluded that teachers would need to adapt the input and modify the tasks, using their own supplementary pragmatic information. 3 He noted that teachers might wish to point out to learners how apology expressions may differ between the students’ L1, German and the FL, English, and to indicate to them the situations in which apologies could be expected to occur.

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While teachers’ reliance on intuition may provide an acceptable apology for the given instance, this approach may not necessarily provide the students with other apology-specific strategies aside from expression of apology (e.g. ‘I’m really sorry’). Here is where sociopragmatics comes in. The strategy of acknowledging responsibility may be crucial in a given apology situation or perhaps offering repair. Here is where pragmalinguistics comes in. Even just with regard to the expression of apology, some situations call for more heartfelt apologies and others for very minimal ones. The possibility for pragmatic failure could result in providing too minimal an apology in a situation calling for a more robust apology, or in overdoing it by giving too lavish an apology in a situation where a minimal one would suffice, or none at all (see Figure 1.1 depicting an unnecessary apology between teenage friends in Israel, p. 9), since overdoing an apology may annoy the recipient. An interventionist study focusing on apologies demonstrated that the ability to produce apologies among EFL university students in Italy could be enhanced by exposing them to model interactions, guiding them in the analysis of the formal and functional properties of the interactions, and engaging them in activities motivating their autonomy (Gesuato, 2013). The activities consisted of having the learners first develop a better understanding of the content and purpose of an apology speech act interaction in English. Then, the students were called upon to recognize, account for and use relevant communicative strategies to identify and select the appropriate language for engaging in role plays. The 49 students who evaluated the course indicated that they found the course, which included apologies and other speech acts, to be interesting and relevant to their educational needs. In addition, the students expressed the view that having better mastery of English grammar would have better enabled them to learn the pragmatics in the course. As will be noted in Chapter 8, learners differ in terms of how they relate to grammar. While some learners thrive when rules are explicitly taught, others do not. Of course, the learning of grammar in the service of pragmatics is not the same as learning grammar for its own sake. Therefore, in English, learning that the past progressive can serve to mitigate a request requires learning the pragmatic functions of verb tenses (e.g. ‘I was wondering if you would lend me $10,000’). Since I was not fortunate enough to have a Hebrew FL course in the 1980s comparable to that developed by Gesuato (2013) for her EFL students, I found myself already living in Israel for a decade or more before I fi nally learned the range of options for how to apologize in Hebrew. Until that time, I had been overgeneralizing the use of one or two pragmalinguistic options, rather than fine-tuning my apologies according to the specific context. As an outgrowth of research that Elite Olshtain and I conducted on apologies in English and Hebrew (Cohen & Olshtain, 1981; Cohen et al., 1986 4; Olshtain & Cohen, 1983), I developed a keen sense of the continuum of expressions to realize the strategy of expressing an

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apology – from the lowest level (slixa ‘sorry’) to the middle level (ani mitsta’er ‘I am sorry’) to the highest level (ani mitnatzel ‘I apologize’). I  also learned how different situations could call for the use of other apology-specific strategies such as acknowledging responsibility, offering repair, providing an explanation or excuse or promising non-recurrence. In a situation where the mother forgets to take her kid to the movies after promising to do so, written DCT responses by Americans were likely to include the strategy of promising non-recurrence (e.g. ‘Oh, sweetie, so sorry. I’ll be sure not to forget next time’). Some of the Israeli responses (e.g. ‘OK, then next time I won’t promise’) tended to reflect a view that life was tough and commitments needed to be seen as flexible. This fi nding serves as a reminder that situations may have differing sociopragmatic realities in different TL communities. In this case, similar to the one with the two teenagers in Figure 1.1, the speaker’s perception may be that an apology is not called for. 5.2 Including Pragmatics in Teacher Development

It is encouraging that standards for L2/FL teaching and assessment, such as the Standards for Foreign Language Learning/Proficiency Guidelines (ACTFL, 2012), do, in fact, endorse instruction in pragmatics (e.g. see Dykstra, 2009, for a discussion about the potential role of pragmatics instruction to educate learners to be truly competent users of the TL). Since research has demonstrated the value for TL learners in having explicit classroom instruction about pragmatics (e.g. Ishihara & Cohen, 2014), it remains for teachers to incorporate pragmatics into their instruction, especially for the benefit of those students who left to their own devices would not pay attention to the subtleties often associated with pragmatics. In fact, it is expressly the students who have perhaps inadvertently neglected the sometimes crucial role that pragmatics plays that encounter pragmatic failure, perhaps when they least expect it. While many TL teacher development courses have stressed a theoretical knowledge of pragmatics, few have provided practical techniques for teachers to integrate into their respective classrooms (with regard to ESL/ EFL, see Vásquez & Sharpless, 2009; Vellenga & Ishihara, 2016). Therefore, if pragmatic knowledge is indeed essential for any language teacher, TL teacher development courses should mandate coursework in pragmatics and its instruction, not necessarily to provide ‘learners with new information but to make them aware of what they know already and encourage them to use their universal or transferable L1 pragmatic knowledge in L2 contexts’ (Kasper, 1997: 4). It has even been suggested that a demonstrated proficiency in the teaching of pragmatics be a requirement for a certificate or diploma for any future TL teacher (see Ishihara, 2011). It is probably the case that many language teachers are already fully aware of the pragmatics themselves and that it is just a matter of passing

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information and insights about pragmatics on to their students. But in fact, as suggested by the survey of NTs and NNTs in Chapter 4, both NNTs who are not so well versed in some aspects of TL pragmatics and NTs who are not fully cognizant of how to teach pragmatics in their L1 may not feel comfortable at times teaching pragmatics to their students. Then, even if the teachers make some effort to teach pragmatics, they may shy away from assessing it, despite the fact that pragmatic ability is measured in the ACTFL standards. They may feel incapable of judging whether one pragmalinguistic form or another is more consistent with the idealized norms that are being used as the benchmark than are some other forms. In addition, NTs who have never studied pragmatics in their coursework may inadvertently signal their lack of knowledge to students who may interpret this as a silent acknowledgment that pragmatics is undeserving of attention. Some years ago, a study was conducted that indicated EFL learners and their teachers identified and ranked grammatical errors as more serious than pragmatic ones, while ESL learners and their teachers ranked the pragmatic errors as more serious (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 1998). The investigators used a videotape with 20 scenarios to test 543 learners and 53 teachers in Hungary and the USA, as well as 112 EFL speakers in Italy. The videotaped segments purposely had sentences that were either pragmatically or grammatically inappropriate, but which did not affect comprehension. The findings of this study underscored the possible differences in perception about the role of pragmatics as viewed in an FL and opposed to an L2 context. Since there are the somewhat subtle pragmalinguistic differences that could take years to simply acquire in the L2 context, it would appear that there is nothing to lose and hopefully something to gain from explicit instruction. This presupposes that the requisite knowledge is teachable and that there are teachers or websites that can provide this information. As indicated above, I spent many years in Israel without becoming aware of the continuum of phrases for the strategy of expressing an apology in Hebrew according to the severity of the infraction. This continuum can be taught to learners relatively easily. Therefore, perhaps teachers can present to their students possible continua in pragmatics behavior for major speech acts such as apologies. Students of language are used to learning grammatical rules for their own sake and often in an isolated fashion. They may not be at all sure as to when to use one or another form in order to achieve the desired pragmatic effect. Providing teachers with ways of presenting material on a continuum may make it easier for them to relay these ideas to students. Contributor author to this chapter, Wyner, has used continua and other visual enhancements for students to respond to the pragmatic appropriateness of email requests to their professors. By allowing the students to mark on a scale the level of seriousness of the infraction, the students are

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reminded that pragmatic knowledge is not simply about learning dichotomies – what to use as opposed to what not to use. Instead, it entails: • • • •

paying attention to factors that may determine what is appropriate in a given situation; having awareness as to the degree of appropriateness that particular pragmatic responses have in a given context; being willing (or not) to exercise this awareness in the pragmatics material that they select for their performance; and having the curiosity to observe the pragmatics used by NSs in the given situation.

If they are unsure, NNTs could verify the continua with NTs or have their students do so as part of a homework assignment. 5.3 Selecting Pragmatics Materials

The selection of pragmatics materials is predicated on the assumption that the NTs and NNTs have some understanding of overarching concepts in pragmatics. The advantage of this background is to afford teachers guiding principles with regard to the theory of pragmatics to draw on in selecting their materials and in using them in class. This theoretical background can help teachers situate their pragmatics examples and rules. Taguchi and Roever (2017, Chapter 3) provide descriptions of various models offering theoretical grounding for the teaching and learning of pragmatics: • • • • • •

the noticing hypothesis; skill acquisition theories; collaborative dialogue and language related episodes; sociocultural theory; language socialization; and conversation analysis.

If, for example, the teacher embraces social cultural theory, then the examples and rules are situated within this framework for interpreting and creating social meaning (see van Compernolle, 2014). While more will be said about the source for materials about pragmatics and ways to access these materials effectively in the next chapter, the discussion will be started here. 5.3.1 The context for the instruction

In responding to the international survey, a teacher of EFL in Iran wrote me an email message as follows: … when I was answering your questionnaire, I realized something, that usually studies focus on teachers’ views about teaching pragmatics, but

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the real problem is the textbook. I mean the teacher has to teach based on the textbook.

This is a good point, and especially when EFL textbooks do not provide extensive guidance in pragmatics, as reflected by the handling of apologies in EFL textbooks in Germany cited above (Limberg, 2016b), teachers are not necessarily going to fi nd much support for their interests in teaching pragmatics from the textbooks. If the curriculum has been designed around a textbook rather than according to student needs, then teachers who are not obliged to follow teaching guidelines mandated from some educational authority may wish to teach their learners what they perceive as necessary for them to be successful in the TL. In fact, it may be the responsibility of classroom teachers to do the hard work that publishers and curriculum designers have not done, such as explaining the pragmatics behind complex interactions. A follow-up study by Limberg (2016a), looking at how HS EFL textbooks in Germany handled politeness yielded an interesting insight. These textbooks adopted a linear progression in grammatical complexity and in the abstractness of vocabulary, which Limberg saw as unsupportive of the pragmatics of politeness that was nonlinear. The textbook approach was apparently rigidly form-focused, featuring the appearance of politeness markers such as ‘please’. The author found that none of the three textbooks offered a systematic, recurrent treatment of politeness as a pragmatic phenomenon – that is, one that gradually built up learners’ competence to communicate politely in different situations over the course of their secondary school FL education. A recent study took a quantitative and qualitative look at 10 intermediatelevel EFL textbooks used in Chinese universities with a particular focus on their coverage of pragmatics (Ren & Han, 2015). The analysis detailed the mention of pragmatic information, the treatment of speech acts (requests, apologies, refusals and invitations) and the representation of intralingual pragmatic variation. The findings showed that pragmatic knowledge is still underrepresented in most textbooks. The range of speech acts included was rather limited and the ways that speech acts were presented seemed to be based on the textbook writers’ intuitions. There was a paucity of explicit metapragmatic information on speech acts, such as with regard to differences in the pragmatic function of the expressions listed. In addition, little attention was devoted to enhancing the learners’ awareness of intralingual pragmatic variation. The researchers gave an example from a textbook that ordered greetings according to formality (Bai, 2011: 1): Most formal: ‘Hello, Mrs. Webster. It’s nice to see you again.’ / ‘Good morning, Mrs. Webster. How are you today?’ /

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‘Good afternoon, Mr. White. It’s good to see you.’ / ‘Hello, Alice. How are you doing?’ / Informal: ‘Hi, Alice! How’s it going?’

However, the authors point out that even if students know which expression is more formal than others, they may not understand the reason for this difference. There is no mention of the factors influencing the formality of various expressions or the variables affecting the politeness of each expression, such as social status, social distance and the imposition of speech acts. The authors also found that the textbooks did not mention any intralingual variation with respect to pragmatic performance. So what can teachers do about the lack of assistance in teaching pragmatics from textbooks? The reality is that what teachers can do about the situation will most likely vary from country to country and from context to context. When NTs are instructing in an FL context, they may take issue with the textbooks, especially if they are written even partly by NNTs. The French L1/German FL teacher that Aslan (2015) interviewed and observed made interesting comments about the TL pragmatics material that appeared in the French textbook which it was her mandate to use for instructional purposes in her NT guise as a French teacher. From time to time, she found unnatural language in the textbooks she was using in her classes – in other words, the language did not reflect the language that she spoke: Sometimes I would have issues just with the books because I can feel that the books were written by Americans – there’s stuff that I will never say in French. But maybe because I’m from a specific part of France, we don’t say stuff; maybe people from the south would say it. So, I will just say to my students ‘OK, I won’t say it [a particular word or expression] but maybe some French people would say it in the south of France.’ But sometimes the books are, like, I don’t know, it doesn’t sound French to me, what’s written. It’s so weird. It makes me laugh, sometimes. (Interview 2, 14 October 2012). (Aslan, 2015: 258–259)

Clearly, an aim of this book is to provide teachers with ideas as to what they can do to supplement their instruction when the textbooks are all but devoid of pragmatics material, especially since this material is likely to support learners’ success at communication. In addition, it would appear that students welcome material on pragmatics, which is in and of itself a motivator. One challenge is that most of the literature on TL pragmatics tends to be in the form of research studies, where pedagogical suggestions come at the end of the study in an abbreviated fashion (e.g. Gauci, 2015, with

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regard to the teaching of requests and complaints to learners of Italian). In some cases, fortunately, teachers can find guidelines in a fledgling pedagogical literature on pragmatics for how to teach particular speech acts. One example is the article by Zeff (2016), based in Japan, on how to teach greetings in the EFL classroom. This article describes four awarenessraising tasks that introduce the greeting speech act, including: (1) keeping a greetings journal; (2) watching contemporary TV shows; (3) using DCTs; and (4) participating in controlled or open role plays, the latter referred to as mingles (i.e. information exchange). Asking the students to keep a journal of the greetings that they experience in both their L1 and the TL heightens awareness about this speech act. Students are asked to answer three primary questions in their journal: • • •

Who are some of the people you greet on a typical day? What expressions do you use when you greet these people? Why do you greet some people differently from others?

Students are asked to observe the different ways one greets in an authentic exchange and to compare these to the phrases and routines in their English textbooks. Zeff (2016) suggests having the students observe how greetings are actually done on a daily basis for a week, paying attention to the relationship of the participants – whether they are close friends or merely acquaintances, of equal status or not and where the greeting occurs (e.g. in a busy hallway, on an open sidewalk or on a train). He also would have the students observe if there are temporal limits on the specific greeting and whether it is linked to some other speech act, such as a request involving an imposition. Zeff also provides a rubric for assessing role plays, focusing on: (1) The speed with which the speaker can produce the target structures. (2) The speaker’s accuracy in grammar and vocabulary. (3) The speaker’s word stress and intonation in the greeting. Zeff includes a fourth item in his rubric, which is where the teacher can offer general reflections on the relative success of the greetings in the given situation. The issue of stress and intonation can be an important factor in the delivery of greetings. In Hebrew, for instance, shalom as a greeting means either ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’, depending on the intonation. 5.3.2 The use of authentic pragmatics material

Because of the limited amount of information about TL pragmatics in the average textbook, raising awareness in this area is left largely to the language teachers (Vellenga, 2004). Fortunately, as Ishihara and Paller (2016) indicate, there are some helpful resources, such as Riddiford and Newton’s (2010) Workplace Talk in Action, based on a corpus of

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language at work. In the next chapter, there is a discussion of how to use corpora to complement the textbook offerings with regard to pragmatics (under Section 6.2 Sources for Material on Pragmatics). But what happens, especially in FL environments, where the teachers may not be knowledgeable themselves about the TL pragmatics as indicated above? Furthermore, as mentioned in Chapter 1, there are those who would favor abiding by local norms for pragmatics, as in the case of World Englishes. Assuming that there is interest among learners in receiving instruction about TL norms for pragmatics based on traditional models (e.g. the pragmatics of US and British English), then learners need explicit instruction using authentic materials that expose them to these norms, since many of the unfamiliar aspects may not be salient enough to be noticed (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996). One source of this information is websites on pragmatics, to be discussed in detail in Chapter 7. 5.3.2.1 Reviews of products and services

Teachers could encourage their learners not only to study from curricular materials developed for TL learners, but also to access material intended for NSs. Internet sites such as blogs, comments sections and message boards provide authentic examples of how NSs interact with texts and where and how they share their opinions in the back-and-forth exchanges that inevitably accompany the posting of a text. By participating in online chats, TL learners can receive feedback on their communicative efforts from those already in the TL environment, with or without accompanying metalinguistic feedback. An ideal result would be that the learners establish their own relationships, but because of the relative anonymity of many websites, learners are still free to disengage from any interactions that may become uncomfortable – an option not open to those whose only interactions with NSs occur face-to-face. While teaching at Columbia University’s Teachers College, contributing author Wyner had her students write reviews of restaurants in New York City (NYC) that they had visited and then send them to Yelp.com for posting. While the activity did not represent direct face-to-face contact, the learners mentioned that they started to feel part of the NYC community by being allowed to offer their opinions and see how people responded to them. Because there was a ‘real’ component of actually visiting a restaurant based on reviews that they had read, they felt motivated to communicate in an online thread regarding that restaurant. Writing effective reviews has a pragmatics component to it, as Vásquez (2014) has amply demonstrated in her volume on the discourse of online reviews. The writers – both NSs and NNSs – need to be mindful of the element of tact involved in review writing, for example, coupled with the desire to communicate feelings and tell the truth to their peers. In fact, the writing of reviews (e.g. of products through Amazon and elsewhere, and restaurants in Yelp listings and elsewhere) has burgeoned into a major activity where

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businesses get valuable publicity, especially if the reviews are positive. Such reviews can serve as a goldmine for examples of the pragmatics involved in how people express their views about goods and services. 5.3.2.2 Video clips, personal anecdotes and role plays

In teaching pragmatics workshops for ESL students at Baruch College in NYC, Wyner used video clips found in movies such as Mean Girls and The Joy Luck Club. While such material was inauthentic in that it was rehearsed and often exaggerated for comedic effect, Wyner still found it better than written texts because it included intonation and gestures. In like fashion, a valuable source of authentic material were anecdotes from the teacher’s own experiences. For example, while studying abroad in France, Wyner made a pragmalinguistic error by using Je suis plein, which could be interpreted to mean ‘I am pregnant’ in French, when she meant to say she had had enough to eat (J’ai assez mangé). She found that sharing her pragmatic goof was a good stimulus to get students talking in groups and with the whole class about their own experiences. Then, once the students shared their own anecdotes, there was a rich source of data to analyze. The students noted that these exercises were useful not just because they became aware of something new, but because they were then motivated to incorporate the cultural and linguistic knowledge into their own TL knowledge base. 5.4 Improving Learners’ Understanding of Teacher Talk about Pragmatics

Teaching pragmatics invariably involves some metatalk about it, most probably involving at least some metalinguistic terminology (i.e. regarding speech acts, implicature, the pragmatic functions of grammatical forms or whatever). Is this talk in the L1 of the learners? In an L2 situation, the learners would probably expect this talk to be in the TL, perhaps in simplified language. In an FL situation, on the other hand, this talk would probably be in the L1 of the learners. It may even be the case that much of the instruction is in the L1 of the learners because it is easier to understand. In addition, the learners may understand NNTs better than NTs if they have the same way of speaking the TL. As indicated in research results reported on in Chapter 3 (Section 3.4), they may, in fact, prefer NNTs as their teachers partly because they can understand their TL utterances more easily. With regard to teacher intelligibility to their students, there are strategies that teachers can use to make sure that their oral language is more comprehensible. Part of the challenge, of course, is that the teaching of pragmatics is likely to include some abstract concepts and learners may have difficulty understanding them. Even if teachers use a

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highly inductive method with lots of examples, there are certainly moments when a more deductive approach is called for and where metalanguage is necessary in order to better describe, for example, a grammatical form, such as the past progressive form of the verb. The ELF literature provides suggestions for NNTs on how to be more comprehensible to their students (adapted from Björkman, 2011; Mauranen, 2007). These strategies could also apply to NTs as well. In some ways, being intelligible is just part of good teaching. In the context of this book, it would mean using intelligibility-enhancing strategies for the purpose of underscoring the points about pragmatics: • • • • • • •

•

• • •

Self-repair – correcting their own language as they go along, when teachers are aware that they have misspoken. Rephrasing in order to clarify – saying something in another way when teachers suspect that what they are saying may be misinterpreted. Repetition – saying the same thing again, especially if there is concern that the teacher’s accent or intonation may have made it difficult for students to understand the utterance(s) the first time around. Asking direct questions in a timely fashion – using the strategy of asking questions as a way for teachers to dispel any misunderstandings. Topic negotiation – clarifying both what the teacher intends to convey and what the students are taking away from the exchange. Metadiscourse (e.g. comments with regard to the intent) – stepping back from the content in order to engage in a metaconversation about the purpose for having the conversation. Improving the organization of the utterances – determining if what is confusing the students is the order of presentation of elements in the discourse and if so, reorganizing the elements in order to resolve the problem. Signaling efforts to convey the message – flagging the key discourse markers or other means for conveying the message so that the students will better understand what the teacher is attempting to communicate. Explicitness – improving students’ comprehension by laying out explicitly what is intended, rather than just dealing with the topic implicitly. Marking topic changes – overtly marking the switching of topics with discourse markers (e.g. ‘next’, ‘second’, ‘now we come to …’) and other strategies to be sure that students are aware of the topic change. Overtly marking major points – by using discourse markers that signal the cohesion.

With regard to this last point about cohesion, I am reminded about an example of cohesion that Urquhart (1976) provided many years ago that

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letting cohesion be implicit may not work as well as overtly marking it. Urquhart’s example involved the following: The woodpecker is an aboreal bird. It bores holes in trees. vs. The woodpecker is an aboreal bird because it bores holes in trees.

His point was that students may not get that there is an implied cohesive link between the two sentences in the fi rst instance. The ambiguity is presumably cleared up with the use of the explicit cohesive marker, ‘because’. While all of the above strategies can be used both by NTs and NNTs to make their instruction more comprehensible and to assist them in conveying insights about TL pragmatics more effectively, some of the strategies may be particularly useful. Two highly useful strategies from the above list are ‘topic negotiation’ and ‘explicitness’. There are times in a language class when the teacher may make assumptions about what is learned from what is taught that are not borne out by subsequent investigation. This is all the more reason to check with students at different levels of proficiency as to what their conclusion is from a given classroom exchange involving pragmatics. Research has also found that teaching explicitly what needs to be learned with regard to some pragmatic behavior is beneficial, rather than assuming that learners will simply learn it on their own. 5.5 Assisting Learners in Becoming more Savvy about TL Pragmatics in Preparation for SA

Study abroad is seen as a valuable way to increase language learners’ exposure to TL input. Yet we need to be mindful that SA is not an automatic panacea, since the successful development of pragmatic skills depends on the actual activities in which the students engage and the exposure may not be as extensive as expected. For example, a study of Americans on SA in China underscored this reality. The study involved 31 intermediate-level American students studying Chinese in a university in Beijing. The learners were instructed in the pragmatically appropriate way to produce 24 formulaic expressions (e.g. for getting a cab, for money withdrawal, for bargaining, for ordering in a restaurant, for fi nding a toilet and for ending a phone call) (Taguchi et al., 2013). Their production was rated by NSs for appropriateness on a four-point scale both at the outset of the study and upon completion of the semester abroad. Also, at the end of the semester, a survey was administered to gather information about the learners’ perceived frequency of encounters with situations calling for the use of these formulaic expressions. While the learners showed modest gains on appropriateness and fluency, the researchers acknowledged that the production of the target formulaic expressions remained

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fairly limited – even toward the end of the semester – owing to the students’ lack of lexical and syntactic knowledge, as well as their lack of both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge. In addition, the learners’ reported frequency of encounters with situations calling for the target formulaic expressions did not correlate with gains in production of these expressions. This well-designed study demonstrated how challenging it is to get students to develop pragmatic ability and how sending them abroad is no automatic gateway to language learning. At-home programs can be as just as beneficial or more so if they consciously involve a series of processes, such as those employed in the intensive summer language programs at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT, where participants are under oath to use only the TL (Freed et al., 2004). Still, SA programs that are well designed and executed can have a significant impact on the development of pragmatics as compared to the effects of athome programs, if the abroad exposure is robust (e.g. Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2015). A recent study investigated the role of different levels of intensity of contact on the development of compliments during a six-week intensive Spanish study abroad program in Mexico (DiBartolomeo et al., 2017). Fifteen native English-speaking study abroad learners responded to an oral DCT, a pragmatic acceptability judgment task and a questionnaire on learner individual differences at the beginning of their six-week program, then received instruction on speech acts and at the end of the short-term study abroad experience responded to the same measures. Whereas the student’s reported intensity of contact with NSs of the local speech community was not significantly related to TL pragmatic development during this short period, there were measurable changes in their complimenting. Their elicited complimenting behavior reflected more that of NSs and there was a shift in orientation from more speaker- to more hearer-oriented compliments. What does robust exposure actually mean? For one thing, it means that even if the SA is somewhat ‘sheltered’, such as by having professors from the home university traveling with the students to the site, there is substantial exposure to local speakers of the TL. While it is often the case that the professors who agree to accompany groups may be L1 speakers of the TL language, these professors may have lived for some time in the home environment of the students, where the TL is an FL. Consequently, these professors would need to be mindful that their pragmatics may have inadvertently shifted even subtly toward that of the students in their own acculturation process. It also means that the programs have to have checks and balances to ensure that the students are fully experiencing the TL community rather than spending the bulk of their time interacting in their L1 with peers from their SA program. What are some of the features of an SA program that could make a difference in helping to develop TL pragmatic ability among students? One thing is to give FL students contact with NTs, which they may not be getting at home in their FL context. In fact, it may be beneficial for

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students to make it a point to study both with NTs and NNTs in at-home programs. For example, when I learned French at a private secondary school (Phillips Academy, Andover, MA) in the late 1950s, I had two classes per day, one with an NT and one with an NNT. In retrospect I can now see that the two teachers complemented each other beautifully, as they each provided what they were strong in with regard to the TL, as well as both delivering the standard curriculum. The course at Andover did not introduce writing until year 2, so year 1 was completely oral. Having an NT then helped me and my fellow students to develop nativelike pronunciation because at the age of 15 to 16, this was still possible. The NNT worked with us diligently on mastering the grammar, among other things. In terms of living among TL speakers in an FL environment, an SA context provides an easy way to arrange for a host family. Of course, it is crucial to find a family where the members are willing and able to interact regularly with the student guest. Ideally, the family has been debriefed as to how to interact with the guest in order to help this person feel accepted and so as to facilitate communication. Unfortunately, my son, Daniel, experienced a homestay in his SA program in Quito, Ecuador 20 years ago, which involved a couple who treated the homestay simply as a way to get extra income and relegated our son to eating his meals alone in the kitchen. Their teenage daughter was considered ‘off limits’, so Daniel rarely interacted with her. After several months of this, he found an apartment to rent in the city with another student from the program. Presumably, the intervening years have seen an improvement in the nature of such SA homestays. A profitable SA program can also include access to a TL conversation club, field trips, participation in conferences in Spanish, volunteer activities (e.g. in orphanages, medical centers and other places), outings to cinemas and theaters, and guided visits to various public offices (as in the Guanajuato program described by Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 2015). Students can be required to speak the TL in these formal and nonformal settings. Of course, having access to such exposures alone will not ensure the development of pragmatic ability. Rather, classroom follow-up in which the students have an opportunity to report back on the language behavior that they observed and on their own challenges in communicating appropriately provides an important means to reinforce the learning of TL pragmatics. Students can ask questions about what they might have expected to be the cultural norms compared to what they experienced to be the case. The point is that pedagogical intervention both prior to and during the SA experience can make a difference in pragmatic development (see Cohen & Shively, 2007; Shively, 2010). 5.6 Teaching Learners about TL Norms

The last section of this chapter will look at various means for teaching learners about TL norms. It will start by raising the question of which TL

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norms to use. Then, we will consider, in order, failures to abide by NS norms, tone of voice as an indicator of attitude, the use of an observational toolkit, and learners as data gatherers in order to improve both their knowledge and that of their instructors as to just how TL pragmatics might play themselves out in the given context. Finally, attention will be given to support for learners in their making of pragmalinguistic choices. 5.6.1 Determining which TL norms to use

For starters, even if NS norms are the reference for TL instruction, it is important to note that while many NSs may have deeper knowledge about pragmatics than NNSs, they themselves may not perform in a pragmatically appropriate way. Candidates in the turgid 2016 US presidential campaign at times demonstrated a blatant disregard for pragmatic conventions, especially the Republican nominee turned president. This point is worth making, lest we assume that just because there are NS norms, NSs will abide by them. Of course, it is possible that pragmatic norms may shift to accommodate the ‘new normal’ for language used in communications by President Trump and by members of his White House staff. And we have also noted that NNSs may choose not to abide by TL norms out of a sense of agency. As already pointed out in this book, conceptions of TL or NS norms may vary widely across and within countries, especially with regard to English language (e.g. African-American Vernacular English), speech communities within a given country (e.g. Afrikaans-English in South Africa) and across formats (e.g. internet English). Given the spread of World Englishes (as showcased in Marlina & Giri, 2014), many TL speakers have not found it necessary to reach optimal levels of NS interactional behavior. In addition, NSs often do not expect TL-like English from NNSs, and by accepting deviations from the norm, they make non-TL speech acceptable (House & Kasper, 2000: 111). In fact, non-TL use can elicit positive responses from NSs, especially when it is considered ‘innovative, creative, or even charming’ (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014: 76). For example, let us say that in the given TL culture, female coworkers often send emojis to one another in emails, but do not do that with male coworkers, regardless of age. It would be important to point out this behavior explicitly to learners and to find authentic examples to present to them so that they can feel comfortable with a range of communicative options from which they can pick and choose. A study of EFL teaching in Japan included in its recommendations not just teaching NS-based pragmatics, but rather making Japanese students aware that pragmatics will vary from culture to culture, and from variety to variety (Kidd, 2016). So, in an ELF world, where mainly NNSs from various contexts are coming together in different contexts, a significant part of intercultural communicative competence would then be to develop an understanding of the way in which language and culture come into play

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to effectively create and exchange meaning. Within this framework, building knowledge and sensitivity to the pragmatic features of both the L1 and L2 cultures and culturally-shaped identities prepares students for potentially diverse sets of values and world views expressed through different linguistic codes. Given that Japanese English speakers often use English not for interacting with NSs, but for interacting with other NNSs, Kidd would suggest that the needs of these learners are better served by exposure to many varieties of English and pragmatic styles beyond American and British, such as Indian, Vietnamese and French (pers. comm., Joshua Kidd, 26 June 2016). To this end, Kidd would like to see NNTs more highly valued and embraced as role models for English learning while also raising awareness of international communication. 5.6.2 Encounters with NS norms resulting in pragmatic failure

NS norms may be invisible to NNSs, but they become very visible as a result of pragmatic failure. Here is one example: knowing how to respond to the proprietress upon leaving a restaurant in the mountains of Japan, after being thanked for having eaten there. As already noted in Chapter 2, I was oblivious to the limitations of doo itashimashite ‘you’re welcome’ until using it upon leaving such a Japanese restaurant. If this were an American restaurant, the proprietor would probably say, ‘Thanks so much’ and the patron would respond with ‘Thank you. It was great’, or something to that effect. What is a clear example of formulaic speech in Japanese is that the proprietor always says, Arigato gozaimashita ‘Thank you’. After seeing the look on the proprietress’ face and having my Japanese colleagues laugh at me, I found out from them that my response was totally inappropriate. They informed me that I was to say nothing, perform a slight bow, say domo ‘thanks’ or say gochisousama deshita ‘I enjoyed the meal’. I had exited restaurants in Japan many times in a dozen trips to Japan without paying attention to what NSs did. So, armed with this new information, students of Japanese could, in fact, try to sit at a table near the door to the restaurant so that they could overhear what NSs say and/or do in the restaurant-leaving situation (see Figure 5.1). In another, nonverbal case in a restaurant in Tokyo where I was eating dinner with a former student of mine who was living in Japan at the time, I poured all of my chicken-vegetable dish on top of my rice which I had dumped from my rice bowl onto my plate. Two waitresses promptly descended upon me and removed my plate altogether, appearing shortly thereafter with a new plate of chicken and vegetables, and with a new bowl of rice. The nonverbal message in this case was clear: one does not put the whole chicken-vegetable dish on top of the rice, as one might do in a Chinese restaurant in the USA. Therefore, learning the pragmatics of a TL community includes familiarity with the acceptable patterns for eating, especially in restaurants.

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Figure 5.1 Students observing NS restaurant-leaving behavior

Of particular benefit to FL learners lacking a readily available context within which to learn, language teachers could help such learners develop pragmatic awareness by having them compare their performance with that of an NS. Students could be asked to reflect on a few questions: (1) How would you perform pragmatically in the given TL situation? (2) How would you compare that behavior to how an NS might perform? (3) In what ways would any departure from the NS norms in your behavior be an expression of agency on your part? This kind of discussion would open up the issue of resistance to norms in cases where learners know what they are ‘supposed’ to do but choose not to, as opposed to my use of doo itashimashite above in leaving a restaurant, which resulted from lack of knowledge as to the normative behavior. Here is where the teachers’ expertise may be helpful in providing a broad base of information. Some learners may have refi ned grammatical proficiency, which makes it easier for them to understand subtle grammatical distinctions that have an important pragmalinguistic role to play. Yet, they may not be so adept at observing how the target culture actually works in situations such as leaving a restaurant. Receiving coaching from their teacher in how to observe local behavior may increase learners’ motivation to improve their TL pragmatics. This presupposes that the teachers already have this fi ne-tuned pragmatic knowledge of the target culture themselves. If they do not, then this is all the more reason to rely on NS or near-NS informants, whether in the local environment or through the internet.

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5.6.3 Teaching about tone and attitude in pragmatic encounters

One challenging element in the perception of pragmatics is that of tone of voice, as it reflects attitude in pragmatic encounters (Beebe & Waring, 2002, 2004). Pragmatic tone has been broken down into the following three types (Beebe & Waring, 2004: 236): (1) assertive tone (via going off-record) (‘I just wanted to know when the professor is free’.); (2) intense tone (‘You’re so rude’. ‘I’ll never come here again’.); (3) sarcastic tone (‘You’re really kind’.). NNSs and NSs who are less attuned to the emotions of others may not understand whether an utterance is delivered straight or whether the speaker is being facetious, cynical, angry or perhaps sarcastic, especially in asynchronous internet-based communication devoid of emojis, where the interlocutor cannot rely on facial expressions or gestures as a means for correctly interpreting the intended meaning. In addition, learners may want to check out their own attitude toward the situation, given the role of agency in pragmatics. They may not be so receptive to what it is they are being asked to respond to or engage in. This attitudinal self-check may consist of placing themselves on a continuum from being totally open to engaging in a given speech act on the one end to having a closed and totally negative response to it on the other. 5.6.4 Developing an observational toolkit for learners

It might be valuable to create an Observational Toolkit for Learners as a way of instilling within language students the importance of observation. The problem is that learners can only attend to so much information at a time. How will they know which stimuli to focus on in terms of pragmatic information? They may be highly motivated but not good at determining where the key pragmatic information lies. Teachers could, for example, design a type of jigsaw activity where the students are each assigned to observe different aspects of spoken discourse and to report back to the group, an activity that results in a pooling of observations into a joint observation report. For example, Wyner has used such an activity to accompany a video clip from The Joy Luck Club where, in groups, some students were responsible for observing nonverbal behavior while others were focused only on what a given actor said. Rather than attempting to notice everything at once, the students focused their observations on, say, a single aspect of an interaction that led to pragmatic failure. Then, they would come together as a group to view and analyze the interaction as a whole. 5.6.5 Having learners be data gatherers

Teachers can also play a significant role in heightening student awareness as to similarities and diff erences in both sociopragmatic and

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pragmalinguistic behavior across cultural groups. For example, if NNTs encourage their students to get feedback from NSs with regard to pragmalinguistic niceties and sociopragmatic realities, this can be a means for not putting the teachers on the spot. The students act as data gatherers and bring those experiences into the classroom for analysis. The one caveat here is that it is helpful to get input from more than one NS, since NSs will not necessarily agree fully with each other as to what constitutes appropriate pragmatic behavior in given situations, which is part of what makes the data gathering so fascinating. One definition of pragmatics refers to it as ‘interpersonal rhetoric – the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social actors who do not just need to get things done but must attend to their interpersonal relationships with other participants at the same time’ (Kasper & Rose, 2001: 2). This defi nition actually underscores the fact that NSs can get things done pragmatically in various ways. The challenge then for learners is to be both actors – however unsure they might be as to their lines – and data gatherers at the same time. The way one study had SA students in Toledo, Spain be both performers and data gatherers was to get permission from the US university’s institutional review board to have the students use a concealed tape recorder to gather data from interactions with their host family, with friends and in service encounters (Shively, 2011). While in the Shively study, the data were collected so that after the SA ended, the researcher could chart the students’ progress in their use of pragmatics, it might be possible to have the students access these data along the way. 5.6.6 Supporting learners in making appropriate pragmalinguistic choices

In an effort to showcase what it means to support learners in making appropriate pragmalinguistic choices, let us focus just on cursing. Teachers can help instill in their learners a sense of reflection and responsibility for pragmalinguistics in making appropriate choices of words and phrases in order that these learners do not accidentally hurt their chances to develop deep relationships by inadvertently annoying their interlocutors or even making enemies. Many learners get their TL input from internet media, and so are exposed to songs and TV shows where they may be unaware that a speaker’s particular pragmalinguistic choices are not necessarily normative ones, but are tied specifically to an individual, to a subculture, to a specific gender, to a given socioeconomic group or to some other subgrouping. It can be the teachers’ role to point out to their learners when pragmalinguistic choices are not normative ones. It could be helpful for teachers to go over the common curses in the TL and to discuss the severity attached to their use depending on the interlocutors and the situation. The learners might then be aware of what the various curses mean and have a better sense of which to use when, if

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at all. An obvious caveat here is that the classroom culture must support such an endeavor in order for teachers to broach the topic of cursing (as suggested in Section 1.2.7) and to point out to students when it might be appropriate for certain speakers and writers to use given curse words. Assuming it is acceptable to do so, then it becomes the learners’ option to determine whether they wish to use such language in their own interactional situations, especially if it is crucial for them in a given community of practice, such as among factory workers (see Section 8.2.1). The following are four anecdotes to help make the case for teaching how to curse in the TL. The first three illustrate how ignorance may certainly not be bliss and the fourth demonstrates a potential benefit from knowing how to curse. The fi rst example is provided by contributing author Wyner, who reported that some of her young Italian male students in New York used the N-word for black people taking their cue from rap songs, without being aware of the word’s painful etymological history and how it was not meant for use by those outside the TL subculture. So Wyner made it a point to instruct them on this matter. My wife and I once had a situation in Jerusalem where we were in a hurry to drive to the theater when we encountered a cab driver blocking a narrow one-way street while he waited for a woman to go up to her apartment to get money to pay him. So I got out of our car, approached the taxi driver, and requested in polite Hebrew that the driver pull up onto the curb so that we could get by. The driver responded that he was unwilling to do that. So I said, Leich le azazel ‘Go to hell’, without realizing the pragmatic weight of this curse in Hebrew. The driver quickly jumped out of his car and came straight at me with the intention of inflicting bodily harm. I immediately backed down from my request in order to diff use the situation and also learned a lesson about cursing in Hebrew. I had never tried that particular curse before, and given the response, was reluctant to use it subsequently. It would have helped to be instructed as to the force of various curses used in Hebrew. One of my female undergraduate students at the University of Minnesota who was just back from SA in Amman, Jordan, bemoaned the fact that she had not been taught Arabic curses before embarking on her SA experience. In the evenings when she was walking along the streets of Amman, men would use off-color language in catcalls to her. Because she did not understand the expressions that were shouted at her, she was unable to determine if they were threatening in nature and warranted wariness or even defensive action on her part. In the Latin world, catcalls may take the form of piropos ‘flirtatious remarks’, such as Que curvas y no tengo frenos ‘What curves and I don’t have breaks’, which is meant to be cute but not offensive. As an example of where knowing how to curse may come in handy, contributing author Wyner recounts that when she felt that she was being overcharged by a motorcycle taxi drivers in Vietnam, she would start

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repeating Vietnamese curses without being 100% certain of their pragmatic effect. Her string of invectives always made the drivers laugh, smile and lower the price for her. She adds that to this day she is still not sure if they felt she was fluent because she could curse and therefore they could not get away with overcharging her, or if they merely thought it was cute that a white woman on the streets of Saigon was cursing like a sailor. Another caveat concerns to the situation illustrated by the above example of rapper language. Instruction with regard to cursing needs to deal with the issue of whether it is appropriate for NNSs to use the same language that NSs do. It may be that NSs in the given TL community – especially in certain age groups – may fi nd it offensive for NNSs to use that language, while it is perfectly acceptable for the in-group to do so (Janicki, 1985). 5.7 Discussion and Conclusions

This chapter has broached the topic of raising awareness about pragmatics. It has also looked at the value of pragmatics for inclusion in teacher development programs. Furthermore, the topic of getting appropriate pragmatics materials has been considered, with much more to say on this below, in Chapter 6. Some attention was also given to improving learners’ understanding of teacher talk about pragmatics. Especially in FL situations, students may fi nd NNTs easier to understand than NTs. Of course, unless students remain in an FL situation, it may ultimately be important for them to accustom themselves to understanding NSs who are not speaking so as to be understood by NNSs. The chapter also looked at the issue of pragmatics in SA. The author remembers vividly a complaint from one of his former students after an SA experience. She had become so used to having her teachers at home patiently giving her sympathetic ‘teacher talk’ (i.e. simplified for easy comprehension and responses) that when she was faced with actual NSs in the country environment, she was in shock as to how unsympathetic they appeared and how impatient they seemed to be with her and her NNS ways. In addition, the chapter considered teacher efforts to get learners to relate to NS norms. Assuming the local attitude is that such norms are to be aspired to, then teachers have an important role as diagnosticians for their students – providing them pragmatics that are likely to be useful given their proficiency levels and both current and future needs as users of the TL. In addition, the importance of explicit instruction for learners was underscored. Knowledge of pragmatics includes not just knowing the pragmalinguistic forms to use (e.g. whether to use ‘very’ or ‘really’ in the expression of an apology), but also the sociopragmatically appropriate situations in which to use these forms (e.g. knowing when, in fact, an apology is called

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for). Learners may have at their disposal the appropriate words and expressions that NSs would use most readily, but not know the sociopragmatically appropriate situations in which to use them. For example, it may be inappropriate for a given interlocutor to broach a particular topic with another individual because of their relative ages, status, gender, their work relationship (if relevant) or some other reason. It may be close to impossible for interlocutors to arrive at the pragmatic insights needed for the given situation if left to their own devices. Explicit instruction, however, may clarify this matter in a most salient way, so as to avoid future pragmatic failure. It is important to get that SA experiences are not an automatic panacea for pragmatic development. It is possible to go abroad and yet exist in an almost cocoon-like bubble where the L1 is spoken regularly and where adherence to the L1 culture is the norm. SA learners need to avoid such situations if they want maximum exposure to TL pragmatics while in SA (for suggestions, see Paige et al., 2006). Exposure is not sufficient, however. It is valuable to be coached on NS tone, on what to look for in terms of TL speakers’ behavior and what to be observant about and on how to interpret speech acts in the TL (such as cursing, teasing and so forth). Notes (1) Lauren Wyner is currently the Academic Manager at the Brooklyn School of Languages, Brooklyn, NY. (2) http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/apologies/index.html (accessed 7 January 2018). (3) See Ishihara and Paller for suggested guidelines as to how teachers could provide metapragmatic information about when certain expressions are appropriate and why. (4) The apology study published in 1986 did not include the alternatives for expressing an apology in Hebrew, although these pragmalinguistic forms had been encountered in the data.

6 Ideas for Teaching Pragmatics and for Motivating Learners

While the last chapter covered a number of general issues regarding the teaching of pragmatics, this chapter focuses in on pragmatics materials, both in terms of the sources and the challenges associated with accessing these materials. Then we grapple with the issue of getting this material to be part of the learners’ repertoire. In addition, we will consider various ideas for motivating learners to engage in the learning of pragmatics. Ideally such efforts will make learners savvier about pragmatics. Being savvy includes their having some control over what to do about TL norms for pragmatic behavior – which ones to abide by and which ones perhaps less so, depending on the sense of agency that the given learners have. 6.1 Toward Developing TL Pragmatic Ability in Learners

In previous chapters, comparisons have been made between NTs and NNTs in terms of their relative strengths in teaching TL pragmatics. Comparisons have also been made between L2 and FL contexts with respect to the learning of pragmatics. Let us keep these comparisons in mind while discussing efforts to enhance TL pragmatic development, since at times they may come into play. The following is a series of ideas for developing TL pragmatic ability, based largely on the responses from the international survey of NTs and NNTs (described in Chapter 4) regarding how they reported handling TL pragmatics. In numerous cases I have expanded upon these ideas in order to render them more operational. This section is divided into ‘Sources for pragmatics materials’ and ‘Means for learning TL pragmatics’. The means involve a series of tasks, starting with an analysis of language forms and content, and including a number of different kinds of tasks. Explicit examples are given along the way so as to make the suggestions more implementable.

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6.2 Sources for Material on Pragmatics

With regard to the sources for TL pragmatics materials, there are several issues that need to be aired at the outset. The first is with regard to authenticity. How authentic should the materials be? The problem with genuinely authentic material is that they may overwhelm the learners. Therefore, for example, while it sounds appealing to use actual oral interactions in order to have learners experience pragmatics in action, they may come away from such encounters not knowing what to focus on. Hence, there may be a real advantage in looking at idealized interactions where certain key pragmatic features are highlighted for easy comprehension and production. Belz (2007) admits that pragmatics in natural data often shows up in ways that are imperceptible to L2 learners. The fact is that in the real world, at worst pragmatics shows up as oblique and at best as a bit confusing. Hence, language teachers may achieve greater success by using simulated and simplified conversations, as long as these offerings provide viable and even fruitful means for learners to engage more productively in TL pragmatics interactions. This would seem appropriate at least in the early stages of pragmatics instruction. Once learners are more proficient in the TL in general and in terms of their performance of pragmatics – both at the levels of perception and production – then accessing authentic material may make better sense. A second issue is that while TV shows are always promoted as a good source from which to learn pragmatics, they often involve highly rehearsed scripts, not like in real life. A recent book on the power of talk in a digital age (Turkle, 2015) made the point that teenagers and young adults are wary of face-to-face communication and even of phone calling precisely because of the likelihood and even inevitability of botching up the interaction by saying something pragmatically inappropriate (in this case, in their L1). The sense would be that human communication left unedited and unguarded presents a minefield of potential problems. For this reason, Turkle argues that youth prefer texting, since they can edit what they communicate. Heavy scripting and rehearsals also characterize movies. A study by Tatsuki and Nishizawa (2005), for example, compared compliments in English-language films and interviews to those in naturally-occurring data. The researchers found syntactic similarity across the venues, supporting the notion that compliments were formulaic in nature. They also found rejoinders to be fairly similar as well. But whereas the pragmalinguistic material in films and TV interviews was found to be a fairly reliable model for actual behavior, the sociopragmatic features (such as the pragmatics of male vs. female talk) were seen as less clear-cut. For instance, in films, it was males who gave and received more compliments than women. In the Larry King Live interview show data, males gave and received as many compliments as females, whereas in naturally-occurring data females gave and received more compliments than males. Also, in the interview data, there were few

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compliments about appearance. Instead the compliments were for acts and attributes. In addition, the media inflated adjectives such as ‘terrific’ and ‘incredible’. The limitations of this study were that the naturally-occurring data were mostly from female graduate students, with limited male-to-male interactions. In addition, these data were from field observation only. Nonetheless, the main conclusion from this study could be that the media present a less boorish image of males than the non-media reality might reveal. Now let us look at a list of suggested sources for pragmatics data: •

Corpora: It may be useful to access corpora in order to get a sense of how pragmatics works. Two examples are the Corpus of Contemporary American English1 and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). 2 The real challenge is to isolate just the information being sought without being inundated with much more information than desired. Also, the wise use of a corpus calls for interpretation of the material. For example, ‘I’m sorry’ may not function as an apology in the given context in the corpus. It may be used as a comment, as in ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’. Ishihara and Paller (2016) point out that while some textbooks have already based their English material on corpora and may even have indicated the frequency of expressions in the given corpus, the pragmatics exercises themselves may be decontextualized, leaving it up to the teacher to give guidance as to how to use the expressions in meaningful contexts. Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2015a) described how to use a spoken corpus of academic language to develop teaching materials for pragmatics based on authentic language. They provided a step-by-step guide for working with a corpus for pragmatics teaching in an English for academic purposes program and illustrated the process with a unit on agreeing, disagreeing and making or requesting clarification during an academic discussion. They focused on agreements and disagreements because of their inclusion in a range of levels in ELT listening and speaking textbooks. They added clarifications because speakers use self- and other-clarifications to avoid disagreeing or to postpone disagreeing until after speakers’ positions are clear. They pointed out that in academic discussions, although ‘I agree’ frequently indicates agreement, it may also occur in disagreements; in contrast, ‘I disagree’ is much rarer, presumably owing to its direct negative impact. Textbook presentations often present ‘I agree/disagree’ as a pair without information about frequency or distribution. These language educators contended that students are not likely to learn these expressions from context for two reasons: (1) they may not have many opportunities to participate in academic discussions with NSs or with proficient NNSs of English, and thus lack both the possible input and the experience that accrues from such discussions; and (2) if they have the opportunity to engage in such discussions, their

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attention is likely to be on the content of other speakers’ turns rather than on the form. They showed how to use MICASE in conjunction with textbooks to identify pragmatic routines for speech acts and how to extract appropriate language samples and adapt them for classroom use. They selected six clear examples of each of the target expressions. Clear examples were those that could be followed without reading the entire transcript, had relatively comprehensible topics, and included an unambiguous use of the expression and a clear referent. Some examples required slight modification to increase their utility as conversation models. Some of the excerpts still had conversational characteristics that were not the focus of instruction. To enhance the salience of the corpus examples, they deleted nonsequential turns from multiparty conversations, substituted common words for technical words to increase comprehensibility (e.g. ‘sunfish’ for centrarchid in a biology transcript) and reduced repetition or repair. They demonstrated how to use the language samples to help students notice how expressions are used in context and to provide explicit statements about form: Example 1: After you have read the dialogues, consider how you know the speakers think the same way. How do the speakers show agreement with one another? Underline the expressions that show the students think the same thing. Example 2: In both of these conversations, one of the speakers expressed disagreement. Notice that neither of them is a direct disagreement. Instead, people usually disagree by using the same expressions they use for agreements … except they add the word but at the end. This allows them to provide a reason for the disagreement. In other words, a polite way to disagree is by agreeing fi rst!

They also provided examples of interactive production activities in formats that approximated conversation. The students in this case were high-intermediate ESL students. These language educators suggested that with a brief orientation, advanced learners could access the corpus themselves. They felt it might be instructive for learners to discover for themselves how infrequently ‘I disagree’ is actually used. The limited number (only nine occurrences in 1.8 million words) is an eye-opener. While MICASE might also be appropriate for EFL students preparing to study at university campuses in North America, they note that other regional corpora could be used for EFL students with different intended destinations. In a complement piece, Bardovi-Harlig and Mossman (2016) focused just on agreements and selected pragmatics material not just from the MICASE corpus, but also from the Santa Barbara Corpus of

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•

•

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Spoken American English3 and from a corpus of language from TV shows.4 Their aim was to demonstrate in a detailed fashion how teachers could go about providing meaningful, motivating and accurate TL input in a way that would be consistent with SLA processes. The steps included selecting the corpus, identifying pragmatic routines, extracting examples, preparing excerpts for teaching, developing activities to improve learners’ noticing of pragmatic features and developing production activities. They illustrated how textbooks tend to present expressions that are longer than what speakers actually use (e.g. ‘Would you mind if …?’ vs. ‘You mind if …?’ ‘Could you give me a hand?’ vs. ‘Give me a hand?’). A follow-up study demonstrated that a judicious combination of teacher-developed corpus-based materials for speech act clarity and corpus searches by learners aimed at noticing pragmatic routines was more effective than just having learners do their own corpus searches (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2017). Collecting pragmatics samples for instructional purposes from NSs of the TL, such as through role play. A helpful example is given in the literature of how examples of responses to gratitude were collected, to be passed on to FL learners of that language. This demonstrative study explored responses to gratitude elicited from 12 NSs of American English through 32 open role plays (Gesuato, 2016a). It reported on their frequency of occurrence and the way that gratitude-specific strategies were combined across situations, depending on social distance and the power relationship between the interlocutors. The researcher found five head act strategies: (1) agreeing/confi rming – confi rming the provision of the benefit, acknowledging the receipt and the adequacy of the expression of gratitude; (2) positive evaluation – expressing some view about the benefit (e.g. ‘glad to hear that’); (3) making the other feel good (e.g. ‘you’re welcome’); (4) minimizing indebtedness by reassuring that there is no need to reciprocate (e.g. ‘no problem’); and (5) reciprocating (e.g. ‘thank you’). The researcher also elaborated on the supporting moves exemplifying these five strategies. Providing learners with sample lists or recordings of utterances that can be used in different situations for various functions. It would be convenient for students to be able to access video or audio clips of TL speakers delivering speech acts such as requests, apologies or compliments in illustrative situations, such as is provided in a new corpus of Spanish speech acts (Vacas Matos, 2017) and in the CARLA pragmatics websites for Japanese and for Spanish (for more on these sources, see Chapter 7). Using scenes from TV or films, chosen carefully to highlight pragmatics at play in reasonably realistic situations. It may be a challenge to find

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such scenes. Let us take one short interaction from Friends as an example. It is from ‘The One with the East German Laundry Detergent’5: Scene: The Launderama. Rachel is there, waiting for Ross. An old woman takes Rachel’s clothes off the machine and begins loading it with her things. WOMAN: RACH: WOMAN: RACH: WOMAN:

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Comin’ through. Move, move. Oh, ‘scuse me. I was kinda using that machine. Yeah, well, now you’re kinda not. But I saved it. I put my basket on top. Oh, I’m sorry, is that your basket? It’s really pretty. Unfortunately, I don’t see suds.

First of all, it is not easy to find scenes that really display pragmatics in action. In order to find this one, I checked through the scripts of two movies before arriving at this segment. Second, the interactions usually call for some explanations in order for learners to pick up on the intended humor. In this scene, Rachel is annoyed because an elderly woman takes her washing machine at the laundromat. Her ‘’scuse me’ is not meant as an apology by any means, but as an interjection with a certain annoyance attached to it. She uses a slight hedge to indicate it was her machine since her clothes were in a basket on top of the machine: ‘I was kinda using that machine’. The woman’s reply is meant to be funny: ‘Yeah, well, now you’re kinda not’. It is funny because it copies her hedge back, in a feisty way that would probably not mirror real life. In real life, the woman would probably say, ‘Oh, sorry. I’ll use another machine’. But it serves as one of the many humorous quips that often prevail in sitcoms like this one. Traditionally, and perhaps now a thing of the past, such sitcom moments were followed by canned, automatic laughter so that the viewers would get that it was meant to be funny. Although a bit unrealistic, this entertaining interaction at the laundromat still has learnable features in it. Finding material on YouTube and other social media sites: There is no question that the selection of useful pragmatics material takes time. If a written version is to be used, it needs to be transcribed. That is the advantage of accessing actual scripts to movies and TV shows, as was done in the Friends example above. Another approach to using movies is that of Hiranoi (2017), who found that taking film clips from a popular Japanese movie, such as Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World (2004), and providing subtitles in English has been a motivator for her university students.6 The fact that the students are already familiar with the film and its dialogue heightens their interest in how the same dialogue would be in English. Of course, if such an approach is to be used to teach pragmatics, then the translation needs

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to be sensitive to just how the Japanese concepts are conveyed in order to be appropriate for similar interactions in US culture. Provided with this information, the students could then act out the interactions in a way that would work in the US context for comparable interlocutors. Using material from an actor (or other persona) that students admire and are willing to imitate (orally or in writing): While this is easy to suggest, finding such material can be very time-consuming. For example, after deciding that I wanted to find cuts from comedy routines by Robin Williams and Chris Rock, the ones that I found had too many obscenities to reproduce for instructional purposes. I guess if the purpose were to show how cursing laces much of this material, they would be perfect. I then looked for movie scenes but went through the screenplays of six movies (Play It Again, Sam, Good Morning Vietnam, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Graduate, My Cousin Vinny and Good Will Hunting) before fi nding usable material in One Fine Day,7 in an interaction between Melanie (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Jack (George Clooney): MELANIE: We have a major problem with our kids. They’re okay, but they can’t stay there. They have to be picked up right now. JACK: Okay. M: Can you do it? J: Me? Now? M: I would definitely jeopardize my career and by extension, my entire life if I picked them up now. J: Well, I would defi nitely jeopardize my career and by extension, my entire life if I picked them up now. M: Okay, but your press conference isn’t until five, right? J: Yeah. M: My presentation is at two. J: Okay, I’ve got to see this lady Elaine Lieberman about some information I need. M: Couldn’t you do that on the phone? J: Yeah, I— M: Great. J: Well, is there anybody else you could call? M: I wouldn’t be asking you if there were anyone else I could call. J: Yeah. M: Look, how about if I watch them both from, say, three o’clock until your press conference ends if you’ll watch them both from now until three?

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J: M: J: M: J: M: J: M: J: M:

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You’re asking me for help? It would appear that way, wouldn’t it? I’ll agree if you say, ‘Jack, please be my Knight in Shining Armor’. Jack, don’t be a shithead. Go rescue our kids. This is hard for you, isn’t it? Are you agreeing or not? You know, you’re not the only one with a day. I’ve got a day, too. Sorry. I’ll meet you and the kids in my office lobby at Rockefeller Center at 3:15. Fine. Fine.

There is defi nitely pragmatics at play in this interaction. Jack is miffed that Melanie is making a request that he take care of her little boy as well as his little daughter, as if he does not have other things to do. He is being sarcastic when he repeats word-for-word her ‘Well, I would defi nitely jeopardize my career and by extension, my entire life if I picked them up now’. He is put off by her career-woman, ‘I’ve got things under control’ stance, since he feels that she really does not have things under control. He rubs it in by saying that he will agree if she asks him to be her knight in shining armor. At this point, she loses it a bit and calls him ‘a shithead’. He then teases her a bit more by suggesting that it is hard for her to ask this favor of him. He ultimately reminds her that he has a day too, but in the end he agrees under certain conditions. This interaction could serve as an example of how learners could take on both of the roles, doing their best to assume the appropriate tone and attitude attached to each utterance. Short vignettes depicting scenes in real life, such as one where a person criticizes a friend. These would be written by the teacher or perhaps by the students and translated into the TL.

FRIEND #1: Hey, how are you doing? FRIEND #2: I’m OK. How are you? F #1: Things are good. I just had something I wanted to share with you and I hope you won’t take offense. It’s about your joking a lot when we are together. I know you mean well, but I think that sometimes your attempts to be funny don’t work so well. They sometimes just distract me and make me wonder whether you are actually listening to what I’m saying, or just thinking about ways to be funny.

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Oh, wow. I didn’t realize you took it that way. I think you’re usually too serious, so I just want to liven things up a little. Thanks for letting me know it bothers you. I’ll try to tone it down. I don’t want it to come between us in our friendship. Thanks so much!

In this interaction, the fi rst friend is really making an effort not to come across as overly critical and unpleasant. The second friend is also taking the criticism very well. An alternate scenario could have friend #2 taking issue with the criticism: F #2: What? I think you are overreacting. I don’t think I’m overdoing it with my attempts at humor. I just like to keep things light if possible since you tend to be so heavy about things. Life is more enjoyable with humor added. You just need to get off it.

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(In L2 contexts) instructing the students to write down speech acts heard in the dorms, in the cafeteria, in sororities or fraternities and in coffee shops. Of course, it may be difficult to do so accurately. It might be a lot easier to audio-record the interactions, but then it might mean having to get permission from the participants.8 Dialogues from textbooks may provide materials for the study of pragmatics, although often such dialogues are limited in the range of pragmatics material and in the depth of coverage of, say, a given speech act, such as complimenting. For example, the textbook indicates that ‘I’m sorry’ is the form to use for apologizing, but little or no effort is made to distinguish minor apologies (‘sorry’) from more elaborate ones (‘I extend my most sincere apologies …’). Also little or no attention is given to the role of intensifiers such as ‘very’ or ‘really’, where in the USA, ‘very’ in an apology may indicate a show of etiquette (‘I’m very sorry to inform you that your time is up’) while ‘really’ signals regret (‘I’m really sorry about bumping into you’).9 In addition, textbooks do not usually provide the full set of possible apology-specific strategies, which include the expression of apology, an acknowledgement of responsibility, an explanation or excuse, an offer of repair and the promise of non-recurrence. Whereas the suggested guidelines for how to make textbook material more productive for the development of pragmatics by Ishihara and Paller (2016) were targeting the speech act of disagreements in English, they could be applied easily enough to apologies as well. Ishihara and Paller would ask teachers to provide metapragmatic information regarding when certain expressions are appropriate and why. The learners would need to know what situations call for apologies and the

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preferred ways to do this, as well as the stakes involved in apologizing or not. The following is an example of a query that a learner might ask the language teacher regarding requesting in English: I noticed that an NS friend softened a request to our professor to make it sound better – ‘Prof. Jones, I know you are busy but I was wondering if you would have some time to meet with me tomorrow morning. I really need to discuss my term paper with you’. I’m practicing my requests to people like that so it doesn’t sound like I’m being bossy, giving orders.

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Articles and ads: Online articles from numerous websites and hardcopy articles from newspapers and magazines, as well as ads can be sources of information on pragmatics, but the question is the extent to which learners left to their own devices are capable of appropriately identifying and, more importantly, interpreting correctly the pragmatics in this material. Perhaps advanced learners are able to do this, but less proficient learners may need assistance from NSs in order to see the role of pragmatics in the material. Ads, for instance, tend to be very carefully written. They use words meticulously – often involving puns – in order to attract the kind of attention they want. Journal articles on pragmatics: Published articles on pragmatics may possibly be a source of information. Of more limited usefulness, perhaps, are research articles where fi ndings are partial and not really meant for immediate application by learners. Such fi ndings may need to be distilled and perhaps simplified. On the other hand, there are numerous studies that do provide readily usable information. For instance, in a study conducted at a linguistics institute in the Philippines, Cui (2012: 756) described the speech act set of expressing gratitude and demonstrated how native English speakers expressed gratitude: In addition to expressing the simple function of thanking (‘Thank you so much’), [NSs] regularly expected other functions such as complimenting (‘You made just the perfect choice’), reassuring (‘Blue is one of my favorite colors’), promising to repay (‘I’ll try to repay you as soon as I can’), expressing surprise and delight (‘Wow! Wonderful!’), expressing a lack of necessity of obligation (‘You should not have taken time to do that’), expressing a desire to continue the relationship (‘I’ll be in touch soon and would like you to come to my place sometime’).

The researcher then proceeded to offer examples of similarities and difference in expressions of gratitude in English by the Filipino, Chinese, Korean, Indonesian and Japanese graduate students in her sample. Another type of article is one reporting on an intervention to teach students how to perform a certain speech act, where the article

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provides extensive detail on just how to teach the pragmatics, and the results of doing so. An example is a report on teaching rudeness to EFL students in Mexico (Mugford, 2008: 377). The students were asked to recall and reconstruct TL encounters involving impoliteness. Mugford distinguished different types of impoliteness: Individual impoliteness – impoliteness which the hearer perceives as a personal attack (Friend: ‘That was a stupid remark’. – in a boyfriend/ girlfriend conversation). Social impoliteness – impoliteness which the hearer perceives as an attack on her/his social role (Shop assistant: ‘Can’t you see it is right behind you?’ NNS Customer: ‘Thank you so much for your help, sir’ – being excessively polite in response). Cultural impoliteness – impoliteness which the hearer perceives as an attack on her/his ethnic group (e.g. ‘I don’t want my son eating tortillas and beans’). Banter – impoliteness which reflects the playful use of impolite language (e.g. L1 user: ‘Get a life! L2 user’s reply: ‘So tell me, how’s yours?’).

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The author’s view was that students, at the very least, should be aware of impoliteness in the TL – that teachers could discuss perceptions of impoliteness in terms of intentionality, speaker purpose and level of aggressiveness, and at least provide the students choices with regard to how they could react under such circumstances. For example, they could answer back with excessive politeness, try to off er an explanation or engage in banter. More recently Mugford (2016b) added more possible responses to impoliteness, such as saying nothing or playing it down, acquiescing, expressing thanks or apologizing. In that report, he had EFL students evaluate each impolite utterance, their attitudes toward it and their possible reactions to it. Songs – whether classical or contemporary, refl ecting rock, folk, jazz, blues, or musical shows: Sometimes a song provides learnerfriendly colloquial phrases that are truly ‘in’. I found this to be true when I memorized a series of Mexican boleros from Trio Los Panchos to sing and play on my guitar many years ago when I was learning Spanish.

6.3 Analysis of the Pragmatics

Analyzing conversational situations from interactions is easier said than done. Conversational data can be messy. Let us look at some of the actual tasks that a teacher could engage in during class sessions:

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Looking at a transcript of an NNS-NS interaction and then commenting on the pragmatics Segments of email messages from a NNS graduate student with my response: NNS Student: Sorry to bother you again but I need some of your precious advises concerning … I will be happy to get your advises as soon as possible. Thank you. Another message from this student: If you don’t mind, I want to ask your about the questionnaire … I will happy to listen your ideas as soon as possible. Yet another message from the student: Hello Professor, I want just some minutes of your precious time. Sorry to bother you but I promise this is the last time I want a favor from you … Please do not be angry with me. I have just send emails for more than ten professors but no one responds. I am not in hurry, you can respond even for more than ten days. Please, I am in need to you, do not neglect the email for the God sake. NS Professor’s response: … As for why the other ten (!!) professors didn’t respond, perhaps it was because of your pragmatics. Had you been more mitigating and polite, perhaps you may have gotten a response. For example, if someone makes a request of me that lacks mitigation, I may be somewhat reluctant to respond. For instance, I get a request with ‘Please, Prof. Cohen’ followed by a command: ‘do this for me’, ‘send me this’, ‘read this’, etc. In other words, they don’t mitigate their request with a preparatory query (‘I was just wondering if you might have a little time just to take a quick look at …’).

We note in my response to this student that his lack of pragmatic niceties put me on edge almost from the start of the interaction (over some weeks). His lack of pragmatic control made him sound rather demanding. Despite the fact that this student was doing a doctorate on pragmatics, he nonetheless managed to alienate 10 professors enough that they did not respond to his query. He clearly did not understand that his email messaging came across as officious. Notice that the third message from him evokes the Lord as a fi nal strategy for getting a timely response. This might be culturally appropriate in a message to a professor in other countries, but probably less so when addressing a professor in the USA, depending on the professor. Now let us consider what the reformulated email messages might look like so that the pragmatics would not be officious and would not incur the ire of the professor: Student: I realize it is an imposition on your time to be contacting you yet again, but I would really be so appreciative if you could just give me a bit of advice about … I would be so pleased to hear from you at your earliest convenience. Thanks so much in advance.

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Another message from the student: … If it isn’t too much of an imposition, I would be most appreciative if you could just answer a query I have about the questionnaire … I look forward to your brief response on this matter if you have the time to respond. Yet another message from the student: Hello, Prof. Cohen. I wonder if you might be able to spare me a few moments of your time to help me clear up one more matter regarding my study. I would really value your input and I promise this is the last time I’ll be asking for your advice … Just so you know, I sent emails to more than ten professors but not a single one responded. You have been quite remarkable in your willingness to respond to my queries. I am most indebted to you for that. So I really hope that you’ll respond to this fi nal query of mine.

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Perhaps these renderings are a bit too much to expect even from an NS graduate student, but the main thing is that there does not appear to be anything pragmatically offensive in the messages now. In any case, presenting such material in class could stimulate discussion with advanced-level students. Going beyond the bilingual paradigm to the multilingual reality: Nowadays, it is likely that NNS learners of a TL have already been exposed to other languages aside from the TL and may actually be dominant in a language other than their L1. Therefore, in speaking of transfer from another language and culture when performing TL pragmatic tasks, it is possible and in some cases likely that this transfer is from an L3 or L4. Hence, the bilingual paradigm is largely a thing of the past. Thus, it may be a useful classroom exercise for students to notice in cases of negative transfer just where the transfer is coming from. For example, an English speaker who speaks good Spanish might inadvertently transfer the usage of buenos días ‘good morning’ to bonjour in French without realizing that bonjour can be used as a greeting well into the afternoon and even into the evening among French speakers. Avoiding the use of bonjour in the afternoon would, in this case, reflect negative transfer from Spanish L2 pragmatics in the learning and performance of L3 French. (Of course, he could also reflect negative transfer from L1 English.) Discussing in class similarities and differences between the language and culture of the home community and the TL community and culture: It can be insightful to look both at oral and written language, since sometimes the major differences between the L1 and the TL are most pronounced in, say, oral language. It may be that the home vernacular or spoken language of the home community has features that are unique to it, whereas the written standard language is more like the TL in terms of, say, how requests are made.

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In terms of the pragmatics of email and text messages, learners usually fi nd that these messages constitute a hybrid form of language, with elements of both oral and written language. Student projects could entail describing similarities and differences among the oral, written and hybrid language varieties, paying special attention to the issue of formality of language. The following are excerpts from an email message that I received from a Taiwanese graduate student studying in California, intended as just one sample of how email has become a hybrid genre combining features of spoken and written language, with the written language on a continuum from more conversational to more formal. Notice the pragmatic features in the message that are more like those of spoken language and those that are more reserved for written language. The pragmatic features expected more in spoken language are underlined and the more formal features are italicized. XXX is used to preserve the anonymity of the sender. Hi Dr. Cohen, How are you? I am XXX, Taiwanese, who is studying MA TESOL program of the University of XXX. I have been reading and learning your articles such as XXX, XXX, etc. from many lectures. Recently, I am writing a research proposal, and I found out a ‘XXX Survey’ created by you. I am wondering if I can have the honor to have your permission for using your ‘XXX Survey’ for my research proposal and thesis paper. My research proposal topic is: XXX. This study aims to investigate the relationships between XXX and XXX. The research design is a correlational design utilizing survey methodology, which included questions to which the participants are expected to respond anonymously … Thank you for generous sharing your articles on line. I will look forward to hear from you. Sincerely, XXX

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Analyzing a given conversational scenario appearing in different registers (i.e. more formal vs. more informal registers, variation in level of politeness) or with a different pragmatic tone (friendly and encouraging vs. unfriendly and standoffi sh): Whereas NSs are usually quick to note if an utterance is overly polite or formal in register and whether it is friendly or hostile, it can be a real challenge for TL learners to perceive register differences in pragmatics. They are often happy just to discern the pragmatic function of an utterance, without being able

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to perceive the register of language it represents. A role for teachers could be to enlighten learners in this respect by providing samples that differ with respect to register and tone. An easy place to start is in comparing written and oral language, as in the following case where the contrast is in formality and in both cases the tone is relatively friendly: Written notifi cation regarding a job interview – a rejection: Mr. Peterson, we wish to gratefully acknowledge your taking the time last week to be interviewed for a job opening we had. Our staff enjoyed interacting with you and were impressed with your background. Unfortunately, we must inform you that at the current time we do not have an opening that calls for your particular skill set. We would encourage you to reapply in the future. An oral notifi cation regarding a job interview – a rejection: Hi, George. Thanks for coming in for an interview last week. It was fun meeting you. You have a fi ne sense of humor. Your work experience is clearly solid. Still, I’m sorry to say we don’t have any openings for someone with your background at present. Please do contact us again in the future. There may be something at that time.

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Examining pragmatic features: Say a learner of a TL wants to emulate the professorial style of a respected university instructor and notices, for example, her use of discourse markers in distinguishing one point from another. He could focus on how the professor makes use of contrastive discourse markers such as ‘however’, ‘nonetheless’, ‘albeit’, ‘in contrast’, ‘on the one hand’, ‘on the other hand’, ‘instead’ and the like (see Fraser, 1998, for more details regarding contrastive discourse markers). Discussing dialectal differences in the pragmatic consequences of using words and phrases: A classic case is when ignorance of the denotations and connotations of words in different parts of the world leads to unintended pragmatic failure. So, for example, the Spanish verb coger means ‘to seize, catch, or grab’ in much of the Spanish-speaking world, but is used for the f-word in Mexico. So here is a case where context is crucial in understanding the pragmatics of an utterance with coger in it, and so well worth classroom discussion. Comparing speech acts in two or more countries (e.g. comparison across different dialects of the TL) or regions of the same country: For example, an attention getter before a request in Uruguay will be mira/e ‘look’, whereas in Spain it will be oye/oiga ‘listen’. For more on dialect differences in Spanish, see the CARLA website, ‘Dancing with Words’.10 Having learners see the connection between pragmatics and the grammatical forms that they are studying: A typical learning situation

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is where students memorize grammatical forms but do not know when nor how to use them pragmatically. A prime example is knowing how to use the imperfect progressive ‘I was wondering’ in English as a crucial element in a well-mitigated request: ‘I was just wondering if you might have an hour or so to help me clean up some computer issues I’m having’. 6.4 Pragmatics Tasks

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Awareness-raising activities: The Ishihara and Cohen volume (2014) has various awareness-raising activities (e.g. Activity 1.1, Ishihara & Cohen, 2004: 17–20). Such activities focus on highlighting features of pragmatic behavior. One activity entails a pragmatics judgment task. The participants see dialogues written down or view video interactions and need to judge just how appropriate it is for the interlocutors to say what they say, given their relative status, their familiarity with each other and the stakes involved in the given interaction. In making their judgments, they are to consider whether the utterances are appropriately formal or informal, appropriately direct or indirect and at the appropriate level of politeness. How easy will this be for learners to do? Students with limited exposure to and experience about the TL community may not know where to begin. NNTs may also be challenged to comment effectively. Hearing an NS comment on each of the relevant features may be truly enlightening. For example, in the TV series Grey’s Anatomy, about the lives of surgeons, there are interactions between surgeons (interns, residents and attending physicians) about their intimate relationships. At times, the dialogue seems to violate norms for what would seem appropriate, given the respective status of the interlocutors. At times, the remarks seem overly familiar or involve cutting remarks, which sometimes other surgeons or nurses overhear, to the chagrin of the person making the remark. At times, the remarks are shocking in that they come across to the viewer as overly critical, bitingly snide, outright insulting or highly abrasive. It would seem as if the screen writers do this on purpose to keep the interest of the viewers and also to serve as a distraction from the surgical portion of each episode, which can get extremely intense. If a teacher were to design a pragmatics judgment task based on material in an episode, it could entail a comparison between what might be expected vs. what actually happens in the given situation. It becomes a lesson in social behavior as well as in the pragmatics of language use. Inevitably, it is not just what is said, but the tone of voice, the gestures and the eye movements that are accentuated during surgeries, since the surgeons are wearing face masks so that all that is visible from their faces are their eyes.11

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Here is one sample exchange between two male surgeons, where the second, Karev, is a womanizer who has slept with numerous doctors and nurses at the hospital: Surgeon #1: Since when can you not sleep with interns? Surgeon #2: I’m a homeowner now. I’ve grown up. Besides, they get all hung up and sad when you don’t want to be their boyfriend. It’s not worth the hassle. #1: You are one classy guy, Karev. #2: I make an effort.12

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Obviously the remark ‘You are one classy guy, Karev’ is said sarcastically. The irony is that Karev, an arch womanizer in the TV series, simply takes it in stride and is most likely being facetious when he replies ‘I make an effort’. The reality is that he does not seem to expend much effort at all when it comes to relationships with the opposite sex and consequently has been in a string of failed relationships. Tandem language learning: This approach calls for pairing up learners of two languages such that each provides the other an NS model for the TL. Pairing up of learners is conducted at university language centers in some universities (e.g. the University of Minnesota). I have had tandem partners over the years for three of the languages that I have learned – German, Japanese and Chinese. While tandem is a resource worth tapping, it is not a given that it will be effective. Each partner needs to be clear as to what s/he wants from the relationship and how best to achieve that. When I was working on my Japanese with a tandem partner, for instance, just before going to Japan, I would review with my tandem partner speech acts such as requests (e.g. for food in a restaurant, for directions or for items in a store) in order to have these ready for use. Currently, my two Chinese tandem partners support me in writing in pinyin each week about topics in my life. Computer-simulated conversations: The use of computer assisted language learning programs is gaining in popularity as a way for learners to practice pragmatic aspects of communication when direct access to NSs is limited. Computer simulations have been used to provide oral, self-paced practice of extended pragmatic routines and to provide learners an opportunity to see the benefits of such simulation for learning pragmatically-appropriate approaches to communication. In one such program, advanced ESL learners were given a workshop on academic communication with a focus on high-stakes requests and were provided a series of simulated conversations as models (Sydorenko & Daurio, 2017). As a result of the simulation, participants noticed and adopted additional pragmatic strategies (e.g. using

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grounders and disarmers in their requests), cultural aspects (e.g. selecting the appropriate timeframe for high-stakes requests) and situation-specific lexical items (e.g. ‘due date’). Feedback from the participants indicated that the shy learners especially found that the opportunity for oral practice in a safe, simulated environment was confidence-building. Role-playing: There are lots of reasons to do role play in class. It gives students a chance to practice the pragmatic feature under examination. It could start with reading a dialogue, but then move to improvisation. It might help to give the participants time to ‘inhabit’ the roles by working with their role-play partner in rehearsing their roles. This way they can get a better handle on what they are supposed to do pragmatically. Beyond improvisation, students could be asked to write their own scripts for the role play so that it constitutes scenario writing. Next, the teacher corrects it and presents the dialogue to the students the next day, asking them what is different in the edited version and why, thus making the process an opportunity for some fi ne-tuned feedback to the students. The teacher corrections could be in a different color font, say, blue, so that they are readily discernible to the learners in comparing this edited version with what they had written. Depending on the time available, it would be helpful to the learners to have a discussion afterwards about the performance of the roles, how well they were performed and how they could have been modified according to age, status, gender, the stakes in the situation, the formality of the situation and the appropriate level of politeness. For example, students could practice different kinds of requests – depending on the interlocutor, the nature of the request, its formality or informality, and so forth. The participants in the role play and the observers could give each other feedback on the basis of an ‘evaluation chart’ developed by the teacher and the students. The teacher would also provide feedback, including both positive features and constructive criticism. A more elaborate way to conduct the role plays would be to turn them into a ‘poster session’ activity. Perhaps the students would be called on to enact a series of role plays and for more than one audience. Along with the enactment, there could be a poster or PowerPoint show with, say, the speech act-specific strategies listed so that the audience would be mindful as to the potential range for strategies. After the enactments, the participants would field questions about the choices that they made in their performances. The intention of showcasing the role plays in this manner would be to improve the likelihood that the lines learned would be more easily remembered. Watching videos: While mention was made above about watching videos, there is still more that can be said about this activity. One thing is that it is a perfect opportunity for TL use. Discussion about

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the videos could be through the TL, despite how convenient it may be to lapse into the L1 of the learners. Discussion could be in student pairs or small groups, but only if all participants have clear knowledge as to how to proceed. The idea is to make sure that no students dominate the discussion. Also, the challenge is to make it fun so that no one feels intimidated by the relative intimacy of one-on-one or small-group interaction. In whole-class discussions, it is easier for some students to hide out, lay low and consequently participate minimally. Smaller groupings in principle encourage participation from everyone, but since this may not be the case, it is helpful for the teacher to provide guidelines for this activity and to see to it that these guidelines are followed, such as through having each group appoint someone to lead the group or through having the teacher assign a group leader. As an acknowledgment of the power of video, a group in New Zealand have created a web-based drama series for adult and young adult ESL students.13 The series, called Fortune, is an original drama about the adventures of detective Jimmy Fortune. Each episode has accompanying materials and videos written by an ESL teacher, with material specifically focusing on pragmatics, such as ending a conversation, making a request or giving advice. The series is intended both for classroom, online and independent use. The script was written by a former language teacher who is having a second career in film. Real play: Real play entails having students in actual language use contexts (e.g. stores, restaurants, health clubs or private homes), where they get to interact with actual store clerks, waiters, health club staff, host-family members or friends. These interlocutors would know in advance that the students are engaged in language practice and consequently making, say, requests solely to practice their pragmatic performance, whether it be in a store, restaurant, club or at home. Reflective journal writing: Students could be asked to keep an electronic journal or blog where they record their insights about pragmatics. It may be a more fruitful activity if it is a dialogue journal, where every so often the teachers read through it and make comments. If students know that the teacher will be reading through the journal, then they may make their entries more purposive. There could even be rules as to how they indicate queries when they make entries. An advantage of an electronic journal is that the students could use a different color font (e.g. blue) or highlight color (e.g. turquoise or yellow) if they make an entry that they are not sure about. Input enhancement: Sometimes the clues to the pragmatics of the input are not clear. One way to enhance the input would be for the teacher to use diagrams to illustrate concepts in TL pragmatics. One vehicle for diagramming would be through VoiceThread,14 which is a media aggregator that allows people to post media artifacts for

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community feedback. The application, developed at the University of North Carolina, makes it easy for users to add voice annotation to an artifact, which might be a document, a slide presentation, a video or a collection of photos. Commentators can add remarks by means of a microphone, a webcam, the keyboard or by telephone. The resulting flash-based animation contains the original artifact and the commentary on it. Reading a short article about pragmatics and then participating in a discussion forum regarding it: This discussion could be via a learning management system (e.g. Moodle). This approach could work well for students who enjoy reading about the language behavior that they are engaged in learning. Metapragmatic instruction: Teachers provide learners explicit correction of their pragmatics. They not only show them more preferred forms, but also indicate why they are preferred. For example, if the topic is email requests, the teachers would present examples of inappropriate requests and precisely how to make them appropriate (as in Section 6.3 above in the analysis of a transcript of email request exchanges). Swapping classes with an NT if the teacher is an NNT: If the teacher is an NNT, it could be beneficial from time to time to have a guest NT if available and if the learners welcome the idea. In my prep school French instruction, I appreciated having two classes a day, one with an NNT and one with an NT. Consistent with the literature on this topic (see Chapter 3), the NNT was an expert in French grammar, which was helpful, and the NS was a fi ne model for numerous other features (as detailed in Chapter 4). Mini-research projects: TL students could be encouraged to design, carry out and present mini-research projects focusing on an aspect of pragmatics that they fi nd intriguing. A particularly attractive part of this approach is that the students (in pairs or larger groups) become the experts on this particular aspect of pragmatics. Therefore, for example, students could collect data on greetings and leave takings from NSs at different ages and representing different occupations. Then they report back to the class on what they found. In these projects, the students assume the role of ethnographers, observing, videotaping (if possible) and/or writing up what they fi nd. Here are some sample projects: (1) focusing just on greetings and leave taking among young men and young women of their own age group (i.e. what they say and how they say it, their proximity to each other, the gestures that they use and their body posture); (2) gift-giving actions and verbal expressions (at birthday parties, major holidays or other occasions); (3) requests for directions around campus; or (4) phone interactions with the customer service representative for a company.

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Virtual pragmatics spaces and augmented reality games: The access students have to virtual websites where they can learn and perform pragmatics may still be limited, but virtual spaces are on the rise. Sykes (2013) provided groundbreaking work in 2008 with the creation of a virtual space for pragmatics, Croquelandia (see Sykes, 2013; Sykes & Cohen, 2008), which is no longer available. At the University of New Mexico, a game called Mentira was created using a game authoring tool, called Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling,15 an open source platform. The object of the game was to solve a murder mystery and involved students gaining information from site visits and from conversation. It combined virtual experiences with real-world visits to locations in Albuquerque (Holden & Sykes, 2013). At present, smartphones with apps are being used to allow games and other activities to take place out in the world and to engage in augmented reality games. In these face-to-face experiences, participants engage in activities in a physical, real-world environment where elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or global positioning system (GPS) data. Students interact in person or online with NTs or non-teacher NSs to try out the pragmatics knowledge that they acquired in class: It may be less imposing to interact with non-teachers. Especially in FL environments, it can be helpful to find TL-speaking tourists with whom to interact, especially if they are just hanging out – for example, waiting for a train, a ferry or a plane. Once when I was sightseeing in Ayuttayah, Thailand, the ancient capital city of the Thai kingdom, I

Figure 6.1 Interview by local students

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remember being stopped by two HS students who wanted to practice their English (Figure 6.1). They each had a clipboard with a series of questions on it. I let them interview me and was actually entertained by the whole process. It made my day. 6.5 Motivating Learners to Become More Savvy about Pragmatics

Just because teachers embrace the view that explicit instruction about TL pragmatics has value does not mean that their students will automatically share this view. There is a continuum, where at one end there are students who take a language course only because there is a language requirement and because the class sessions for this course fit into their busy schedule. At the other end of the continuum are students who are taking the course because they are passionate about mastering the given TL. Especially in the case of those learners who are not enthusiastic about learning the TL, teachers may be called upon to motivate them to learn TL pragmatics. As much as learners may warm up to the notion that good communication in the TL involves good pragmatics, the actual learning of the material can be a challenge, especially for those students who lack motivation. One motivator would be to have students fi nd tandem partners, an activity suggested in Section 6.4 above. The tandem partner could either be local or in the TL country (e.g. through Skype or some other program). Consistent with the Taguchi (2011) study, which underscored the value of the students contacting their teacher by email, there is value in having an NS or highly competent NNS for students to contact whenever they have questions. For numerous learners, asking questions through email or through the chat mode can help them avoid any embarrassment associated with the face-to-face asking of a question that they may feel they should know the answer to, regardless of whether it was taught or not. I have sent many emails to my current Mandarin-English tandem partners to clarify semantic distinctions.16 I am amazed at just how unhelpful dictionaries can be – since, like many textbooks that lack information about TL pragmatics, most dictionaries tend not to give sample sentences to help learners fi ne-tine their knowledge of the semantics associated with the particular word or phrase. Having a tandem partner, a pen pal or some other kind of learning partner can be most helpful. Perhaps such a partner can be found on an internet message board. I found one of my partners through a longstanding tandem program at the University of Minnesota’s Language Center. The other had contacted me through email, but then we met at two conferences as well. While there is professional literature on how to make the best use of a tandem partner (e.g. Consolo & Furtoso, 2015; Vassallo & Telles, 2006), a successful tandem relationship depends on the individuals involved, their needs and their ability to provide their partner the desired

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language support. My experience with perhaps 10 tandem partners over the years is that, unsurprisingly, some are better language tutors than others. Hence, while tandem can be an excellent way to enhance TL pragmatics, the reality of the interaction may be lacking. In this case, one option is to coach the partners so that they provide more useful support. The other is to fi nd another tandem partner instead. Teachers have a real opportunity to enhance learners’ pragmatic awareness so that added proficiency is not just simply ‘providing them more rope with which to hang themselves’ if added proficiency means more opportunities for pragmatic failure (using the metaphor from Takahashi & Beebe, 1987). For starters, teachers may need to motivate learners to avoid negative transfer from the L1 transfer.17 In part, this means motivating learners to want to learn about TL norms, which is no small feat, since ‘(it) involves consideration of regional, gender, social class, and age-based variation’ (Barron, 2003: 75). The classroom teacher could make it a point of stepping in from time to time to comment on pragmatic issues. It may be especially helpful to develop tools for teachers to use in this endeavor. Since a frequently used speech act such as ‘making a request to teachers (and others)’ may result in pragmatic failure, teachers could have a ‘requests’ toolkit ready for their students’ use. Since in the real world there are no teachers around to help out, this is all the more reason to get the most mileage from teachers while it is still possible. Moreover, while it is true that using NS norms as a benchmark for behavior may not be so crucial in an FL situation, it can still be valuable for learners to have at least some familiarity with what these norms are, regardless of whether they attempt to adhere to them and continue to seek out TL relationships after their fi nal language class. By sharing personal examples of pragmatic failure with students, a teacher can help push learners to figure out not only what went wrong, but ways in which such pragmatic failures could be avoided in future interactions. Another motivating option would be to have a ‘Show and Tell’, where each day different students are responsible for presenting to their classmates an aspect of pragmatics that they heard or saw in print (perhaps as part of the mini-research project activity, suggested in Section 6.4 above). Ideally, the students take the initiative to figure out for themselves what the pragmalinguistic and/or sociopragmatic ramifications of the TL behavior are, such as through discussing their pragmatic performance with an available NS. The students then give a short presentation to their class, and in a sense, become the experts on this TL pragmatics behavior. In an FL context, this type of activity, while possible, is more of a challenge. It may call for an assiduous use of the internet, such as through chat rooms. In addition to specific activities, it is also important for teachers to help students get in touch with what they do not know about TL pragmatics and to become more independent at fi nding out about these gaps in their knowledge for themselves.

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The following is a summary of suggested motivating activities reportedly used by the NNTs and NTs in the international survey reported on in Chapter 4. In this case, they are presented in two separate lists, though it is certainly possible that NTs and NNTs could engage in items from both lists as a means for motivating their students to develop their pragmatic ability. Also, there is invariable overlap between activities described in Section 6.4 under ‘Pragmatics Tasks’. Ideally, all tasks are motivating at least to some learners. This is why suggesting a variety of activities is beneficial. It is hard to predict which of these tasks will have genuine appeal to the given learners.

6.5.1 The NNTs’ list of motivators for learning about TL pragmatics

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Having a conversation in a real-life situation can be highly motivating for some learners, such as using speech acts while talking with NSs out of class (e.g. getting directions, engaging in service encounters, extending or responding to invitations), especially if the NSs are amenable to such interactions and are patient with students who may need lots of time to communicate. Listening to the personal experiences of others with pragmatics may be motivating for some learners. NNTs’ recounting their personal experiences involving pragmatics that worked or did not work can be of interest to their students, especially if the teachers speculate as to why their behavior did or did not work. Having paired or group discussions about these issues could also serve as a motivator. Encounters in the real world are sometimes confrontational, given that people may be rude, especially if they are busily engaged with their devices and view being interrupted by someone – especially an NNS – as an intrusion into their private space. I remember some 35 years ago or more (well before smartphones), NYC ran an ad campaign by posting notices in the subways with the intention of getting New Yorkers to be kinder to foreigners. This was based on a sense that some New Yorkers were considered rude to foreigners18 (see Beebe & Waring, 2005, for a report on a study using notebook data on NY rudeness). Reading and writing entries experiences with pragmatics in a class blog may work well for some learners, depending on their learning style preferences. Watching a really informative video about pragmatics may be a motivator, such as a video on how to bow in the Japanese culture, what to say and why – before, during and after such bows. Conducting explicit instruction around a given pragmatics feature, which could entail watching a short portion of a movie, where

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students analyze certain behavior (comparing it to how people would behave in those situations in their own culture). Then they do a role play with this material, ideally using dialogues that they have created, with time for the teacher to edit it before it is used in a role play. It can be motivating for students who fi nd this a good way to learn pragmatics – examining NS samples and comparing them to samples from NNSs that are pragmatically ‘incorrect’, reflecting on their own L1 pragmatics and relating what they fi nd to the TL norms. In making such comparisons, for example, it might fascinate some learners of Japanese to discover that complimenting is done differently in Japanese from the way it is done in American English – that (as indicated in Section 2.3) the speaker needs to be careful when complimenting a Japanese professor on a talk not to appear to be passing judgement on the talk, since this may well be seen by the Japanese professor as insulting. Instead, the persons offering the compliment to the professor are simply to indicate what they got out of the talk, rather than to evaluate how good they thought it was. 6.5.2 The NTs’ list of motivators for learning about TL pragmatics

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A critical incident of miscommunication that leads to an embarrassing or negative situation is presented. The teachers could present their own embarrassing cross-cultural experiences as examples. One NT couched the motivator in a ‘Don’t let this happen to you’ approach, giving the students examples of pragmatic failure with consequences (e.g. getting a poor grade in class, alienating an NS friend, being fired or losing status at work), then clearly spelling out the TL norms and having the students do role play until they get it right. Ideally, students would also have access to NSs’ comments regarding NNS responses in potentially face-threatening situations. An important slant is to make students acutely aware of how things that they would interpret positively in their own culture could be interpreted as rude in the TL culture, with the assumption that in many or most situations people do not want to be considered rude. Obviously, there are exceptions – those situations where being rude is called for or preferable in order to achieve the particular outcome in the given situation, such as in a service encounter where being civil simply does not work. But even then it is crucial to know not just when to be rude, but also how to be rude – that is, the pragmalinguistic forms to use in the interaction. Extensive exposure to TL pragmatic situations as a motivator. For example, learners could view service encounters through audio/video short clips from TV shows, movies, news broadcasts, and social media snippets, or from written media, such as from magazines or novels,

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with the view that the more time students spend engaged, the more cues they will pick up. Since just being exposed to pragmatically rich input is usually not sufficient, the teacher may stimulate the learners’ interest and hopefully heighten their motivation by making explicit comparisons between the pragmatics in the learners’ L1 and culture and that of the TL. It also helps to survey or interview other NSs aside from the NT and ask them what they would say in the various situations. Learners will also need practice in performing the pragmatic interactions themselves, through role play. The literature provides sample activities, such as those in Ishihara and Cohen (2014) – Activity 1.1, pp. 17–20; Activity 5.1, pp. 90–96; Activities 10.1–10.3, pp. 193– 200; and Activities 12.1–12.2, pp. 240–243. Using humor, partly through funny anecdotes. Also NTs can help learners understand what is considered funny in various jokes and why. The rationale for focusing on humor is that laughter is good for the soul. If students view the TL class as ‘fun’, they may be more motivated to learn about pragmatics. Obviously, humor is a complex matter and even NSs of a language do not necessarily agree on what is funny. Still, it is helpful if NTs (and NNTs as well) provide learners some examples of what a language community deems to be funny. A study focusing on native English speakers’ handling of humor illustrated just how problematic responses to attempted humor can be, even for NSs (Bell, 2013). The researcher looked at native-speaker responses to a joke that hinged on a rather subtle pun (‘how’s’ = ‘house’). The pun situation involved the mailman inquiring about a homeowner’s dog that had attacked him in the past. When the postman asks, ‘How’s your dog?’ the homeowner, hearing (or pretending to hear?) the imperative ‘House your dog’, responds ‘I did’. The joke was impossible for most hearers to comprehend without an explanation. Using camaraderie: Many students find their motivation to learn and use a TL improves in meaningful friendship situations with TL locals. A classic example of this would be amorous relationships, assuming that they involve robust use of the TL. The potential for learning pragmatics in such situations can be great. It may also be the case that a tandem partner becomes a friend as well, as in the case of my Chinese tandem partners. Coaching learners on how to use pragmatics strategies for being a student in the TL community: For example, this could entail providing TL models for how to ask good questions in class, how to answer questions effectively, how to brainstorm in a group, how to interact effectively in group discussion, how to ask the professor for an extension and how to start small talk outside a lecture hall. Just because students know how to do these things in their L1 does not mean that they know how to do them in the TL. Sometimes, differences across TL communities are striking, such as in how to take a turn in a group discussion or how to engage in small talk.

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A study comparing British, Irish and US small talk found that it varied in a number of ways (Schneider, 2008). Differences included the choice of discourse markers indicating the closing of a conversation (British ‘anyway’ versus US ‘well’), and also the distribution of ‘so’ (clearly preferred by speakers from Ireland – e.g. ‘so, by the way, what is your name?’). Notable differences could be observed in the choice of move types in the opening turns. In small talk at a party, for example, speakers from England typically opened their party conversations with a bare greeting, while speakers from the US favored moves disclosing or requesting names and Irish speakers preferred party assessments such as ‘Great party, isn’t it?’ or ‘Are you enjoying the party?’ The move types employed by the American speakers in their opening turns, especially self-identifications and requests for identification, were used by speakers from Ireland and England in later turns. 6.6 Discussion and Conclusions

A major aim of this chapter has been to underscore that it is simplistic just to point teachers in the direction of sources for pragmatics materials. It is necessary to think about ways to make these materials truly accessible to learners. In part, this means that the teachers need to take an active role in making the pragmatic elements of the material explicit to the learners by drawing their attention to the pragmatic features of concern. Otherwise, it is likely that some, if not many of the learners will not realize what it is they are supposed to be taking away from exposure to the given material. After all, the aim is ultimately to have relevant pragmatics material in the learners’ repertoire. I owe a debt of gratitude to the many teachers who in their responses on the international survey provided me with a host of rich ideas for how to fi nd sources for pragmatics materials, how to analyze the materials and how to bring them to life in classroom and out-of-class tasks. In the chapter, I was then able to expand on these ideas, sometimes problematizing them, in order to make the ideas more operational or at least more able to be operationalized by teachers and learners. Given that authentic pragmatics material may be overwhelming for learners, teachers can play an invaluable role in acting as a guide to learners to help them see what the key elements for pragmatic behavior are in a given situation. Left to their own devices, learners will often not know what to be looking for. And it is not just a matter of obtaining good samples of pragmatics in action. It is also important that these materials be analyzed in a meaningful way. This can help to make them more real for the learners and hopefully support them in remembering the given pragmatic features. For example, if the focus is on the level of formality and politeness, having learners both analyze and role play the material may

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have a more lasting impact than if they just learn about these matters. If the process of learning the pragmatics (of, say, greeting elders or using table manners) is enjoyable, it can also serve as a motivator to keep the learners engaged in learning and using the language. As indicated in Section 5.3 above, it is valuable to have some overarching conceptual framework to bolster the pragmatics instruction, such as social cultural theory (van Compernolle, 2014) or one of the other theoretical frameworks enumerated by Taguchi and Roever (2017: Chapter 3). The advantage of such a framework is that it can afford teachers guiding principles to draw on in selecting their materials and in using them in class, as well as providing learners a means for scaffolding the important pragmatic information gleaned from rules and examples for storage in their long-term memory. It can also be helpful to have a grammar text for learners of the TL with the emphasis on how grammar and pragmatics interrelate (such as the use of the past progressive to ask for something in the future in English; e.g. ‘I was just wondering if you could just take a quick look at my thesis …’). As an indication of what such a grammar text would contain, Félix-Brasdefer and I provided a model of how to teach the pragmatics of FL Spanish, while at the same time highlighting the important role that grammar plays in this process (Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen, 2012). Ways for teaching grammar as a communicative resource were presented by looking at the pragmatic functions of grammatical expressions used in Spanish communicative interactions, such as the conditional, the imperfect, tag questions, impersonal expressions and adverbials. Since the publication of an entire grammar text in support of TL pragmatics instruction is still an idea for the future, in the meantime the teacher can play the role of guide in this endeavor, which can be highly motivating for learners who spend hours grappling with TL grammar without necessarily knowing which grammatical forms they should be using and when to use them for best pragmatic results. This chapter has also served to raise the notion of motivation. If learners’ motivation to learn pragmatics is heightened, then the learning outcomes are probably going to be enhanced. Obviously there are always going to be learners with high motivation and little to show in the way of results, but nonetheless it is motivation that keeps them going back for more. My fi rst tandem partner in Chinese exclaimed when we were into our fourth year of study her amazement that I had the motivation to keep at it, given the obvious challenges for me in learning Chinese at an advanced age (late 60s at the time). My principle motivator has been to keep my learning agenda focused on blogging about events in my life, and hence of relevance to me personally. I would imagine that many learners get turned off to learning the given language because they do not see the curriculum as relevant to them. Also, I had to let go of the notion that I would retain lots of vocabulary that I had memorized, such as adverbs for indicating the frequency of events.

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In the next chapter, we will consider issues regarding the use of technology in learning TL pragmatics. Notes (1) See: corpus.byu.edu/coca/ (accessed 10 November 2016). (2) See: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/c/corpus/corpus?c=micase;page=simple (accessed 10 November 2016). (3) See: http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/santa-barbara-corpus (accessed 10 November 2016). (4) See: http://www.lextutor.ca/conc/eng/, selecting ‘TV – Marlise’ as the sub-corpus (accessed 10 November 2016). (5) See: http://friends.wikia.com/wiki/The_One_With_The_East_German_Laundry_ Detergent/Transcript (accessed 7 January 2018). (6) Chieko Hiranoi is a professor of theater and EFL at Hosei University, Tokyo. (7) See: http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/o/one-fi ne-day-script-transcript. html (accessed 10 November 2016). (8) Collecting data surreptitiously in public places and even in private homes has been approved by institutional review boards at universities such as the University of Minnesota these days, so notions of privacy vs. public domain are perhaps in flux. See Shively (2011) for an example of a study abroad research project where surreptitious audio-recordings were approved. (9) This distinction emerged from a study which compared EFL apologies to those of NSs (Cohen et al., 1986). (10) See: http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html (accessed 10 November 2016). (11) Back episodes of the series are available from Netfl ix and other providers. Many of the episode scripts are available on the internet – for example, see foreverdreaming. org. (12) From Season 9, Episode 10 of Grey’s Anatomy, 2013. See: foreverdreaming.org/ viewtopic.php?f=11&t=6456 (accessed 10 November 2016). (13) See: chasingtimeenglish.com (accessed 7 January 2018). (14) See: https://voicethread.com/ (accessed 7 January 2018). (15) See: https://fielddaylab.org/make/aris/ (accessed 7 January 2018). (16) One of my partners recently fi nished her studies for an MA in Chinese language, as an outgrowth of having been my tandem partner for six years of English-Chinese tandem exchanges. Another of my partners is a professor of EFL in China. (17) While the reference is made here to L1 transfer, the reality is that at times the learners’ dominant language may not be their L1. Also, in the case of multilinguals, the transfer may be from some other language that they know well or at least better than the TL. (18) See: http://stuff nobodycaresabout.com/2014/06/09/the-top-10-worst-stupid-rudeand-annoying-behaviors-people-do-in-new-york-city/ (accessed on 10 November 2016) as one example of reactions to NYC rudeness.

7 The Role of Technology in Teaching and Learning Pragmatics

The purpose of this chapter is look at contributions that innovative technologies have made to the learning and performance of TL pragmatics, and to consider current and future ways in which both NT and NNTs and their learners can make use of technology for enhancing pragmatic development. While the promise certainly exists for technological advances to enhance pragmatic development, efforts specifically aimed at pragmatics have, for the most part, been relatively modest. At a time when language learners worldwide have been engaged in uses of social media where they are inadvertently called upon to perform pragmatics in a host of venues, they have usually not been coached in how to do this effectively. The reality is that despite the global rise in the uses of the internet and other technological advances, efforts to enlist these technological advances in support of enhancing TL pragmatics among language learners have been limited. Therefore, while technology provides assistance (see Taguchi & Roever, 2017: 194–208, for a recent review), it is certainly not yet a panacea and needs to be seen as a complement to other TL instructional approaches. We should also bear in mind that some of the earlier efforts to use technology in the teaching of TL pragmatics were limited to what the technology was at the time. For example, it used to be a costly matter to provide instruction through live video links, but then with the advent of Skype and other similar programs, along with smartphone apps that provide video chatting (e.g. FaceTime, WeChat, Facebook and others), it has become a modus vivendi for many learners. As I have pointed out, I have regular Skype sessions with my tandem partners, an option that was not available when I was learning Japanese by tandem in the 1990s. 7.1 Corpora as a Resource for TL Pragmatics Instruction

Given that the teaching and learning of TL pragmatics in internetmediated partnerships has been coupled with access to corpora for 154

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pragmatics instruction and research (Belz, 2007), in principle, this venue is potentially attractive to teachers looking for samples of NS language given that they represent authentic language. A problem, of course, is the lack of direct correspondence between language forms and pragmatic meanings or functions (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014; Rühlemann & Aijmer, 2015). For example, ‘sorry’ in a corpus may not be functioning as an apology, as in ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’ This reality somewhat constrains the form-to-function use of a corpus for pragmatics, except in cases of greetings and leave takings where the function is more obvious to someone who accesses the corpus (e.g. ‘Hi!’, ‘Bye!’). A more optimistic view is that ‘corpora can nudge us closer to discovering authentic pragmatic usage because corpus data do provide some evidence of the context’ (Rühlemann, 2010: 290). Given the problems with making assumptions about the function of a given form (the form-to-function approach), Furniss (2016a) took a close look at the alternative, namely, the function-to-form approach. In this approach, an effort is made to identify certain pragmatic functions in a corpus and then to see what forms are, in fact, used to convey those functions. This is not easy work, since fi nding occurrences of particular speech acts in a corpus (e.g. apologies, complaints, insults or criticism) can be challenging. Perhaps other speech acts such as requests or compliments would be easier to fi nd. But then there are other issues such as variability across language registers (e.g. according to level of formality), across genres and across varieties within a language. In other words, hunting for authentic material in a corpus can be a little like the Indian fable of the six blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and coming up with different conclusions as to what an elephant is. There is also the issue as to whether there is sufficient depth of context in order to learn about the possible sociopragmatic import of material in the corpus. Fortunately, experts in pragmatics have spelled out just how both NTs and NNTs might create corpus-based materials to teach pragmatic routines, drawing on an English-language corpus (Bardovi-Harlig et  al., 2015b). The approach calls for fi rst identifying expressions used in the speech acts in ESL textbooks – in this case, the speech acts of agreement, disagreement and requests for clarification. Fortunately, all three of these speech acts were relatively identifiable using the form-to-function approach. Information on the frequency of these expressions was then retrieved through a search of MICASE, with expressions that occurred less than 10 times per million words being rejected. Therefore, this constitutes a productive way to use a corpus – to check on the frequency of textbook expressions for realizing a given function. Next, excerpts were selected that ‘could be followed without reading the entire transcript, had relatively comprehensible topics, and included an unambiguous use of the expression and a clear referent’ (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2015b: 511). Slight modifications were then made to the excerpts to aid comprehensibility and

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the excerpts were re-recorded. Finally, focused noticing and production activities were created in order to teach these three speech acts, being sure to use forms that had a high frequency in the corpus. Another approach to the use of a corpus in the development of pragmatics materials was that used by Belz and Vyatkina (2005) sometime earlier, namely, to create their own corpus based on a complete record of all NS-NNS interactions during two months of telecollaborative partnerships among 16 undergraduate learners of German in their fourth or fi fth semester and 23 German NSs studying to be teachers of English. Transatlantic groupings consisted of pairs of Americans with four or five German partners. A contrastive analysis of German modal particle use in learner and NS corpus data showed that the NSs in the corpus used four modal particles – ja, denn, doch and mal – more frequently than the NNSs. These modal particles were chosen for examination because they were deemed pragmatically important carriers of interpersonal meaning such that their absence would possibly make the utterance sound choppy, abrupt, even harsh or unfriendly. An aim of their project was to demonstrate the value of an intervention to improve the learners’ use of these four German modal particles. Activities were created to instruct learners in the use of the particles. Participants were found to use these particles more frequently as a result of the intervention and their metapragmatic awareness increased. Yet another study focused on teaching learners of Russian routine phrases or conversational gambits with pragmatic functions (e.g. the Russian equivalents for ‘What’s the problem?’, ‘You’re kidding!’, ‘You don’t say!’, ‘Wow!’, ‘No big deal’ and ‘So what?’) (Furniss, 2016b). The routine formulas were selected from a small corpus of Soviet and Russian film subtitles, which were then further computer-analyzed to get at phrases with potential instructional value as pragmatic routines. Those already in textbooks were excluded. Finally, the researcher’s intuition as both an advanced learner and an instructor of Russian guided the selection of routines that were frequent in informal Russian conversation, but difficult to acquire. Nine targeted formulas were selected in order to provide learners with a manageable amount of material. For instructional purposes, examples of these phrases in use were found in the Russian National Corpus. Then, an awareness-raising, corpus-referred instructional website was set up with the Russian formulas, which were taught to 18 intermediate and advanced learners of Russian, all NSs of English. These participants, along with a control group, had their comprehension and aural recognition of the routine formulas assessed on a pretest, posttest and delayed-posttest basis. There was no assessment of oral use of these gambits for budgetary reasons. Results indicated that the intervention had a durable effect on the learners’ awareness of the targeted routine formulas. Therefore, these three studies would suggest that the careful use of corpora may well contribute to the development of pragmatic ability.

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7.2 Experiences on Social Media Sites 7.2.1 Oral and written chat

One of the early studies on how best to harness technology to teach speech acts was conducted by Sykes (2005), who studied 27 learners of Spanish receiving instruction on refusing invitations through a 20-minute self-directed online instructional unit. The learners either used written chat, oral chat (Wimba) or face-to-face interaction as their vehicle for delivering the refusal speech act. The study showed that those doing written chat outperformed the other two groups in complexity of the head acts and in the variety of supporting moves, thus more closely approximating NS norms. By virtue of the intervention, the written chat group changed from direct refusals to grounders, while the face-to-face group continued to use direct refusals. Sykes attributed this fi nding to the fact that the written chat group communicated at a slower pace, so they had more time for reflection and construction of responses. In addition, the written chat group was the only group that received consistent practice in both the oral (face-to-face) mode and in the written mode. Nowadays Skype, FaceTime and other technologies make the communicative means available at that time seem rather out of date, but the study still stands as an indicator of how the written mode can support learners of pragmatics, especially those whose learning style favors the visual mode. Nowadays, these learners can draw heavily on texting and tweeting. Another study demonstrated how the group application in Facebook could be used in order to explore the sociopragmatic functions of the speech act of greeting (Blattner & Fiori, 2011). Posted messages, the content of the wall posts and other content posted in the forum were the focus of this study. Observation-based awareness-raising tasks were found to be beneficial for the development of sociopragmatic competence. Students reported on the type of basic greetings typically observed in this electronic context, whether these greetings served to direct the conversation to either the whole group or to specific participants, and whether greetings allowed for initiation or continuation of the particulars of a given thread. While the most prolific types of greetings were quite basic, like a simple ‘hello’, some students reported on more intricate, detailed greetings. Whereas a number of greetings were inclusive, there were a few cases reported where the discussion started with non-inclusive greetings that targeted a specific group member. Students’ verbal reports included comments about the type of greetings that were the most appropriate depending on the genre (formal/informal) of group forums and the role or impact that the greetings played as a conversation opener in those situations. This study demonstrated how a project to analyze virtual exchanges could have a spinoff effect of enhancing the communicative engagement of language learners, both increasing their confidence as well as their enthusiasm for the subject matter. One participant noted, for example,

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that ‘the groups brought the course to life because [he] realized that what [they] were learning in the book was relevant’ (Blattner & Fiori, 2011: 35). The researchers concluded that accessing this kind of website provided attractive cultural information that stimulated the language learners to autonomously explore a target culture and thereby actively engage in the use of authentic source materials. A study by Takamiya and Ishihara (2013) illustrated how blogging could be deployed in an effort to enhance the development of TL pragmatic ability. The authors demonstrated how the use of technology could involve pedagogical rigor to make sure that the pragmatics was clear to users of the technology. This case study focused on just one student, namely, Jane, a senior at a US university who had at the time of the study just returned from study in Japan for five months, and prior to that had had five semesters of college Japanese. Her intention was to return to Japan to work. She was in an advanced course designed specifically to improve TL pragmatic ability. As part of the course, she needed to blog about speech acts four times during the semester. At the end of each entry, she was asked to include a DCT with pragmatic situations that were especially relevant to her. Jane received responses both from local peers, from Japanese experts at her local university and from three to five native Japanese speakers studying English in Tokyo. The report of fi ndings focused on Jane’s efforts to notice, understand and acquire the speech act sequences of refusals through a variety of means, which included: • • • • •

learning refusal strategies in class by means of role playing; participating in an awareness-raising discussion about refusals; self-evaluation of her use of refusal strategies; a discussion focusing specifically on what made a refusal sociopragmatically appropriate; and feedback on her blog which included her DCT results.

These various activities apparently afforded Jane a good handle on how to perform refusals, which included telling a white lie, something Jane had resisted doing until she had learned more about the sociopragmatics of Japanese refusals. 7.2.2 Conveying tone in tweets

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is seen as an interactive discourse that is neither spoken nor written, yet both (Scott, 2015: 9). Since they were designed to be used in a microblogging site, tweets on Twitter were restricted to 140 characters. Consequently, users of the site developed techniques for getting their messages across within the character limit and without the need to provide explicit background information and thus detract from the casual, informal style. Abbreviations and omissions are common, and since there is a need to infer meanings, hashtags

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have become popular as a means for conveying style and tone – for guiding the reader’s inferential processes. The hashtag symbol # now functions to mark keywords or topics in a tweet as a highlighting device and to guide readers’ interpretations in unpredictable and largely anonymous one-to-many, asynchronous communication. Scott points out that tweeters cannot take for granted that they share contextual assumptions with all or any of their audience, and need to keep in mind that tweets reflect a discourse that is lean in terms of social cues. Thus, in this milieu, hashtags play a stylistic role, allowing users to maintain a casual, personal and informal style in a mediated, largely textbased, public discourse context. The information contained in a hashtag may guide the hearer in determining the derivation of both explicitly and  implicitly communicated meaning, and may also have stylistic consequences. The following is an example of how a hashtag was used to flag a higher-level explicature, signaling an elated tone in a tweet (Scott, 2015: 17): Finally got my mom to take and read a @RichardDawkins book while on vacation. #soproud. 13/3/14

The interpretation given for this tweet was that the tweeter wanted to indicate how ecstatic she was that she had persuaded her mother to read a book by a particular author while vacationing. As of November 7, 2017, Twitter officially doubled the number of characters per tweet, to 280 characters. This action has changed the discourse somewhat by easing restrictions that kept messages highly succinct. 7.2.3 Experiences with online cultures

Thorne et al. (2015) reviewed studies documenting the burgeoning of the internet and other information and communication technologies since 1995. Given that these technologies are now ubiquitous across everyday life contexts in both developed and increasingly in the developing regions of the world, according to the authors, more than 40% of the global population is currently online. They refer readers to internetlivestats.com. One of the byproducts of this always expanding online community is that NSs and NNSs are accessing the same websites where being an NNS may be viewed by the NSs as an invasion of their private world. For example, tension around disclosure of one’s offline identity was reported in Pasfield-Neofitou’s (2011) examination of the informal online communication between 12 Australian university students and 18 Japanese contacts. Examination of electronic discourse generated across a variety of platforms revealed that participants’ level of personal disclosure varied, especially when disclosure of a transportable identity (e.g. being non-Japanese) led to mocking and exclusion on sites that were

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dominated by Japanese NSs who were not welcoming of learners of the language. Nonetheless, there was much positive benefit to this kind of virtual immersion. Australian participants in the study saw the real advantage in joining a virtual community with its greater exposure to Japanese, which provided the participants opportunities to view authentic communication among NSs. They also saw it as a way to obtain linguistic assistance from NSs. Furthermore, participants’ self-identification as foreign or nonnative may have been beneficial in a number of ways. The main goals participants had for using the TL online were social and educational. By constructing their identities online as learners of Japanese, they mitigated any potential loss of face owing to their more limited language competence. In addition, by construing themselves as experts in English or as foreigners, they may have made themselves more attractive to Japanese members who were actively looking for a foreign or English-speaking contact. In fact, at least one participant in the present study met her closest Japanese friend in this way. Second, by describing themselves as learners, they invited correction and other forms of repair, which were particularly frequent, for example, in the public forums such as the Japanese online social network site (SNS) Mixi. In digital contexts that, unlike the NS Japanese sites, explicitly support interaction across multiple languages, multilingual writers have been shown to use SNSs as hybrid third spaces through which they can construct personal and collective identities that articulate with local as well as global concerns. This was exemplified in a study by Chen (2013) who selected as subjects two of her friends, both NSs of Chinese, Cindy and Jane. Cindy was an MA student in Chinese linguistics at a university in the US Southwest, and Jane was a doctoral student in applied linguistics at the same institution. On the one hand, both Cindy and Jane used Facebook in order to initiate conversations strategically, build relationships with audiences across different social and cultural groups, establish identities as multilingual speakers and eventually come to see themselves as users, rather than learners, of English. On the other hand, the two subjects varied in their ways of interacting in and through Facebook during their studies in the USA. For Cindy, Facebook was reportedly a site for reflection. Through her deliberate choice of Mandarin, Cindy positioned herself as a friend with shared culture in relation to other Chinese-speaking graduate students and created social bonds with them through reflections on her life in the USA. She used English in SNSs not only to reflect her feelings toward school, but also to establish her membership as a legitimate member of the university and to reach out to her American friends. With an awareness of audience, Cindy used language as a resource for conversation and in order to build relationships with audiences across different social and cultural groups (Chen, 2013).

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Jane, however, chose to communicate online mainly though English. In addition to engaging in text-oriented practices on Facebook such as status updates, Jane also actively participated in multimodal practices such as posting hyperlinks, sharing videos and creating images. The researcher found that Jane exploited the technological affordances of Facebook to link to outside sources, to share information and to connect with others both locally and globally. For Jane, Facebook became a set of ‘third cultures/spaces’ where two or more cultures created ‘localized versions of the global culture’. While establishing an international identity as a multilingual speaker, she also created a close bond with the local city and university community through discussions about local issues, while not abandoning her other identities as a proud citizen of China, as well as a multilingual and multicultural cosmopolitan global citizen (see Chen, 2013 for more details). Thus, the ever increasing expansion of the internet affords people worldwide more extensive and intimate access to communities that were previously far less accessible, if at all. Nonetheless, it brings with it potential challenges such as the need for learners to deal with situations calling for fi ne-tuned pragmatics, such as that of a Japanese SNS that might not appear, at least initially, to be welcoming of NNS participants. 7.3 Telecollaboration: NS-NNS Partnering

Telecollaboration has become a popular vehicle for mobilizing technology to support pragmatics, whereby NNS learners can be in touch by Skype, social media apps or some other means with NSs, often in some other part of the world. We can see how this use of technology can be valuable, especially for NNTs teaching in an FL context. One of the early studies took 14 learners of German and demonstrated over a nine-week telecollaborative partnership with German NSs in computer-mediated interaction (email and chat) that it was possible to increase from less than 25% to 90% accuracy in the use of four German modal particles – ja, mal, doch and denn (Belz & Vyatkina, 2005). The teaching materials were based on the learners’ own previous language learning record and were sensitive to the learners’ emerging performance profi les. The study included both quantitative and qualitative analysis of classroom instruction, students’ learning histories, their reactions to the interventions, their journal reflections and their interactions with keypals. Given the array of data sources, the research process was reported to be labor-intensive, calling for collection of data on a daily basis. There was, however, no followup after the course in order to assess the long-term impact of the intervention regarding the use of German modal particles. A more recent study of telecollaboration in learning pragmatics involved Facebook (Rafieyan et al., 2014). Thirty undergraduate EFL students were divided into two groups of 15 students each: an experimental

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group that was paired with American undergraduates at a Southwestern university in the USA through an educational group in Facebook designed and supervised by the researcher. Both experimental and control-group students received instruction in pragmatics. The theme for the Facebook interactions was culturally-specific behaviors of Americans. The American students were asked to explain in writing their cultural beliefs and behaviors regarding the specific issues listed by the researchers. The Iranian students were asked to express in writing their perceptions of these cultural behaviors and to seek feedback from the American with whom they were paired regarding their perceptions. The impact of these semester-long sessions was assessed through a 30-item multiple-choice (M-C) listening comprehension test of pragmatics, specifically of indirect opinions, adapted from a longer instrument by Taguchi (2008a: 68). Here is a sample item from Taguchi’s instrument: Mary: Hi John, I’m back. John: Hey Mary, welcome back. You must be really tired after rushing around for your friend’s wedding. Mary: Yeah, I’m so tired. I haven’t slept much in the last three days. John: How was the wedding? I bet it was exciting. Mary: Well … the cake was OK. Q:

Did Mary like the wedding?

The version by Rafieyan et al. (2014) used an M-C response format, rather than a yes-no one. The comparison of the performance of the experimental and control groups indicated a significant positive effect of telecollaboration on the development of pragmatic comprehension. Therefore, the interpretation would be that the Facebook interactions focusing on comparisons between US and Iranian culture gave the students who were paired with American undergraduate peers an advantage at this type of pragmatics measure over their Iranian peers who did not have these interactions. 7.4 Digital Classroom Interventions

Digital classroom interventions can be a way for FL learners to experience more of an L2 environment in their TL learning. They are likely to be welcomed by NNTs who wish to create a more L2-like context for their learners. Sykes (2017) has pointed out that synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), asynchronous computer mediated communication, multiuser virtual environments and mobile augmented-reality games have been implemented and researched as viable and, in some cases, transformative tools. Sykes’s (2013) work at creating a synthetic immersive environment (SIE), Croquelandia, as part of her doctoral research, was groundbreaking in the learning of pragmatics through virtual interaction.

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The SIE consisted of a Mexican town, with a host-family home, a plaza, and a market for the learning and performance of two speech acts in Spanish, apologizing and requesting. It drew on the collaborative gameplay behavior of multiplayer online games. The players were informed that they had won a SA trip and would be living with a host family. While living in Croquelandia, the players were to complete various quests in order to progress. The apologies module contained multi-stage quests. Sample apologies included one for forgetting to help out in cleaning the house, apologizing to a vendor for breaking a vase in her open-air market display, apologizing to a friend for spilling coffee on her computer, apologizing to a friend or to a professor for arriving late, apologizing to an elderly woman for bumping into her on the street and apologizing to the host mother for stepping on her foot. The players were given M-C options for apology strategies drawn from actual face-to-face role-play interactions. The non-player characters’ response depended on the option selected by the student player. Sykes (2013) noted in a chapter about the SIE that this technologicallycreated content may have been better suited for learning of some communicative functions than others. That is an intriguing notion since, in principle, one might think that such a digitally-mediated environment might be less conducive to the learning of a rather complex speech act such as apologizing than the learning of a somewhat more straightforward speech act such as requesting. Why should the SIE have been more favorable to the learning of apologies (e.g. apologizing to your host mother for stepping on her foot or apologizing to a friend for spilling coffee on her computer) than the learning of requests (e.g. asking to accompany your host mom to the store or asking to use her computer)? Perhaps it was the very complexity of apologizing that made it more of a challenge to learn about and so the students paid greater attention, while they felt that they already knew how to request so they did not feel the need to focus in on issues such as the degree of directness. Sykes found in her research study on the SIE that a key gain for learners was in a shift from speaker-oriented strategies to hearer-oriented ones. It is encouraging that the learners’ reaction was reportedly highly positive to the use of the SIE in general for the development of TL pragmatic skills. The learners reported being intrigued with the concept, enjoying the experience and participating successfully. Sykes pointed out that a key to the creation of productive, meaningful experiences in SIEs was the inclusion of content that learners found engaging. The nature of the content motivated them to pay attention to it if they wished to complete quests and move forward in the game. Student complaints that the program was sometimes slow or crashed in the middle of the task were expected, given that it was a pioneering effort at the time (2008). Unfortunately, shortly after the study was completed, the Croquelandia SIE was shut down. Since the creation of Croquelandia, there have been numerous advances in the ways in which 3-D immersive spaces have been created.

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For instance, a more recent effort in SIE is the use of a place-based mobile game, Mentira, for teaching pragmatic behaviors in L2 Spanish1 (Holden & Sykes, 2013). Constructed using the open-source authoring platform, ARIS, 2 at the time it was the first place-based game to focus on the learning of Spanish, with an explicit orientation toward pragmatic abilities. The game was launched in 2009 and involved activity out of class, in the local Spanish-speaking community in Albuquerque, NM. While playing Mentira, learners had to investigate clues and talk to non-player characters in order to prove that they were not responsible for a murder in a local neighborhood. The game was part of a four-semester, intermediate-level university Spanish language class. The unit took place over four weeks, with at least one hour of in-class time per week explicitly focused on Mentira. Since the game was played on iTouch, all students were provided with one, unless they already had one or had an iPhone. An attractive feature of this game was that the non-player characters differed as to whether they preferred direct or indirect requests for information in Spanish. The more adept players were at utilizing a variety of pragmatic strategies to interact differently with each of these characters, the better they would be at getting the information that was needed. Utilizing examples drawn from a collection of gameplay data, exit interviews and in-class participation, the authors used a design-based research perspective to explore feedback sources related to place-based mobile games. The authors acknowledged that the amount and depth of feedback that they were able to provide the students in the game as to their pragmatic behavior was actually rather minimal, but the 25 students under study reportedly believed that their play acted toward that end, and they offered numerous explicit and detailed ideas about how to improve the interactive system. With regard to SCMC, Gonzales (2013) looked at users of Livemocha, a social networking site which was at the time being used by many millions of language learners worldwide. 3 She selected the chat-room venue for her research because she viewed it as ‘an affinity space’ in which students with a shared interest could learn. Especially given that her subject, a learner of Spanish named Bill, reportedly hated the chat sessions because he found them boring and not useful, it might have been a more productive study had Gonzales looked at students having a more positive experience with Livemocha (or other language programs offering a chat space). The author claimed that despite Bill’s negative orientation to the activity and his adverse attitude toward joining such a community of language learners, he engaged in Spanish chat because he was a dedicated and cooperative student. As an outcome of his chat sessions, Bill’s closings apparently began to look more like those of his several NS Livemocha contacts. Gonzales looked just at conversation closings, a much more limited pragmatic event than, say, a prolonged complaint, apology or request. Beyond closings,

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there are numerous other speech acts and other pragmatic behavior that can be studied in the SCMC context. It might, for example, be interesting to relate to typical or more successful topics for the chat sessions taking place under the auspices of Livemocha or some similar venue, and to the pragmatics leading to more or less successful interactions. SCMC can also be used as a vehicle for researching just how learners use particular speech acts. So, for example, a study with international undergraduates showcased the synchronous online context of giving and receiving advice concerning various drafts of their written work (Tsai, 2017). The participants took turns acting as advice givers and recipients, with advice givers momentarily positioned as the more knowledgeable party on the writing issue being discussed and advice recipients in a subordinate status. The study revealed how the recipients of advice invoked authority, provided a justification or initiated inquiries to indicate resistance in a delicate manner. The researcher viewed these resistance strategies as serving to establish the recipients as competent, independent participants and to assert their primary rights over their written text. The study demonstrated how L2 SCMC peer response is not only a means for participants to develop rhetorical knowledge, but also to negotiate advice and manage interactional practices. Since these were international students, a follow-up study might investigate the extent to which any of the resistance moves reflected pragmatic behavior more associated with the particular student’s speech community than with that of the large university in which the study took place. 7.5 Creative Use of Films

While there is nothing innovative about the use of film per se, Abrams (2016) amply demonstrated in a qualitative study how the rigorous and systematic use of fi lms in a language class of 30 advanced beginners of German could have a noticeable payoff in the students’ ability to incorporate into their own dialogues pragmatic features from German films that they had viewed and studied. Before the intervention, the students’ dialogues did not have opening greetings and no downgraders, few intensifiers and limited listener responses (instances of backchanneling). There were no signs of local contextualization. Rather, the interactions were between characters without clear identities, taking conversational turns that did not seem situated in the given conversation. Abrams noted that it was difficult to enrich interaction with pragmatic devices if the ‘personalities’ in a typical textbook task had no personalities and no relationships. Films were seen to provide the social context and consequently the opportunity and impetus to engage in exchanges that reflected sociallyembedded language use. Abram demonstrated how students working in pairs over a semester could use the social context provided by each fi lm to situate the

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characters and employ appropriately formal or informal language and greetings depending on the communicative purpose of the interaction. Using the fi lms as a source, the students were requested to write 15-minute dialogues and perform them in front of the class. While Abrams acknowledged that the students’ capacity to create written dialogues based on fi lm transcripts was not equivalent to the ability to participate in spontaneous exchanges, it still demonstrated a significant gain in awareness of how pragmatics worked in contextualized interactions in German. 7.6 Technology and SA

Technology can be used to get ready for SA, to enhance the experience while there and to continue to benefit from the experience once back home (Godwin-Jones, 2016; Goertler, 2015; Shively, 2010). There are now, for example, numerous apps available to help enhance the in-country experience: • • •

the app TextLens, which provides a translation for a sign, apps for uploading media-rich blog posts, like BlogPress and Blogsy, apps for writing personal journals, like Penzu and Rove. (Godwin-Jones, 2016: 9–11)

The CARLA research project on SA included the use of e-journaling as a means for keeping the experimental group students in touch with one of the three research assistants that they were paired with back home in Minneapolis while the students were in sites in Spain, Latin American, France, the Ivory Coast and Senegal (Cohen et al., 2005). The 42 students were required to write reflective entries about their SA experience and were given weekly reading assignments in the Maximizing Study Abroad (MAXSA) guide and participated in back-and-forth email exchanges with the research assistants, which were an integral and important part of the SA experience for these students (see Paige et al., 2006). This is a far cry from the blue air letters that I would send my parents while in the Peace Corps in the hinterlands of Bolivia (1965–67). During my Peace Corps stint, it would take at least three weeks for the letters to arrive in the USA (once I was able to get them to La Paz to be mailed), and then there would be a three to six week turn around before I received a reply at my Peace Corps site on the High Plains – a five-hour truck ride on a dirt road from La Paz. During the CARLA study, the students submitted a total of seven biweekly e-journal entries to their research assistant contact. Students responded to a series of questions each week in their e-journals, which included sharing about their language and culture learning experiences, including reports of how they had used strategies described in the MAXSA guide and how they had dealt with critical incidents that they had

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encountered on site. These were the questions that the students were posed (Cohen et al., 2005: 52–53): • • •

• • •

What were your impressions of the readings in the assigned section? What were your impressions of the activities? Please comment on each of the activities. What types of language and culture strategies are you using in order to deal with the host country language and culture (for example, listening for key words in a conversation, explaining cross-cultural experiences to family and friends back home, etc.; see pages 16–28 in the Guide for lists of strategies)? What are the contexts and situations in which you use these language and culture strategies (for example, eating dinner with your host family, talking with your language partner, etc.)? How have the readings and activities related to your study abroad experience? Please give examples with explanations. Is there anything else you would like to tell us?

As can be seen, the questions were purposely specific in order to stimulate the students to pay attention to and describe their actual strategies, rather than simply providing the research assistants general labels of an nondescript nature. 7.7 Websites on Pragmatics 7.7.1 CARLA pragmatics webpages

CARLA was established in 1993 under the umbrella of the University of Minnesota’s Institute of International Studies (now the Global Programs and Strategy Alliance) to house the federally-funded Title VI National Language Resource Center grant to support a coordinated program of research, training, development and dissemination aimed at improving the nation’s capacity for language learning and teaching. One of CARLA’s efforts over the years has been that of promoting the teaching and learning of TL pragmatics. It is fair to say that a major motivation for creating the website at the time was to make TL pragmatic materials readily available to all learners of the TL, with a special concern for NNTs teaching in an FL context. Three sets of webpages4 were constructed at CARLA, as follows: (1) a general website introducing pragmatics and especially speech acts in 2001, entitled ‘Pragmatics and Speech Acts’; (2) a Japanese pragmatics website launched in 2003; and (3) a Spanish pragmatics website launched in 2006. All three websites benefited from research in cross-cultural pragmatics and from interventional studies investigating the effects of explicit instruction on the development of pragmatic ability. Their goal was to employ web-based strategy instruction: to enhance learners’ development

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and use of language learner strategies; to provide guidance in complex pragmatic language use that was difficult to simply ‘pick up’; and to facilitate learning through web-based materials. At the time that these websites were being constructed, the aim was to identify and teach both NTs and NNTs and learners about speech acts in a variety of languages. Describing speech acts has been a keen concern of researchers and practitioners, and of late the foci for pragmatics research have been enlarged and the means for collecting data have expanded. The design of pragmatics websites was viewed first and foremost as a support for busy teachers, especially for NNTs as well as NTs who might not be sure of the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic constraints for a given situation. The provision of TL pragmatics materials on a website was viewed initially as a means to mobilize TL acquisition theories in support of classroom practice. As indicated below, these webpages have proven popular over the years and continue to get a lot of ‘hits’. The perception I had at the time that the pragmatics website construction was started was that there was a critical mass of empirical research accumulating, but not much effort to get this information out into the field of language pedagogy. Hence, the design of pragmatics websites was seen as a contribution to teacher development in TL pragmatics by providing research-based information about pragmatics. In addition, the webpages were viewed as a place that learners could go to help them obtain insights about appropriate choices in intercultural communication, as well as to get tips on how to be more strategic about their learning and performance of speech acts. There was a desire to incorporate technology into instructional offerings for the learning of pragmatics. Fortunately, advances have been made to facilitate this incorporation of technology (see Sykes, 2017; Taguchi & Sykes, 2013). A rationale for constructing the CARLA webpages was to make it easier for NTs and NNTs to include pragmatics in their instruction by supplying them with pragmatics materials that were empirically-based rather than based on intuition, as was often the case with the pragmatics material found in the average TL textbooks. The intention was also to provide teachers with knowledge about pragmatics and a way to package this knowledge for students, as well as to offer a ready means for integrating pragmatics into instruction for teachers who were already overly busy with what they were currently teaching. Along with the website development, a course for language instructors, professors and administrators on the teaching of pragmatics was developed and started to be offered in the summer of 2006 at CARLA alongside the other summer institute offerings. Largely as an outgrowth of developing materials for that summer course, a book was written to assist teachers in TL pragmatics instruction (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014). The material in the book was pilot-tested in those institutes over three summers (2006 to 2008), so that all the tasks in

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Figure 7.1 Pragmatics and speech acts website

the book had ample field-testing. The summer institute has now gone to an online format, with the first one being offered 9–27 July 2018. 5 Thanks to federal funding to the Language Resource Center at CARLA, the pragmatics website project was initiated in 2001, as indicated above, with the first effort being to construct a website for teachers, curriculum writers and learners, entitled ‘Pragmatics and Speech Acts’ (Figure 7.1). The website provides information about six speech acts: requests, refusals, apologies, complaints, compliments and thanking, and offers examples of these speech acts in 10 languages. 6 The website has suggested strategies for teaching these speech acts and provides sample teaching materials, along with an annotated bibliography (updated in 2012 and 2016), which includes information on other areas of pragmatics as well. The second project was the construction of a Japanese pragmatics website, entitled ‘Strategies for Learning Speech Acts in Japanese’. 7 The website has units for the learning of specific speech acts in Japanese: apologies, compliments, requests, refusals and expressing gratitude. The initial construction and evaluation of the website was under the guidance of Gabriele Kasper (University of Hawaii) and the curriculum adviser was Elite Olshtain (now professor emerita from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem). Each unit was pilot-tested with learners of Japanese, revised in the spring of 2003 and then further revised in the fall of 2003, incorporating learners’ feedback from research conducted with students using the website (Cohen & Ishihara, 2005). The units were adopted (on a trial basis) as part of the thirdyear Japanese course curriculum at the University of Minnesota, from 2003 to 2004.

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As part of each speech act unit, learners are to interact with audio clips of NS dialogues and complete 10 exercises designed to assist them in developing appropriate strategies for learning and using each of the five speech acts in Japanese. Each speech act unit has the following components: • • • •

• •

comparisons of L1 and L2 norms; examination of contextual factors influencing each speech act (i.e. the age of the interlocutors, their relative status, their level of acquaintance and the intensity of the act); self-evaluation of linguistic behavior; a focus on the speech act-specific strategies which alone or in combination with other strategies help in producing the given speech act, such as ‘an expression of apology’, ‘an acknowledgment of responsibility’ or ‘an offer of repair’ when apologizing; practice in producing output; and self-evaluation and feedback.

For each unit, sample interactions are based largely on empirical data from research studies. There are pragmatic awareness-raising tasks, where the norms for TL pragmatic behavior are clearly spelled out. There are both pragmalinguistic exercises, where the focus is on language structure, with lexical and grammatical information provided (e.g. how to use the apology word sumimasen), and sociopragmatic exercises, where the focus is on sociocultural issues, such as what to compliment people for in Japanese (Figure 7.2). The website was intended to be used either on a stand-alone basis or as a supplement to an intermediate course in Japanese (for more on the website, see Cohen & Ishihara, 2005; Ishihara, 2007; Ishihara & Cohen, 2014).

Figure 7.2 Strategies for learning speech acts in Japanese website

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Here is a comment from a student learner of Japanese after accessing the website: We focus on grammar the most in courses so we can produce proper sentences, but we seldom get a chance to practice the use of such phrases. Having a variety of situations with a detailed description of what elements are important and relevant to the speech used helps a lot. It helps to know what to take into consideration, such as the age of the person, the situation, and the level of formality.

The third project was the construction of a Spanish pragmatics website, entitled ‘Dancing with Words: Strategies for Learning Pragmatics in Spanish’8 (Figure 7.3). Its construction drew on lessons learned from the development of the Japanese website, as well as advances in web

Figure 7.3 Dancing with Words: Strategies for learning pragmatics in Spanish

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technology, and it was launched in August 2006. The site consists of an introductory unit and eight additional units: • • • • • • • •

compliments; gratitude and leave taking; requests; apologies; invitations; service encounters; advice, suggestions, disagreements, complaints and reprimands; and considerations for pragmatic performance.

Each unit consists of unscripted video interchanges between NSs of various regional varieties of Spanish and activities at different levels of difficulty to cater to learners with varying pragmatic ability. All instructional material is in English with the examples, transcripts and activities to be completed in Spanish (for more on the website, see Sykes & Cohen, 2008). The website constitutes a self-access venue for learning Spanish pragmatics with the following elements: • • • • • • •

empirically-based content; the provision of strategies-based learning and use; examples of acceptable pragmatic behavior; the pragmatics for language varieties in the Spanish-speaking world; encouragement of individual pragmatic development; a non-prescriptive approach to pragmatics; and accessible feedback to learners.

Each unit has the following: • • • • • •

an introduction; a description of the speech act (referred to as a communicative act); strategies for learning and performing the given speech act; identification of important social factors; a discussion of pragmatic variation by dialect; and a summary of the key points.

As indicated above, the webpage included information on dialect differences in Spanish based on research available at the time (e.g. Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 2005). As is the case with any research-based website, more studies of dialect differences in pragmatics have appeared since its construction (e.g. García & Placencia, 2011; Schneider & Barron, 2008), which is partly the stimulus behind the creation of a pragmatics wiki (see Section 7.8 below). Student piloting of ‘Dancing with Words’ in 2006 provided useful feedback on how to improve scrolling through the Spanish pragmatics website, as well as feedback on links that were made or needed to be made. There was also useful feedback on improving the content, on

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providing more examples, on accent marks, on the use of terminology and on writing style. The following is a student’s comment from the piloting: I think overall it’s really helpful and informative, especially for students who are intending to study abroad … because before you go you know it’s going to be different, but you don’t get the actual pragmatic stuff.

It would appear that the many years spent in pragmatics webpage construction have been beneficial to the field. It appears to have stood the test of time. The pragmatics materials on the CARLA website continue to be popular with numerous users. We note that while the material on both the Japanese and the Spanish websites is drawn from empirical data on pragmatics in the respective TLs, it has, in fact, been distilled. Indeed, the interactions on the two websites are idealized ones based on empirical data, but are not taken directly from natural corpora. The reason for this is that actual corpus data are in need of modification to make them easier for students to use, as discussed in Section 6.2 above (Bardovi-Harlig et al., 2015a). Consistent with this reality, efforts were made on the CARLA websites to streamline the utterances so that they can be learned more expediently. To determine just how often people were accessing the pragmatics materials on the CARLA website, Google Analytics was used,9 with special attention given to Content Drilldown, which provides an analysis of the extent to which users access different webpages on the site. From 29 August 2013, to 29 August 2014, all the CARLA websites combined experienced a total of roughly 1,250,000 hits. Of these hits, 11% were on the pragmatics pages (133,000). The general website, ‘Pragmatics and Speech Acts,’ received 70% of these hits, with interest being both in the descriptions of speech acts and in the annotated references. The other 30% of the hits were divided between the Japanese and Spanish pragmatics websites, with ‘Dancing with Words: Strategies for Learning Pragmatics in Spanish’ getting 23% of the hits and ‘Strategies for Learning Speech Acts in Japanese’ getting 7% of the hits. So, more than a dozen years after the first effort was made to construct an L2 pragmatics website at CARLA, the pragmatics pages have continued to draw interest, which is gratifying for those of us who worked on these projects. 7.7.2 Web-based tutorial for Spanish pragmatics

The web-based tutorial (WBT) was designed to teach learners of Spanish FL about the speech acts of complaints and requests, and the content of the WBT was based on available empirical evidence about these speech acts (Russell & Vásquez, 2011). The website designers noted that although CARLA’s ‘Dancing with Words’ website offers instruction on a number of speech acts in Spanish, the WBT offered lessons on the speech act of complaining in Spanish, which was not available on CARLA’s website. In addition, the Spanish pragmatics tutorial was seen to offer a unique and highly interactive user interface where learners had the option of

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recording a video response (with their webcams) to the DCTs that were presented to them during the pragmatics lessons, making the assessment of pragmatics interactive. Russell and Vásquez (2011) pointed out that whereas CARLA’s ‘Dancing with Words’ website also employed DCTs, users only had the option of replying with a written response via a text box, not in speaking interactively. Thus, the authors felt that the WBT made better use of the capabilities of the web-based format, had a more appealing user interface design and provided greater interactivity for users than the Spanish pragmatics lessons that were available on the CARLA website. The researchers conducted a study with seven novice and six intermediate-level Spanish students in SA to Cádiz, Spain (Russell & Vásquez, 2013). The results of a game-based assessment looking at DCT results for formal and informal compliments and for requests, and a qualitative analysis of the DCT results suggested that the WBT was effective for raising learners’ awareness of pragmatic strategy use in Spanish. The intermediate-level students were found to perform significantly better on the DCT for the formal complaints than did the novice group. The WBT developers concluded that despite the limitations of the study, including the small sample, there was some indication that the website may have been more effective for intermediate learners than for novice learners of Spanish. 7.8 The Creation of a Pragmatics Wiki10

Given the question of how best to disseminate to the international community teachable material about pragmatics, a viable response seemed to be that of setting up a wiki where pragmatics researchers and instructors worldwide could contribute their insights and fi ndings to further along TL pragmatics pedagogy. The main strategy is that of crowdsourcing, namely, soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from the online community. The aim is to make the collection of TL pragmatics information varied – including data from a number of languages, as well as more information about language variation across users and dialect variations within the same language as well. The Pragmatics Wiki that has been created – wlpragmatics: http:// wlpragmatics.pbworks.com – is intended to serve as a repository for teaching materials in a variety of TLs and across a wide range of pragmatic behaviors. The goal is to have this wiki address a felt need in the L2/ FL pragmatics community and provide accessible teaching resources for those interested in further incorporating the instruction of pragmatics into their various teaching contexts. Contributions have already been made to the wiki by NTs and NNTs who have had experience teaching pragmatics. The aim is to amass a respectable collection of teachable items – contributions that are practical and aimed at classroom instruction. It is intended that as the wiki expands, contributors will post suggestions or questions and get input from those around the world. This global

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effort is aimed at allowing multiple comparisons as to what is similar and what is different across cultures and subcultures. The CARLA website for Japanese pragmatics was constructed just with audio clips, albeit of NSs speaking in an unscripted fashion and being as natural as possible in their responses in the given speech act situations. The Spanish website was constructed with both audio and video material (using a hand-held camcorder). Nowadays everyone has video capability on their cell phones. Those who submit pragmatics information are either attaching video clips or including links to videos showcasing the behavior. Technology is racing ahead at such a record-breaking pace that it is difficult to foresee just what may be possible in the future for illustrating pragmatic behavior across languages and cultures. 7.8.1 Suggestions for contributions to the wiki

Readers of this pragmatics volume are encouraged to contribute to the pragmatics wiki. Here are some suggestions for possible contributions: • •

•

Examples of speech acts and/or how to teach them – for instance, criticism, advice, apologies, compliments, persuasion, nonverbal responses, small talk, humor, cursing, greetings and closings. Video cuts from the discourse around the holiday dinner table – capturing key moments of discourse (with the permission of family members, relatives and others). If not in English, then glosses need to be provided for those utterances. Findings of research with a bearing on instruction, especially in areas that are underrepresented in the field – for instance: genuine criticism (e.g. for dressing sloppily, having an absurd hair style, behaving unacceptably and the like); efforts by nonnatives to curse that do and do not work; perception or production of sarcasm or a facetious utterance/ dealing with tone of voice; conversational management and mismanagement by nonnatives; efforts at small talk that work or do not work; sharing anecdotal accounts of pragmatic failure, especially cases of what have amounted to sociopragmatic goofs. Some possible examples: – complimenting a secretary in Israel for a job well done (not knowing that the secretary may well consider the compliment as demeaning since it implies that the other work performed is not up to par); – an NNS asking an American how much s/he makes a month or how much the new house or new car cost, asking whether or not a woman is trying to have kids and how it is going (e.g. whether she is using IVF to have a baby); ○

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–

•

•

•

asking certain Arab males how many children they have (since for some, divulging this information could put a curse on one or another of the children); – an American telling other Chinese colleagues in Beijing about a late-night foot massage with a Chinese colleague and spouse, without realizing that the sharing this information would be deeply embarrassing to the colleague since it implied they had extra wealth to be able to afford such extravagances. Getting the pragmalinguistics wrong – for instance, using ‘very’ in an apology for inflicting bodily harm (‘I’m very sorry for smashing into you’) when ‘really’ means ‘regret’ (‘I’m really sorry about that! Are you OK?’), and ‘very’ is often used as a form of etiquette (‘I’m very sorry to inform you that your time is up’). The pragmatic consequences of using certain words that have multiple meanings or connotations which can be misinterpreted in a language. For instance, Je suis plein, intending to indicate the woman has eaten enough can easily be misconstrued in French to mean she is pregnant, whereas J’ai assez mangé ‘I have eaten enough’ would work fi ne without ambiguities. Posting on the wiki thorny questions dealing with topics of crucial concern to research students, where researchers with experience in those areas can jump in and provide answers (as is readily available in so many internet sites today). Here are seven such queries that I have culled (and edited) from emails I have received regarding pragmatics research: How do I design video clips? Or could they be downloaded from the internet? If I design the video clips, should they be silent so that the participants could produce their own response? How do I determine which speech act norms are most appropriate for my students’ classroom, since the norms may vary according to the particular speech community where the language is spoken (as in the case of the different World Englishes)? I conducted my research with nearly 150 college university students at three levels of EFL students: BA, MA and PhD. The question is ‘How do I differentiate between lack of pragmatic knowledge and perceived resistance to accommodate?’ For example, when a student starts his letter to a faculty member with ‘Hello, teacher. Please give my paper another read. I deserve a better grade’, trying to determine whether the lack of mitigation is due to a lack of knowledge or a conscious choice to be a bit rude. I found the speech act of ‘genuine criticism’ intriguing. I wonder what the word ‘genuine’ means exactly and what it refers to. Is it the type of immediate criticism that interlocutors express in the very social context in which they are interacting? I wonder if you may give me some hints. ○

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Does development in pragmalinguistic ability follow in an incremental way, like with the development of negation or question formation? Since there might be more than one way to perform a speech act, how do I determine which norm(s) to pay attention to? How do I determine the extent to which the alternate approaches are at similar levels of importance with respect to their impact and appropriateness? I am currently hoping to do my dissertation research on interculturality and pragmatics for Hebrew as a second language, and as a base I need some study that looks at Hebrew pragmatics as a first language in Israel (for comparison purposes). There are plenty of studies from the 1980s about this, and most people who decide to mention Hebrew in their studies go back to these articles. Although these articles are vital to understanding this area, I feel that my study would not be as credible without more modern examinations of Israeli Hebrew pragmatics. Do you know if there are more recent studies that actually collected data from native Hebrew speakers that I could use? How do I assess pragmatic performance?

The above examples just serve to underscore the ubiquitous role of pragmatics in daily communication. Pragmatics makes communication in any one language a daunting task at times. How much more challenging it becomes in multilingual contexts, especially when translanguaging,11 is a factor. 7.8.2 Guidelines for posting of pragmatics material to the wiki

If readers wish to contribute to the wlpragmatics wiki, the materials are to be submitted to wlpragmatics.pbworks.com. Contributions are welcomed in any languages, with English being used as the language for instructions and explanations. If the material consists of lesson plans, then it would be helpful to indicate the goal of each lesson, a description of the activity on a step-bystep basis and suggestions for ways to vary it as well. If possible, it would also be helpful to provide some ideas about assessing pragmatic performance in the classroom. Any questions about the website are to be sent to the wiki’s email address, [email protected], along with the following basic information: (1) Name and contact information. (2) Background information on the developer of the materials (e.g. the venue for teaching pragmatics and number of years taught). (3) Whether the TL pragmatics material is or was taught in an L2 or an FL context.

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It is hoped that this website will provide valuable teaching resources to the global L2/FL pragmatics teaching community. 7.8.3 Copyright issues

The Pragmatics Wiki can include links to online material along with any citations. It cannot, however, post a copy of what is online on another website. In addition, the wiki can post published articles and chapters, but only with the written consent of the publisher. In this section options available for licensing materials submitted to the Pragmatics Wiki are provided. 7.8.3.1 Creative Commons License Information (https://creative commons.org)

An approach used by websites such as Wikipedia and Google, as well as photo-sharing websites such as Flickr (flickr.com), is to select the appropriate type of license in order to be able to post the material on the wiki freely. There are six main types of Creative Commons (CC) licenses that our contributors could choose from. The descriptions come directly from the CC website: (1) Attribution: This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most accommodating of licenses offered. Recommended for maximum dissemination and use of licensed materials. (2) Attribution-share alike: This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to ‘copyleft’ free and open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects. (3) Attribution-no derivations: This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you. (4) Attribution-non commercial: This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. (5) Attribution-non commercial-share alike: This license lets others remix, tweak and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

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(6) Attribution-non commercial-no derivations: This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they cannot change them in any way or use them commercially. Hence, through the CC website (https://creativecommons.org/choose/) those interested in submitting their pragmatics materials choose which type of license they want and obtain from the website an HTML code, which would be posted on the wiki along with their materials. The website provides guidelines as to display the type of license affi xed to the contributed material: https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Marking_your_work_with_ a_CC_license. 7.9 Conclusions

The purpose of this chapter has been to look at the contributions that innovative technologies have made to the learning and performance of TL pragmatics, and to consider current and future ways in which to use technology in the service of pragmatic development. The chapter started by focusing on corpora, with a concern for how they could be accessed and utilized in effective ways. Detailed examples were given of how NTs and NNTs can provide content for instruction drawing on such corpora. Up-to-date corpora based on relevant users of the TL can be a potentially valuable source for instructional materials. Then attention was given to social media sites for oral and written chat, and programs for video communication. It was noted that while the use of such sites could be challenging to NNS users, their use can – especially with the assistance of their NT or NNT – potentially serve as a helpful vehicle for their learning and use of pragmatics. After all, there is just so much that teachers can do with classroom hours. Since learners spend a lot of time on the internet in outof-class hours anyway, having them devoting some of this time to such websites (e.g. in TL chat rooms) could be instrumental in their development of pragmatics. The chapter cited numerous studies investigating the role of technology in pragmatics, including a study to determine the ways that hashtags serve to signal tone in tweets. The chapter also looked at the possible role of telecollaboration in a world characterized increasingly by truly global communication. In addition, digital classroom interventions were discussed, including the recent addition of gaming that includes both virtual and real spaces. Moreover, attention was given to the possible ways in which technology could contribute to the creative use of films in the language classroom, and to the quality of the SA experience. Finally, a new pragmatics wiki at CARLA was described and contributions to it were encouraged.

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Notes (1) See: http://www.mentira.org. (2) See: http://arisgames.org. (3) Rosetta Stone acquired Livemocha in 2013 and closed it permanently in 2016. (4) Webpage here is used to distinguish subsections of a website from the other sections. A webpage may actually consist of multiple physical pages. (5) See: http://carla.umn.edu/institutes/2018/linguistic.html (accessed 18 November 2017). (6) See: http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/descriptions.html (accessed 22 November 2017). (7) See: http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/introtospeechacts/index.htm (accessed 22 November 2017). (8) See: http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html (accessed 22 November 2017). (9) See the following link for an explanation: http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/ 2340779/google-analytics-content-reports-understanding-the-key-benefits# (accessed 29 June 2016). (10) This section is an updated version of material that fi rst appeared in Cohen (2016). (11) Translanguaging is ‘the ability of multilingual speakers to shuttle between languages, the diverse languages that form their repertoire as an integrated system’ (Canagarajah, 2011: 401). See García and Li (2014) for more on translanguaging.

8 The Learning of Pragmatics

This chapter focuses on the learner of TL pragmatics, since the ability to engage in appropriate pragmatic behavior ultimately depends on the learners themselves. Having said that, unless the learners are totally self-tutored, NTs and/or NNTs are nonetheless likely to play a major role in this learning process. As previous chapters in the book have indicated, NTs and NNTs can support the learners in both similar and different ways in this effort. NNTs are likely to have numerous insights as to TL pragmatics based on their own experiences and learning the TL. NTs who are aware of what it is they know about pragmatics as NSs can share these insights. Under any circumstances, since classroom instruction is only a relatively brief portion of their contact with the language, it is crucial for learners to have a repertoire of strategies for learning and performing pragmatics so that they can handle these issues more effectively on their own. These strategies will enable them to continue learning new pragmatic material and also to perform what they know while at the same time doing their best to keep pragmatic failure to a minimum. This chapter provides both a series of anecdotes, as well as a set of concrete strategies aimed at transforming this learning and performance of pragmatics into something more doable. That said, it can be a daunting task for learners to deal with the pragmatics of a new language. Especially if the TL has a host of ways to perform speech acts such as greetings in comparison to the relatively few options in the learners’ L1, then performing the speech acts in the TL may be a challenge. That is the feeling that I have had working on my 13th language, Mandarin. For example, there are numerous verbs in Mandarin to express what in English is often expressed by one single verb, ‘to visit’, depending on whether the visit is to a place or a person, whether it is a personal or a state visit, whether the person being visited is more senior and distinguished, a sick person in a hospital, a close friend and so forth. Therefore, once the choice of appropriate verb is sorted out, it is then necessary to determine when it is pragmatically appropriate to use one or another of these verbs and how to use them. For instance, the NNS could accidentally use the verb for visiting elderly or sick individuals when visiting someone who is young and healthy. 181

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In my case, the age factor has to be added to the mix. I started learning Mandarin in my late 60s and have found that I have difficulty retaining in active memory much of the vocabulary that I encounter. A recent volume by Ramírez Gómez (2016) focuses on what is referred to as foreign language geragogy, namely the learning of an FL when over the age of 60. She contends that while aging does have an impact on a language learner’s ability to notice, process, analyze, organize and memorize the input received, there is no conclusive evidence that older learners are unable to attain high FL proficiency levels. In her upbeat treatment of the elderly FL learner, she provides a series of strategies that these learners can use to improve their success at remembering words – such as contextualizing the target words, connecting words to personal experiences or actions, making semantic maps of word relationships and using keyword mnemonics (i.e. relating the word in sound and imagery to an L1 word). She describes in detail an effort to engage elderly Japanese learners in how to learn Spanish as an FL effectively and reports that from her perspective and that of the learners there are notable gains using her suggestions. While her book does not deal with pragmatics per se, undoubtedly the instructional techniques could be applied to the learning of pragmatics. Is the learning of TL pragmatics – whether as a younger learner or as an older one – a daunting enough task to discourage prospective learners? Hopefully not, but learners clearly need to be selective as to what they learn and how. The good news for those who are living in the context of the TL, many of these distinctions are actually acquired, consistent with Krashen’s (1985) pronouncements, rather than formally learned. I experienced this firsthand when living in Jerusalem, Israel for over 17 years. It turned out that much of the material that I had written down in my notebooks during Hebrew classroom instruction, and had never learned at the time I was studying, was ultimately acquired during the 16 years that I lived there. This observation was reinforced upon looking through my notebooks after 10 years in Israel. I found that I had acquired much of what was at the time in my notebooks and not in my brain! Yet I also saw that not only was I not taught much at all about pragmatics, but also I did not acquire very much of it on my own. I came to the conclusion that is a part of a TL that often needs to be explicitly taught. This personal finding is consistent with research cited above (see Section 1.4) about the importance of explicit teaching in this area. Let us just take greetings as an example, since it is likely that in the very initial language class sessions, language instructors teach their students basic greetings. So in French class, learners are taught bonjour ‘good morning, good day, hello’. The problem is that very often it is not made clear when and how to use bonjour. For starters, English NSs may have difficulty using it late in the afternoon if they assume it mostly means ‘good morning’. But its use is more complex than that. Some years ago I approached a man on the street in Martinique and launched directly into a request for help in interpreting a confusing parking slip issued by a

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machine (see Figure 8.1). Instead of responding to my question (asked in fluent French), the man replied, ‘Bonjour, monsieur.’ So what did the bonjour mean pragmatically? In this case, it meant, ‘I was put off by your focusing immediately and exclusively on the parking slip, without going through the courtesy of extending a morning greeting.’ The speaker stressed the bonjour when he said it, in order to indicate his being a bit irked by my focus on the issue rather than the importance of fi rst providing a greeting. After a proper greeting, a pleasant conversation took place with the man – a Martiniquais, living in Paris for over 40 years and working with the police there. His response: ‘No one will be checking parking for the next few days since it is a holiday period.’ As corroboration that I had not learned when and how to use a basic greeting in French, bonjour, I had had similar responses from native French speakers in two other previous instances in France; one asking a railway attendant for the track of a departing train in Paris and another when requesting a loaf of bread in a bakery shop in Arcachon. Given that acquiring a working understanding the illocutionary force or function of bonjour in a French-speaking community can be a challenge, a strategic approach for learners would be to receive coaching on the function of greetings in the given language. It is not enough just to memorize the various greetings for different times of day. It is crucial to know the when, how and why of using them. Living In Israel for many years, I acquired the proper intonation for signaling when my use of shalom meant ‘hello’, ‘greetings’, ‘goodbye’, ‘peace’ or something else. Strategies for learning and using TL pragmatics probably need to be taught, since learners are unlikely to just pick up much of the pragmatics on their own, particularly the more subtle elements. As seen above,

Figure 8.1 The importance of greetings in a given language community

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performance of even the most conspicuous speech acts such as greetings may not necessarily be obvious. Since the learning of pragmatics involves so many disparate bits of information, it is helpful to have learners use their own strategies for both the initial learning of TL pragmatics and strategies for performing TL pragmatics. It can be especially beneficial to look for or to create strategies that are earmarked for the language area of concern – in this case, pragmatics – rather than attempting to use amorphous, one-size-fits-all strategies that are not truly focused on the language area of interest. Note that sometimes what are presented as one-size-fits-all strategies (e.g. ‘I use a dictionary’, ‘I use visualization’ or ‘I use repetition’) are actually more skill-like, that is, reflecting the ability or propensity to use dictionaries, visualize or use repetition. The way in which learners go about using various types of dictionaries, visualizing for a given purpose or making use of repetition calls for enlisting task-specific strategies. This then is the process by which skills are operationalized (see Cohen, 2011: 18). For this reason, efforts are made in this chapter on the learning of pragmatics to refer not to general skill-like behaviors, but rather to strategies and to give examples of such strategies that are, in fact, specific to the learning and performance of pragmatics. 8.1 Learner Strategies Specifically for Pragmatics

A classification scheme for pragmatics strategies was published some years ago (Cohen, 2005, 2014b) in an effort to provide more than a onesize-fits-all approach to strategizing about TL pragmatics. Especially at the stage of the initial learning of pragmatics, learners need to attend to the pragmatic behaviors that they would like to learn and to notice the particulars of performance in a given situation. Once learners have noticed what it is that they would like to learn, they can call up one or another strategy for dealing with this pragmatic behavior. Since some pragmatic behaviors may be subtle, the learners may need to ask NSs or highly competent NNSs to verify whether the relative age and status of the interlocutors and the given situation have a bearing on how to perform the speech act. For example, the learner may ask something like, ‘Was it because the person asking for directions was younger that she was so polite in her request? Or was it just because she was asking a stranger? Would it have something to do with her gender or age?’ 8.1.1 Ways to classify learner strategies

I have realized over the years that part of the difficulty in interpreting the language learner strategies (LLS) literature is that there are numerous different and often competing systems for classifying language strategies. Just three of these are presented below.

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8.1.1.1 By goal

Strategies for learning the TL – for example, identifying, distinguishing, grouping and memorizing strategies – and strategies for using the TL – that is, performing your knowledge, such as retrieval, rehearsal, communicative and cover strategies. Cover strategies are used by learners in order to look good, even when they do not have a clue as to what they are hearing, saying, reading or writing. 8.1.1.2 By function

Strategies may assume a metacognitive, cognitive, social or affective function (i.e. purpose or role) from one moment to the next, depending on the nature of the interaction.1 In other words, the very same strategy of, say, asking a woman passerby on the street for directions in Buenos Aires in Spanish (Disculpe. Usted podría decirme cómo llegar a la embajada de los Estados Unidos? ‘Excuse me. Could you tell me how to get to the US Embassy?’), could take on one of the four functions enumerated above, and could fluctuate back and forth from one function to another. For example, if the learners are attending to the age factor in how they make their request for directions to this woman, this strategy has a metacognitive function at the moment when they are planning to ask the woman for directions. That same strategy assumes a social function when the learners are determining whether, in fact, it is acceptable to ask this passerby for directions, given the person’s gender and age. The strategy takes on a cognitive function while the language users are searching in their mind for the pragmalinguistically appropriate forms given their relative ages and genders. In this case, the learners would be selecting the appropriate form of ‘you’ (e.g. whether to use tu, vos or usted in Argentinian Spanish). The use of this ‘asking a passerby on the street for directions’ strategy may take on an affective function if, say, the passerby responds that she is new to the city and is therefore unable to give directions, if the response is too fast or abrupt, or if the request is ignored altogether. In other words, the affective function is activated if the learners feel frustrated (which can happen frequently during efforts at TL use). If the learner is persistent, then this moment of negative affect is likely to activate the metacognitive function in that the learner now plans how to ask a new passerby. Determining which language material to use involves the cognitive function and the social function may play a brief role if considerations as to gender and status crossed the learners’ mind. SA students are often surprised at how people on the street in the host country are not as accommodating as their teachers were at home. Therefore, as we see, this task of getting instructions from a passerby probably entails a back and forth fluctuation with the function shifting from metacognitive to social to cognitive to affective, possibly in a cyclical fashion. If the task calls for a sequence, pair or cluster of strategies, then

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this fluctuation of functions could be across these various strategies, which makes strategy use even more complex. In asking directions from a person on the street, an initial strategy might be to engage the person in conversation about the weather. The next strategy in the sequence might be for the learners to say that they are just visiting. If the passerby has time, which is more of a commodity in some cultures than others, a third lead-up strategy could be to point out that they are learning the language and therefore might not make the request properly. 8.1.1.3 By skill

A third way of classifying strategies would be by skill: listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar or translation strategies with regard to the TL. The skill approach provides a popular way to classify strategies, especially with regard to the two productive and two receptive skills, plus the skill of vocabulary learning. Less attention has been given to how language learners deal with the skill areas of translation and of grammar, both of which can benefit greatly from well-placed strategizing (see Cohen, 2002 with regard to translation and Cohen & Pinilla-Herrera, 2010 with regard to grammar). 8.1.1.4 Other ways of classifying strategies

• •

•

• •

By age level – with the implication that certain strategies may best be used by younger learners, teenagers, adults or seniors, or when addressing people at those stages in life. According to the learners’ proficiency levels – a rather difficult categorization since higher- and lower-proficiency learners may use the very same strategies, but may employ them in sometimes subtly different ways with regard to the nature of their use and the quality derived from the use (e.g. subtle differences in intonation or in the timing of the utterance). By specific TLs where special strategies need to be mobilized by learners/users. For example, learners of Hebrew and Arabic need strategies for correctly marking the gender of verbs in all tenses in Hebrew and Arabic. This means, for instance, correctly perceiving the gender of young children when addressing them or, if not possible, employing some cute way of asking a little child for his or her biological gender (e.g. in Hebrew, one could ask, ‘Hi/hu?’ ‘He/she?’ whereupon the child, if a boy, is likely to respond, Ani gever ‘I’m a boy’). By strategy use reserved for interactions in specific subcultures, such as strategies that apply in certain TL communities for addressing women or seniors. According to their use with speakers of different varieties of the TL, such as by socioeconomic status, by occupation or by religious sect.

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8.1.2 Strategies for the initial learning of pragmatics

A place to start would be to have learners identify several speech acts to focus on, deploying criteria such as: (1) their frequency of use in common situations encountered by the TL speaker in the given speech community (e.g. ‘requesting’, ‘refusing’ and ‘thanking’); (2) their potentially high-stakes value in discourse (e.g. ‘apologizing’ and ‘complaining’); and (3) their special role in the given community of practice within the speech community or the society, such as in creating solidarity (e.g. the use of cursing for the purpose of bonding – see Daly et al., 2004). Once learners have identified the speech acts of interest, they need strategies for collecting their data as to the frequency of use of these speech acts, their role in discourse and any special role they may have in a given community of practice (e.g. cursing among fellow students at the university or among soldiers in an army unit). They will also need to strategize regarding the aspects of performance to which they will attend. For example, how much will they focus on the comprehension of the given speech act and how much on the production of it, and how much attention (if any) will they give to the speakers’ tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures in the delivery of the given speech acts? While it is undoubtedly challenging for learners to collect these data on their own, it may give them more ownership of the task, and hence increase their motivation to do the task and contribute to the learning process. If they are currently taking a class with an NT or an NNT, the learners can then report back to the class as the ‘experts’, since they are the ones with the ‘fresh’ information, perhaps collected from speakers in a certain subculture of interest. As noted in Chapter 7, a good source of basic information on key speech acts is the CARLA website. 2 Examples are given in some nine different languages. As indicated above, that same website also has webpages with strategies earmarked for the performance of speech acts in Japanese3 and also for the performance of speech acts in Spanish.4 If learners have the energy to do so, they could also gather information (through interviews and observation) on how these speech acts are performed by members of one or more communities of practice within a given speech community (e.g. at the workplace: asking someone how old they are, refusing requests made by people of higher status and thanking people in service – e.g. cafeteria workers or custodians). In addition, learners could observe what NSs do by paying attention to what they say when speaking naturally or when they are prompted to do so – as in an oral DCT, how they say it (e.g. their speed of delivery and tone of voice) and their nonverbal behavior as well (e.g. their facial expressions, body posture and gestures).

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Still in the interests of collecting basic information on speech acts, the NT or other NSs could be asked to model performance of the speech acts as they might be realized under differing conditions and possibly be asked to answer questions about their performance as well. A key goal of the learners – using whatever strategy set they enlist – would be to see if there is variation in the realization of the speech act(s) according to: (1) the magnitude or seriousness of the issue prompting the speech act (e.g. apologizing for missing a meeting vs. spilling hot coffee on a friend); (2) the relative age of the speaker and of the addressee (e.g. making a request to a senior professor or to a young child); (3) the relative status of the speaker and of the addressee (e.g. making a request to the senior vice president of a firm or to a custodian); (4) the relative roles of the speaker and of the addressee in the relationship (e.g. making a request to the chair of the board meeting or to a waiter in a restaurant); and (5) the length of acquaintance of the interlocutors (e.g. making a request to a stranger about switching seats upon boarding an airplane, as opposed to making an appeal for assistance to a longtime friend over morning tea). Another useful exercise for learners would be to engage in cross-cultural analysis by thinking through and even writing out what the appropriate things to say would be for that speech act (or other pragmatic behavior) in the given situation in the L1 speech community of the learners as compared to what is said in the TL speech community. The comparison could involve the following elements: (1) Identifying the sociopragmatic norms for performance of these speech acts in the L1 and TL communities – namely, the circumstances under which you can use the speech act or would not: for example, whether to make an apology for a work-related incident to a colleague during a social event; or whether to convey the bottom-line message right at the start of a communication at the workplace, gradually build up to it or save it for the last possible moment (or after several drinks away from the work site, such as at a social club). (2) Identifying the speech act-specific strategies that tend to be used with the given speech act in that situation (e.g. whether the strategy of offering a repair is expected to be used in that apology situation). (3) Obtaining a viable interpretation for the cross-cultural differences by asking members of the TL speech community, which could mean members of a particular community of practice such as a group at the workplace or social or friendship group (e.g. asking whether it is appropriate for a college student to give an outright refusal to the department chair’s invitation to dinner and whether the refusal could include – even in jest – an informal phrase like ‘No way!’).

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(4) Identifying the pragmalinguistic forms to use (e.g. whether to use the word ‘apologize’ in the expression of apology or just ‘sorry’; whether to repeat ‘sorry’ more than once, and whether to intensify with words like ‘really’, ‘awfully’ or ‘so’). (5) Upon establishing similarities and differences between the two cultures, making a mental note or a notebook entry regarding these differences, such as in terms of address (e.g. referring in the TL to Dr Stephen Blake as ‘Doc’, ‘Steve’ or ‘you’, which involves choosing between tu or vous in French, and among tu, vos and usted in Spanish) or in whether to invoke G_d’s name in the apology, as might be the case for NS speakers of Arabic apologizing in Arabic (Al Masaeed & Waugh, 2017). If the classroom teachers are NTs, they may be especially effective at fi ne-tuning some of the distinctions that learners come up with, based on their intuition as NSs. (I am constantly turning to my NS Mandarin tandem partners to get clarification as to subtle semantic and pragmatic distinctions.) If the classroom teachers are NNTs, they may both draw on their rich knowledge base about pragmatics to support the information that learners fi nd and may also benefit from these learner activities as an opportunity to deepen their own understanding of TL pragmatics. 8.1.3 Strategies for performing pragmatics

The following are a series of strategies to assist learners in their performance of the pragmatics that they have learned. 8.1.3.1 Visualization strategies

Learners could use visualization strategies in order to retrieve the speech act material that has already been learned. A visualization strategy could, for example, entail visualizing a continuum with pragmalinguistic options on it from the most minimal expression of apology in the TL (e.g. slixa ‘sorry’ in Hebrew) to the most formally apologetic (ani mitnatzel ‘I apologize’). A mnemonic device could be used to retrieve material not on a continuum, such as the various categories for when the subjunctive would be expected to be used in Spanish (e.g. WEDDING representing ‘wish’, ‘emotion’, ‘doubt’, ‘desire’, ‘impersonal’, ‘negation’ and ‘general possibility’). 5 While accessing the subjunctive aspect is not in and of itself a pragmatics issue, it could become one since there is a fi ne line between grammar in its own right and grammar as a vehicle for being pragmatically appropriate. Therefore, pragmatic inappropriateness could result from the use of the indicative, which might sound too bossy, as opposed to the subjunctive, which sounds more mitigated (*Quiero que lo hace ahora. * ‘I want you to do it now’ rather than Quiero que lo haga ahora. ‘I would like you to do it now’).

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8.1.3.2 Strategic practice

Strategic practice of those aspects of speech act performance that have been learned could involve the learners doing mind games, where they engage in imaginary interactions, perhaps focusing on certain pragmalinguistic aspects of the speech act (while riding their bikes somewhere or while waiting on a line for a latte at a coffee shop). This imaginary play would entail using strategies for operationalizing the skill of visualization, with the goal being greater comfort using the given speech act. Learners could also engage in speech act role play with fellow learners of the TL or with NSs playing the other role. A less common but fruitful activity would be for learners to engage in ‘real play’ with NSs in the speech community, where the NSs (perhaps the students’ friends or acquaintances) perform their usual roles (e.g. that of a lawyer, a doctor or a shop clerk), with the added knowledge that the learners are simply practicing speech acts and may say things that are contrary to fact (e.g. apologizing for an infraction that in reality they did not commit). Since professionals may not wish to interrupt their busy work schedule to engage in real play during business hours, it may be necessary to conduct such sessions with professionals outside of work hours with professionals. The successful completion of these activities would call for a series of strategies on the part of the learners, with the realization of each strategy potentially activating more than one function, as described above in Section 8.1.1 (i.e. fluctuating from a metacognitive function to a cognitive one, from a cognitive to an affective and/or a social one and so forth). Of course, another option would be for learners to engage in interactions with NSs without the interlocutors being aware that the purpose for the learners is actually for them to practice speech acts. After real-play or totally unstaged interactions, learners who are currently in a class could report back to the class on their interactions, if possible playing a recording of themselves engaged in the interactions. Nowadays it is possible to record a selfie video easily enough on a cellphone. 8.1.3.3 Using strategies consistent with learning style preferences

Learners might wish to select strategies that are consistent with their learning style preferences during their efforts to practice performing TL pragmatics. First, learners determine their learning style preferences, ideally through some style preference inventory, such as the generic one available on the Spanish Grammar Strategies website at CARLA.6 Then, they try out an approach to speech act delivery that is consistent with the results. For example, if the learners fi nd themselves having a more reflective style preference, then they may wish to think through the elements in the speech act before performing the speech act; if they are more impulsive in nature, then they may wish to ‘on-line’ it and see what the response is. Students who are eager to engage in pre-planning of speech act delivery

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could track the strategies that they use consistent with this learning style preference. Students who prefer to on-line it could track the strategies that they actually use and the results. If the learners are currently studying in a class, the NT or NNT could have them report back to the class or to a small group in the class the strategies that they found themselves using in delivering a given speech act, and how well this use fits with their learning style preferences. Perhaps the students could record themselves as they deliver the speech act and then record their retrospective self-observation as a means for exploring the rationale behind their strategy use. Likewise, pairs of students could take turns being the performer or the one collecting the verbal report data (see Section 10.3.1 under ‘Elicited data’ and Cohen (2013) for more on collecting verbal report data). 8.1.3.4 Using communication strategies to get the message across

Sometimes, communication strategies might be used to help pave the way so as to avoid uncomfortable situations. Learners could, for instance, use the strategy of alerting the addressee just before the delivery of one or more speech acts that their delivery may not be completely appropriate (e.g. ‘I want to say I’m sorry, but I’m not sure how to say it right …’). Then just afterwards, if the learners have a sense that the performance did not work as intended, they could use a strategy to try to repair the situation (e.g. ‘I have a sense that I didn’t say that right. Please help me out here. How would you make this request/apology/complaint? If it is of any help, this is how I would say it in my native language …’). Another communication strategy would be that of translanguaging, where, as footnoted in Section 7.8.1 above, the speakers draw on their linguistic repertoire which includes material from other languages aside from the TL in order to communicate their message. An ethnographic study of translanguaging among Latino 11th graders in New York City showed how two students, Genesis and Haidy, drew on both English and Spanish to express their emotions in describing a text (Seltzer & Collins, 2016: 152): RESEARCHER (KATE): What about this? What do you think he’s doing in the last two lines of the poem when he says, ‘Sometimes when no one is around I punch the wall?’ GENESIS: Cause he’s angry, cause he can’t read. RESEARCHER: What does it look like to punch a wall? GENESIS: You have to, like, tiene que sacar lo que siente, la rabia ‘you have to get out what you feel, the anger.’ HAIDY: Cuando tú estás furioso, no sientes nada. Tú le das todo a la puerta ‘When you’re furious, you don’t feel anything. You give everything to the door.’ When you do it and you’re not angry you go, ‘Oh, my god, what am I doing?’

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Although I am unaware of research dealing with the pragmatics of translanguaging, it is logical that it would occur at moments when speakers are in an emotional state where their L1 or dominant language is the preferred means for expressing themselves. 8.1.3.5 Expressing agency

Learners may fi nd it helpful to check out for themselves the role that agency might play in their handling of the TL pragmatics. They could do an exercise to determine the extent to which they resist being nativelike in their pragmatics. These are instances when they have the requisite knowledge to perform the speech act appropriately but, as an expression of selfagency or subjectivity, remain true to their own inclinations in their speech act delivery, rather than being nativelike in their performance (see Ishihara, 2009b). For example, American learners of Japanese may purposely refrain from using honorific verbs in talking about people of higher status (for instance, using taberu ‘to eat’ instead of the honorific verb mesheagaru). If appropriate, the learners could use the strategy of sharing with their interlocutors the fact that they purposely avoid using such honorifics in order to treat everyone equally. Under Section 8.2.2 below, more will be said about resistance to abiding by the TL norms. 8.1.4 The supervisory function in handling of strategies for TL pragmatics

As noted in Section 8.1.1 above, the use of a strategy could activate a metacognitive, cognitive, social or affective function. If a strategy for learning or performing TL pragmatics takes on a metacognitive function (i.e. for planning, monitoring or evaluating strategy use), then in this case it could also be considered a metapragmatic function, since the focus is on pragmatics. For example, in an effort to avoid pragmatic failure, learners may monitor for the level of directness or indirectness in the delivery of TL pragmatics (e.g. in making a request of a stranger on an airplane); for the appropriateness of the selected term of address (e.g. referring in the TL to Dr Stephen Blake as ‘Doc’, ‘Steve’ or ‘you’); or for tone, facial expressions and gestures. Whereas an actor is usually coached in such matters, language learners are invariably left to figure it out by themselves, which at times can be a daunting undertaking. 8.2 Examples of Strategies for Comprehending and Producing TL Pragmatics

It can be a real challenge for learners to become fully versed at both understanding the pragmatics of what they hear and read, and at producing in speaking and writing language what is pragmatically appropriate. For this reason, they often need to compensate for what is lacking in their language

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proficiency by means of strategies for learning about TL pragmatics expeditiously and strategies for performing pragmatics effectively. In many cases, the main purpose of these strategies is to help cope with a lack of language proficiency. Nonetheless, highly proficient learners of a language can also benefit from such strategies. This section of the chapter will provide examples of some of the strategies that could be used to deal with the enormous demands put on learners in their efforts to avoid pragmatic failure. 8.2.1 Comprehending the pragmatic messages in the input

The input that needs to be comprehended could be transmitted by means of language (e.g. through lexical items, syntax or discourse), gestures or even total silence. Whether this input is pragmatically comprehensible to the learners depends on: (1) the functional proficiency of the learners in the TL or in other languages; (2) the age, gender, occupation, social status and the experience of the learners in the relevant communities of practice (e.g. during committee meetings at the university, while engaged in talk on the shop floor or having conversations in the locker room at the health club); and (3) the learners’ previous multilingual and multicultural experiences. 8.2.1.1 Getting greetings right

Let us now relate these factors to a sampling of language and nonverbal behaviors in an effort to illustrate how such factors may contribute to the ease or difficulty that learners have in interpreting the pragmatics of an interaction in a given situation. One major pitfall, although seemingly innocuous, is getting greetings wrong. Therefore, for example, underestimating the illocutionary force or pragmatic function of bonjour in a French-speaking community can be detrimental to getting a transaction to work (such as in the parking meter incident in Martinique that was given at the outset of this chapter). The pragmatics of this apparently simple greeting may have a subtle purpose attached to it, namely, to establish contact politely, which NNSs may miss. This would apply in a bakery in France, in requesting information from a conductor at a train station, at a post office, in the open-air market or wherever. A strategic approach to dealing with the pragmatics of greetings is to have a classroom teacher or other highly competent speakers of the language provide guidance as to the function of such greetings in the given language. It is not enough just to memorize greetings to be used at different times of day. It is crucial to know the when, how and why of using them. In something so basic as greetings it may be easy to operate from an L1 pragmatics mode and simply transfer this approach to the situation at hand in the TL community, rather than (1) asking how a speaker of, say, French

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in the given Francophile community would do it; (2) observing how they do it; or (3) asking how they as learners would be expected to do it. Therefore, if time permits and if the behavior is readily observable, being strategic could mean selecting option (2) – observing how locals do it. If an effort is made to ask locals about the proper expressions to use in given situations, then learners have to be careful to qualify the age, gender and status issues related to the given situation. Otherwise they could be misled by the response that they get and inappropriately overgeneralize this particular comment at greeting a friend to a situation where it is not usually applied. When a teenager on the Experiment in International Living’s summer program to Bordeaux, France, I had a most embarrassing experience after obtaining from a teenage buddy his way of saying a young lady looked really good. I had neglected to ask him when it was appropriate to use this expression. Little did I know that the expression was reserved for male teenager talk about girls, but was not meant for mixed company. When I used the French expression in a multigenerational French family context as part of my greeting to a young lady in our program, the adults were aghast – especially the grandmother (Figure 8.2). 8.2.1.2 The role of dialect in pragmatics

Another issue affecting the performance of pragmatics at both the comprehension and production levels is that of dialect. It could be that the learner brings previous knowledge of the pragmatics of French as spoken in France to bear in another Francophone country, namely Martinique, where the pragmatics could diverge somewhat from those of France.7 While differences in greetings between two languages and cultures may be very pronounced, as in the case of bonjour in Martinique (where there were few Americans and little English is spoken), they may be more subtle

Figure 8.2 Learning when to use TL expressions

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and even blurred in TL situations such as when French is spoken in a French-speaking community in the USA. In this intercultural situation, perhaps the need for the greeting as a conversation opener is diminished, given the influence of the mainstream language community where ‘we get down to business’ right away. A study comparing requests and expressions of gratitude in Namibian, Ghanaian, British, Irish and American English found that requests in Namibian and American English were similar in terms of preparatory strategies (e.g. ‘Excuse me …’), the position of ‘please’ and the position of the grounder (i.e. the reason for the request). In terms of lexical items used in the grounders, Namibian English was more similar to Ghanaian and British English. With regard to responses to thanks, Namibian English speakers responded 61% of the time with ‘a pleasure’, which was not in Irish English responses at all and only minimally in British and American English responses (Schröder & Schneider, 2016). The fi ndings from this study would underscore the need to determine how speech acts tend to be realized across dialects. Lack of knowledge may affect both accurate comprehension of the speech act, as well as appropriate production of it. 8.2.1.3 The role of negative transfer from the L1

Other problems associated with comprehension of pragmatics behavior can be attributed to negative transfer from the L1, overgeneralization of material in the TL or limited proficiency in the TL (three categories to be elaborated on in the section on pragmatically comprehensible output, Section 8.2.2 below). So at the lexical level, the first time that, say, English NSs from the USA hear New Zealanders or Aussies say ‘Good on ya!’ (accent on the ‘on’), they might be a bit startled, thinking perhaps that they had spilled something on themselves. So part of pragmatic comprehension includes identifying the local expressions that are not completely opaque, but may give pause for thought. 8.2.1.4 The role of grammar in comprehending pragmatics

At the grammatical level, NNSs have to interpret correctly the role of grammar (e.g. verb tenses) in pragmatics. It has been seen, for example, that English-speaking study abroad students to Spanish-speaking countries misread their acquaintances’ use of the conditional in requests (e.g. podrias ‘could you …’ instead of puedes ‘can you’) as being overly formal (Cohen & Shively, 2007). Therefore, a strategic approach would be to check with locals as to just what verb tenses are most likely to be used for what. This might seem straightforward, but in reality it can actually be rather subtle. Unfortunately, textbooks tend to give more emphasis to the plethora of verb tenses and perhaps not enough to just when to use them and for what purpose. The problem is that without having the tense usage explicitly called to their attention, learners may not attend to nor acquire the proper usage of these forms, which they may have learned by rote.

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8.2.1.5 Speech acts spread over multiple turns

Another language-related issue is that speech acts in real time may not show up in a neat, interpretable fashion, but rather may be spread over a number of turns in a lengthy interaction, culminating in something like, ‘Well, then, I’m sorry for that’ (see Félix-Brasdefer, 2006). It may be progressive enough and subtle enough that NNSs do not even realize that an apology is taking place. Therefore a strategy would be for the learners to ask the interlocutor what just happened in instances where they are not sure. For example, a strategy would be to say, ‘I’m still learning the language and I want to make sure I understood correctly. Was that an apology?’ The same strategy could be used to determine whether the interlocutor just complained, made a request, gave a refusal or performed some other speech act. 8.2.1.6 Interpreting the pragmatic function of gestures

A rather obvious case of miscomprehension would be with a gesture such as the one for ‘wait’ in Hebrew, which consists of extending the forearm with the fingers and thumb bunched and pointing upwards without moving the hand (with the palm facing the person doing the gesturing) (Figure 8.3). It is used to mean, ‘Just a second and I’ll be with you’ or ‘Please wait and let me cut in’ (when on a bike, in a car, or in some other vehicle). Such a gesture does not exist in American English but does (with the hand moving) in European languages and has a different, sometimes obscene, meaning. All the more reason for learners to deploy the strategy of asking about seemingly curious and perhaps bewildering gestures that they see used in TL contexts early on. It may be a mistake for the learners to assume that the meaning is clear from context, when, in reality, it is not. The teachers could certainly play an instrumental role here in helping them to understand the meaning of these gestures.

Figure 8.3 Getting hand gestures right

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Fortunately, a new book deals in an imaginative way with nonverbal communication cues that are part of face-to-face interactions in US English (Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2017). Part 2 of the book is devoted to gestures such as the one in Figure 8.3 above, as well as to related nonverbal behaviors such as posture, facial expression, eye behavior, and the uses of space and touch. The authors offer a series of strategies for comprehending and producing nonverbal communication more efficiently, as well as providing a host of videos intended to demonstrate how nonverbal communication actually works, especially in situations where the nonverbal cues may not be so obvious, but rather somewhat subtle. The Gregersen and MacIntyre book provides helpful guidelines for interpreting nonverbal communication cues, which can be applied to other languages as well. 8.2.1.7 The use of silence in the speech community

The use of silence itself can have a pragmatic function that is lost on NNSs who are unaware of the norms. Therefore, for example, an American English speaker may interpret silence in a Japanese speaker as meaning that the person is relinquishing the floor when this may not be the case. As chair of a session at a language assessment conference at a kibbutz in the mountains near Jerusalem, I once led a round of applause for a Japanese speaker of English when I interpreted an extended pause as meaning that the speaker had ended his remarks when he had not. So in this case, it was a matter of misinterpreting silence. So embarrassed at my faux pas, I felt like crawling under the table. In a second example, for the many years that hitchhiking was a common practice in Israel, a NNS hitchhiker could easily interpret silence on the part of the driver as meaning the driver was a bit shy and so all the more reason to fi ll the silence with banter. In this case, it would be likely that the hitchhiker was unaware that it was appropriate to remain silent rather than to entertain the driver with conversation, which was more likely the norm in the USA at the time. The strategy called for here would be for learners to inquire about the role of silence in the TL language, something that may be under the radar for most TL learners. 8.2.1.8 The function of cursing in the community of practice

With regard to demographic variables and communities of practice, NNSs may misinterpret the role of curse words in the discourse (as suggested in Section 1.2.7). They may be shocked when they first hear them, without realizing that in the particular community of practice, these words may serve an important role, perhaps contributing to bonding between the employer and the employees, and among employees. Therefore, for example, as part of a ‘Language in the Workplace’ project at Victoria University of Wellington, Holmes and her colleagues collected over 2000 interactions in English (mostly L1) in the workplace in New Zealand (Daly et al., 2004). Extensive analysis of their corpus yielded insights into what was necessary

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for becoming an integrated member of the workplace and one of the things was the ability to curse affectively, especially using the f-word with fellow employees and even with the boss, as a way to fit in and bond. NNSs apparently could find themselves ostracized for not cursing like the rest. On the comprehension side, learners may hear these curse words and be put off or even shocked, and certainly not eager to learn when and how to use them. A strategy would be for learners to pull over a working associate with whom they have established rapport and ask to be briefed on how to curse effectively – something that language teachers are often reluctant to deal with. Perhaps if the topic is grounded properly in the research literature and situated respectably within the field of pragmatics, teachers might be more willing to include cursing in the instructional material. 8.2.1.9 Making assumptions based on previous experiences in other cultures

At times, learners miscomprehend what is said because of their previous multicultural and multilingual experiences. Their expectations from previous pragmatic experiences in other speech communities set them up for a pragmatic breakdown. Such was the case when my wife and I arrived at the InterRent shack in Martinique in December 2009 and the Frenchspeaking clerk promptly asked me when my license had been issued (Figure 8.4). I immediately replied ‘February of 2007’, reading the date of

Figure 8.4 Interpreting a question at a car rental desk

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issue right off my Minneapolis driver’s license. The clerk then looked at me with great dismay and said, Je suis desolée ‘I’m so sorry’ and proceeded to inform me that she could not rent me a car since the driver must have at least a year’s experience driving before being able to rent a car. What was intended by this request within her community of practice in Martinique was to find out when I had been issued my first driver’s license. What followed, once I determined the misunderstanding, was that she needed to calculate the year that I first started driving, which was probably about 1960, but for safety’s sake, I just arbitrarily said at age 18. She was relieved and then proceeded with the rental agreement. Perhaps there is no one strategy that can safeguard against this kind of pragmatic failure. Learners just have to be ready to deal with contextual differences in what is intended by utterances in the TL. Utterances may well take on a different, contextually mandated meaning, as in this example. The Peace Corps motto when I went off to the High Plains of Bolivia in 1965: ‘Expect the unexpected’; that would apply here. Another case is when my wife and I learned that in order to take a rental car on the ferry from Trinidad to Tobago, we had to produce a certificate from the rental car company specifying the exact weight of the vehicle. Therefore, we had to go back to the company and get them to fax us this document in order to take the car on the ferry. Sometimes these culture differences are irksome and result in both surprise and sometimes pragmatic infelicities. 8.2.1.10 Factors contributing to comprehension of the pragmatics in a situation

Table 8.1 provides a summary of the examples presented above, when comprehending the pragmatic message in the input may be problematic for learners. Having given a number of possible misunderstandings, the question remains as to the factors that will determine whether pragmatic failure is more likely to occur in the case of a given individual. Presumably it is more likely to occur among the less proficient and more inexperienced users of the TL, and possibly among those who have had more limited contact with members of a particular community of practice. But let us assume that two NNSs have the same amount of background knowledge and exposure to the language. What might contribute to one of them understanding the pragmatics of the situation better than the other? Learning style preference may play a role, such as the relative introversion of the NNSs. Learners who are more extroverted may be more interested in their speaking performance than careful observation of NS pragmatic behavior. Keen powers of observation may assist learners in getting the pragmatics of a message in instances where most of the vocabulary and grammatical structures in the message are incomprehensible to them. They simply take the clues that they perceive (e.g. tone of voice, facial expression, body posture, elaborateness or curtness of the utterance) and intuit or infer the rest from there. The robustness of the

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Table 8.1 Comprehending the pragmatics of the input Age, gender, occupation, social status, community of practice Language: • Lexical items (words and phrases)

Bonjour in Martinique Expression of acknowledgement ‘Good on ya!’ in New Zealand

• Syntax (e.g. verb tenses)

Formality of the conditional form of the verb in Spanish in a request to a friend

• Discourse

An apology extending over numerous turns in a corpus

Gestures

Negative transfer of a gesture from one TL to another (‘Wait’ in Hebrew’

Silence

Silence in the TL (use of silence in Japanese; silence from the hitchhiker in Israel)

Former cross-cultural experiences

The ‘in’ words and how to use them – ‘cool’, ‘sweet’, ‘bad’, etc. Curse words in New Zealand

Renting a car: ‘When was your driver’s license issued?’ in Martinique

learners’ strategy repertoire could also play a role in that some learners select among their strategies that of being more consciously aware of how pragmatics works in the given speech community and specific situation, even to the extent of asking locals whether they have interpreted a speech act correctly or not.8 8.2.2 Producing pragmatically comprehensible output

What do learners need to do strategically in order for their output to be comprehensible pragmatically to their interlocutors? Whereas there are advantages in accommodating to the local speech community’s norms for pragmatic performance, such as in, say, making a request, there are at least five factors that can stand in the way of acceptable accommodation (Ishihara & Cohen, 2014), possibly leading to pragmatically inappropriate output. It is helpful for both NTs and NNTs to be mindful of these factors and to be on the lookout for their emergence in their students’ work both in and out of the classroom. This is perhaps a propitious moment to point out that teaching strategies and learning strategies are not necessarily the same. The fact that teachers employ a given strategy does not mean that learners will necessarily either recognize it as such or incorporate it into their own behavior.

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Rather, it is the NTs’ or NNTs’ role to support learners in developing their own strategies, some of which may have been suggested by their teachers, some culled from other sources and still others that they have arrived at on their own. Now let us look at each of the five factors in turn that may stand in the way of acceptable accommodation to TL norms. 8.2.2.1 Negative transfer of pragmatic norms from the L1 or another language

In this instance, learners transfer the patterns for how they would conduct the interaction in the L1 or another language speech community, most likely unknowingly but sometimes knowing it is probably wrong but the only thing they know how to do. Let us suppose that Korean learners of English respond to their American friend’s compliment about how nice something they are wearing looks by saying ‘No, that’s not true.’ Whereas this would be appropriately modest behavior in Korean culture, in US culture this response to such a compliment may make it sound as if they are flatly rejecting or questioning the friend’s judgment, and hence creates a somewhat awkward or perhaps even insulting situation. The best strategy would probably be to check with local peers as to the most appropriate ways to respond to such a compliment regarding wearing apparel. Another example would be when Japanese students request that a professor read a paper that they wrote by saying, ‘Professor, read this paper please.’ Such a request may come across as too direct, even though the students said ‘please’, which would probably make the request polite enough in Japanese. In this case, a useful strategy could be to collect data on the pragmatics of how to make polite requests in such situations in that speech community and in that community of practice (e.g. a university setting) – especially if learners would like the request to be responded to favorably. 8.2.2.2 Limited TL grammatical ability

A lack of knowledge of certain grammatical forms, or more likely a lack of knowledge of how to use them functionally in a given TL situation, may inadvertently lead learners to produce language that is pragmatically gauche. A beginning learner of English, for example, might request that a clerk in a repair shop fi x an item, with ‘I want you to fi x this’, because the learner has not learned how to be more indirect in order to sound more polite (e.g. ‘I was wondering how soon you might be able to repair this for me?’). ‘I want you to fi x this’ is likely to be interpreted as an order and may consequently annoy the clerk. Again, an effective strategy for learners might be to obtain models for appropriate ways to phrase such a serviceencounter request. The challenge here for both NTs and NNTs is to teach their learners how to be appropriately polite (or impolite) while also teaching grammar at the same time (see Ishihara & Cohen, 2014).

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8.2.2.3 Overgeneralization of perceived TL norms for pragmatics

Some learners may generalize norms for pragmatics that are acceptable in one situation to another situation where that behavior is not appropriate. Therefore, for example, Korean learners of American English perceive Americans as being very direct and frank about things, a perception that is reinforced when an American adult passenger sitting next to them on a flight shares some intimacies. Consequently, the Koreans are surprised when the fellow passenger is clearly reluctant to answer a question about how much s/he makes a month. While the Koreans would not ask that question in their home culture, they just assumed that the American’s frankness in discussing intimacies would carry over to other topics as well. Therefore a strategy for pragmatic performance here would be to gather information about delicate or taboo topics for conversation in a given speech community, especially with casual acquaintances or strangers. In addition, teachers could lead a discussion with students concerning the more taboo topics in the given culture these days. Another example would be that of Americans who, because they have heard that Italians talk with their hands, make an effort to use a lot of hand gestures to make their point in Italian while studying in Rome. An Italian friend may take them aside to inform them that they are gesturing too much, and also that some of their gestures mean something different from what they intend them to mean. A strategy for learning the proper amount of gesturing would be to consciously observe what locals do. If the learners are learning the TL as an FL, it might be more of a challenge to gather such information, but it could be done through contacts with NSs, through movies or through sitcoms (see a specific example of this in Section 6.4 above). As to what gestures mean, just as in the section on comprehension of pragmatics above, learners in classes could ask their teachers to teach them the meaning of some of the nontransparent gestures and also provide information regarding the extent to which these gestures are normally used. Again, it may also be beneficial to check with other non-teacher acquaintances, especially since some gestures may be more common within certain age groups or subgroups within the community. Yet another example would be of American SA students who have a sense that Spanish speakers are more formal in their commands. Therefore if the students want a glass of water from their host-family mother, they ask for it in a most polite way, Podría Ud. darme un vaso de agua, por favor. ‘Would you be able to give me a glass of water, please.’ Their host mother fi nds their style overly formal since in this Barcelona home, family members just say the equivalent of ‘Water, please’ or ‘Give me a glass of water, please.’ This kind of situation can be avoided by checking out how to be pragmalinguistically appropriate. It is not enough just to learn the conditional forms of the verb in Spanish, for example. Rather, it would be

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helpful if teachers could provide guidance as to when it is advisable or even crucial to use them, and when it is equally important not to use them, as in the case of SA in a Barcelona home. Finally, there is the example of English-speaking learners of Japanese whose close Japanese friend offers them more food at an informal dinner meal at her apartment. The learners know an expression, Iie, kekkoudesu ‘No thanks’ in Japanese and use it. However, they are unaware that this expression is primarily reserved for formal situations and sounds funny or awkward if used with a close friend. Especially when learning languages in which the level of formality plays an important role, a key strategy would be to ask about the formality of expressions, rather than to assume that one expression will work in all situations, as may be the case with certain common English expressions. Teachers may be able to assist here, but since there are so many potential interactive situations, there is a real need for learners to be strategic when they are on their own, outside the language classroom. 8.2.2.4 The effect of instruction or instructional materials

Learners might also be led to a pragmatic misstep as a result of somewhat misleading information that they receive either from the teacher or from their course materials. Therefore, for example, learners of English may have read in an ESL textbook that Americans tend to give the precise reason why they cannot attend a party to which they are invited. Yet when the learners do the same, they fi nd that in the particular instance (say, an important work-related party) it may be interpreted as an unacceptable excuse (e.g. ‘I can’t come because I have a dinner date with a friend.’). So strategizing would need to include checking out the possible exceptions to rules of pragmatics for being honest and explicit in refusals. In other words, there may be times when a white lie is appropriate in order to save the face of those involved. As another example, American learners of Japanese may be taught in class to fill a pause with either eeto or ano9 and so they do their best to fi ll as many pauses as they can that way. Their NS interlocutors are annoyed by this overuse of these pauses and depending on their relationship, may eventually tell the learners that they are fi lling their pauses too much – that NSs prefer to use silence or nonverbal cues more. Whereas in part this could be considered a case of overgeneralization, it originates from instruction regarding the fi lling of pauses. What is misleading is that in Japanese silence is favored more than in English, and the teacher of Japanese may neglect to point this out. This example of filled pauses is a perfect case where some data gathering could play a strategic role in helping learners avoid speech behavior that annoys NSs of the TL. Learners could strategically pay attention to hesitation phenomena in English during authentic listening or video material.

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8.2.2.5 Resistance to using perceived L2 pragmatic norms

Another source of pragmatic failure may be an intentional desire not to abide by the TL speech community’s norms in the given instance despite having full knowledge of what is expected – which sets this category apart from the other four. In this case, the learner may not desire to perform all TL pragmatics just like NSs. Therefore, for example, English-speaking learners of Indonesian hear NSs use the equivalent of ‘Did you eat yet?’ as a regular greeting but avoid using it themselves because it does not fit their pictures of what a greeting should be. Or as indicated above under Section 8.1.3, American learners of Japanese have learned the honorific verbs that are required when speaking to or about people of higher status even if they are not present at the time, but resist using them since to do so would violate their own principles as Americans regarding how human interactions should unfold. While choosing to opt out of conforming to the pragmatic norms is every learner’s prerogative, a strategic approach to the matter of conformity would be to find out what the repercussions for doing so are. Learners could take stock of just which pragmatic forms they prefer to avoid. The expression of agency characterized in at least a small measure my performance in Japanese while studying it intensively at the University of Hawaii in 1996–97. We seven students in the course were introduced to 10 irregular honorific (keigo) forms of the verb, which consisted of totally different verbs for the same concept. For example, taberu ‘to eat’ became meshiagaru and miru ‘to look at’ became goran ni naru, when it was necessary to employ honorifics. The teacher gave us the rules for when to use these honorific forms of the verb, such as when speaking about a higher-status person to an equal- or lower-status person, even when the higher-status person was not present. Therefore, for instance, if I were asking a peer whether the president of the university had eaten yet, I would be expected to use the honorific meshiagaru rather than the regular taberu, even if the president was not there to hear my query. I resisted learning this rule since it seemed illogical to me and even a bit irksome (see Cohen, 1997: 150–151). Here is where NTs may perhaps have certain insights regarding these honorific forms, having grown up in a speech community that abides by them. NTs may also have a sense of just how important it is to use these forms at the current time. By the same token, NNTs who have looked into this matter rigorously could also provide valuable insights. As a learner of Japanese pragmatics, I was struck by my total ignorance as to the connotations associated with either using or not using these honorific forms. Here is where explicit instruction can really come in handy. Table 8.2 presents a summary of the examples of obstacles to pragmatically comprehensible output described above. Obviously whether or not a message leads to pragmatic failure depends not just on the NNS sender, but on the recipient as well. It is possible and often the case that the NSs of the L2 will go the extra distance to comprehend the NNS, even if the NNS’s behavior misses the

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Table 8.2 Producing pragmatically comprehensible output Nature of the Output

Negative transfer of pragmatic norms from the L1 or other languages

Overgeneralization of perceived TL pragmatic norms

Language Phrases

Rejecting a compliment with "No, that’s not true."

Using a formal request or refusal when the given situation calls for informality

Discourse

Request to read a thesis: "Prof. Cohen, please read this."

Being overly frank – asking for salary information

Gestures

Silence

Limited TL grammatical ability

Effect of instruction or textbook materials

Resistance to using perceived TL pragmatic norms

Avoiding "Did you eat yet?" as a greeting in Indonesian

Making a request that sounds like an order

Giving the actual reason for a refusal in a situation where it is inappropriate

Avoiding using honorific verbs to speak to or about people of higher status

Overusing hand gestures in Italian Using filled pauses too much rather than silence

mark by a long shot in terms of pragmatic appropriateness. In fact, the NS interlocutor often has the wherewithal either to cut the NNS slack or to lower the boom, depending on factors that may have little to do with whether the intended message was understood. On the other hand, a perceived breach of pragmatic etiquette may itself be enough to result in pragmatic failure for the nonnative. For example, several years ago while I was a visiting professor in New Zealand, a Japanese student who had recently graduated from the department came to my office, put her MA thesis on my desk, and said, ‘Dr. Cohen, please read this’, an example of negative transfer mentioned above. I hesitated for a moment, but then had a visceral reaction and responded, ‘No, I won’t. I’m on sabbatical here and they don’t pay me to do this. Sorry.’ I did take a glance at it but no more than that. Had she said, ‘Dr. Cohen – I was wondering if you might just take a look at my MA thesis and let me know what you think of …,’ I might very well have read through it. 8.2.3 Strategies for negotiating meaning and making conversational repairs

Some learners are better at getting the TL pragmatics right than are others, due both to their grasp of strategies in general and to their ability to strategize with regard to pragmatics (Cohen, 2005). These individuals

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are strategic both in how they go about learning pragmatics and in their TL performance, so that both their comprehension and production of language are pragmatically appropriate for the given situation. They also have strategies for evaluating how well they understood the pragmatics of a given message and also how effective they were in producing a pragmatically appropriate message. Such strategies can make the difference between pragmatic failure and pragmatic success, since as illustrated in this chapter, learners can take strategic action to avoid pragmatic failure or to remediate the situation once pragmatic failure has occurred. For example, nonnatives can check to make sure that they interpreted a message (such as a key request from a co-worker) correctly, ‘So let me see if I understand your request, George. You want me to speak to the boss for you, correct?’ NNSs could also include an alerter before a delicate speech act so that the addressee will be lenient in interpreting the intent of the message: ‘Hi, George. I want to make apology but not so sure it is OK. I’ll try now …’. In Krashen’s (1982) terms, some NNSs are better monitor users than others when it comes to pragmatics. In Long’s (1985) terms, some NNSs are better at making sure that there is rich interaction that serves to clarify the intended pragmatic meaning in both the input and the output. In part, this can be a function of the personality-related style preferences of the learner, such as being more extroverted or more closure-oriented (i.e. less tolerant of ambiguity; see Cohen & Weaver, 2006). In Schmidt’s (1990) terms, some NNSs are better at noticing the pragmatic aspects of discourse, both in classroom settings and out in the real world. And there are some NNSs who more actively create situations where they can check to see if, in Swain’s (1998) terms, they are producing output that is comprehensible pragmatically. The point is that what works for one TL learner in terms of strategically gaining pragmatic awareness and enhanced performance may not work for another. Some learners may, for example, benefit from extensive observation of what NSs do with only limited oral interaction with them, while others start interacting extensively from the very start. 8.3 Research on the Learning of Pragmatics

To round out this chapter on the learning of pragmatics, let us take a brief look at a few studies that provide insights on the topic. Mostly, such studies simply remind us of just how much needs to be learned in order to handle TL pragmatics effectively. Since frequent mention has been made in this volume of the role that noticing plays in the learning of pragmatic features, let us start with a study which addressed the issue of the pragmatics that five ESL learners noticed and then learned when repeating a request task with three different NS partners, in each case assuming the role of both the requester and the requestee (Sydorenko & Tuason, 2016). Noticing was measured both

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by learners’ uptake and by their verbal reports via notetaking, interviews, stimulated recalls and reflection. It was found that learners predominantly noticed and incorporated pragmatic strategies used by their NS partners in the role play, such as using a preparator (e.g. ‘I have to move from my apartment this weekend’), a disarmer (e.g. ‘I know your family will come to you and I’m embarrassed but …’) or an imposition minimizer (e.g. ‘Yeah, any time, yeah, that’s OK’) in a request for assistance with a move. It was found that they were not especially likely to incorporate language forms used by their NS conversation partners. The explanation given was that they were focusing more on their interlocutors’ strategies than on the actual forms that were used. Some sociopragmatic learning was evident in that several learners noticed and changed the level of directness of their requests by placing preparators and disarmers earlier in their requests. Another research issue is that of whether students perceive a need to learn pragmatics after they have been oriented as to what it entails. A study of how Chinese college-level EFL students acquired pragmatic competence focused on different types of pragmatic knowledge, learner perceptions of such knowledge and strategies that the students employed in the process of learning English in general and pragmatics in particular (Yuan, 2012). Data were collected from four sources: a questionnaire (n = 237), DCTs (n = 55), focus group interviews (n = 18) and an analysis of textbook tasks. The study found that although the EFL students were grammatically advanced language learners, they displayed limited pragmatic knowledge and a highly restricted repertoire of language learner strategies. Nonetheless, the majority of the respondents believed that pragmatic knowledge was as important as linguistic knowledge in the process of developing communicative competence for interaction in different contexts (see also Yuan et al., 2015). It was argued that a combination of a less than sufficient English proficiency, limited knowledge of pragmatics, inadequate language materials and tasks, and a small stock of language learning strategies, were all factors that hindered effective learning and communication, resulting in pragmatic failures in many intercultural communication situations. Interestingly, the students indicated a desire to sound nativelike in their English, rather than like speakers of an ELF variety of WE. Since politeness plays an important role in pragmatic appropriateness, it seems appropriate here to include a study investigating the types of politeness strategies used by Iranian EFL learners in a class blog (Reza Adel et al., 2016). The options were: • • • •

positive politeness (e.g. emphasizing common ground); negative politeness (e.g. using deference, indirectness, and hedging); bald on-the-record strategies (i.e. not minimizing the imposition and using direct imperatives); and bald off-the-record strategies (e.g. indirectness as through hints, clues, and the use of irony).

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The researchers found that blogging provided an opportunity for students to equalize power relations with their instructors, given the more informal nature of blogging. This meant that the students favored positive politeness strategies as opposed to negative politeness strategies, and also used more bald on-the-record strategies than they would normally use with their instructors. Another crucial area in pragmatics is that of conversational management – especially knowing how to initiate and shift topics, and how to engage effectively in turn-taking. Research analyzing student performance on oral tests has shown, for example, that learners may lack knowledge as to how to initiate repair or produce an appropriate response to a question, and as to how to close down a conversation before moving to leave-taking (Filipi & Barraja-Rohan, 2015). The fi ndings prompted the researchers to develop a series of pedagogical interventions aimed at heightening learners’ awareness of how to manage their conversations more effectively in a TL. The pragmatic features that they covered included the following: • • • • • • •

Conversational openings (including greetings with appropriate sociocultural norms of interaction such as a ‘How are you?’ sequence). Adjacency pairs (paired utterances such as greeting/return greeting and question/answer). Initiating and closing a topic (including using assessments such as ‘That’s good’). Keeping a conversation going through questions like ‘What about you?’ Response tokens to show active listener behavior, such as ‘mm (hm),’ ‘yeah,’ and ‘okay’. Closing a conversation with terminal components such as ‘okay’ with falling intonation. Appropriate leave-taking.

A second study dealing with conversational management focused more specifically on topic management, identifying the kinds of skills learners need in order to be pragmatically appropriate (Youn, 2016). The researcher provided clear guidelines as to what learners need to learn in order to manage topics: • • • •

Knowing how to initiate topics in order to establish a shared context, mutuality and shared understanding. Using shift sequences (topic shift markers such as ‘you know what?’) and pre-sequences effectively. Making the most from an individual turn – clear, substantive and coherent content. Understanding the normative turn-taking structures for the given language in the given situation (e.g. knowing how to use the expected

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disagreement sequences, such as providing a justification, and knowing how to insert inter-turn delays). Having a sense of how to organize sequences – in order to eliminate the need for further negotiation.

A third study dealing with conversational management involved 29 students representing different degree programs and nationalities, taking a course in business English in Mexico, along with three Mexican instructors (Martínez Sánchez, 2017). Thirty-six hours of classroom interaction and 12 interviews provided data regarding the participants’ perceptions of their interactional pragmatic strategies. Discourse analysis was used to get at their understanding of how language was used in the given business discourse. Conversation analysis was used to discover how participants understood and responded to one another in their turns at talk. Different types of speaking tasks were analyzed, including discussion, formal presentations, role play, practice with model language and oral language tests. Pragmatic interactions included questions, statements, cues, pause/ silence, mispronunciation, overlapping and external interruptions. The interactional pragmatic strategies under analysis were those used for repetition, rephrasing, repair and code-switching. The researcher attributed difficulty in teaching the strategies to the complexity of communication and consequently felt that teachers would benefit from awareness-raising as to how they themselves used these strategies while communicating. Finally, a review of the literature looked at studies dealing with the extent to which learners engaged in agency – that is, converged with or diverged from TL pragmatic norms depending on the extent to which they viewed the particular TL norms as consistent with their L1 cultural identity, with the image they had of themselves or with their image of self as a ‘foreigner’ in the TL community (Gomez-Laich, 2016). The author described studies that documented how strong L1 cultural identity coupled with a resistance to accommodate fully to the TL norms prompted subjective responses from learners. She also included studies documenting how the learners’ perception of their position as ‘foreigners’ in the TL community bolstered their subjective stance to resist full compliance with the TL norms. Thus, this study documented that whereas learners might learn how to perform according to the local norms, they might choose not to. At the present time, part of the challenge for learners is accessing material that will be of genuine benefit to them in learning just what it is that they want to know regarding the pragmatics of the TL. Fortunately, materials are becoming increasingly available, both on the internet and in print. For example, efforts have been made to improve the descriptions of key speech acts targeted at ESL learners from particular speech communities, such as German EFL learners (Limberg, 2016b).

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8.4 Conclusions

The main purpose of this chapter has been to showcase the role that learners’ strategies can play in dealing with TL pragmatics. Clearly, both NTs and NNTs can provide strategy instruction where it may support learners in this effort. The intention behind making sure that learners are aware of such strategies is to make the initial learning and then the performance of pragmatics in a TL more manageable for them. The main point is that in order for such strategies to be beneficial, they need to be specific enough so that they have an impact on the handling of pragmatics. The chapter provided guidelines and suggestions for how to make this happen. Then, multiple examples were given of situations in which strategies can play an important or even crucial role in both the input and output sides of what is comprehensible pragmatically, and suggestions were given of strategies that learners could use in order to make the input and output more comprehensible. So what needs to happen for learners to achieve success at comprehending and producing language pragmatically? It would appear that part of a learner’s pragmatics is acquired without explicit instruction. Nonetheless, there are pragmatic features that most likely would benefit from explicit instruction (whether from NTs or NNTs directly or through a website such as the three posted at http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/) if the intention is to have the learners achieve relative control over them within a reasonable amount to time. Especially in cases where fine-tuning is advisable or crucial, learners may need to be proactive and seek out special coaching in order to comprehend and produce TL pragmatics appropriately in some areas, whether in the basic speech act areas of requests, apologies and complaints, or in the even more challenging areas of criticizing, teasing and the use of sarcasm. Notes (1) See Cohen and Wang (2018) for a research study undertaken to substantiate the claims that strategies assume one of these four functions from one moment to the next. The study found that there can be fluctuation from one function to the other for the same strategy and across strategies, since strategies are often used in pairs, sequences, or clusters. (2) See: http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/descriptions.html (accessed 7 January 2018). (3) See: http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/introtospeechacts/index.htm (accessed 7 January 2018). (4) See: http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html (accessed 7 January 2018). (5) See an example in the Grammar Strategies Website: http://carla.umn.edu/strategies/ sp_grammar/strategies/form/moods/subjunctive/wedding.html (accessed 22 November 2017). (6) See: http://carla.umn.edu/strategies/sp_grammar/pdf_files/CohenOxfordChiStyleSurvey.pdf (accessed 31 July 2016). (7) For a sampling of research on dialect differences in the pragmatics associated with different speech communities, see the treatment of Spanish in an edited volume by Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2004). (8) For more on individual differences in LLS use, see Takeuchi et al. (2007). (9) For more on the pragmatics of using eeto and ano, see Sections 1.4 and 2.5.1 above.

9 The Assessment of Pragmatics

This chapter looks at how to assess what has been taught and then the next chapter will look at the role of assessment in the context of research. NTs and NNTs alike may be reluctant to teach pragmatics because they are unsure about how to assess what they have taught. This chapter is intended to provide language teachers with some useful ideas about how to determine what their students do and do not know with regard to pragmatics and specifically with regard to the pragmatics included in a given unit of instruction. In many ways, NTs and NNTs are equally challenged by having to construct measures to assess pragmatics. NTs may have an advantage in being able to more accurately assess the appropriateness of students’ responses in specific situations where, for example, knowing how to be tactful in oral or written language may depend upon subtle niceties. Of course, the issue of standards for evaluation of student responses comes into play. If local standards for acceptability are adhered to, then the local teacher determines what is acceptable. Therefore, perhaps what might not be assessed by NTs as appropriate in the TL community may be viewed through a somewhat different lens by NNTs in the FL community. An example could be a Japanese EFL NNT not rating hesitation and stammering in oral English apologies by Japanese students as a sign of dysfluency, in contrast to an ESL NT in the USA who might do so. Such hesitation phenomena in Japanese apologies appropriately signal humility. This chapter will review different ways to assess pragmatics and then will offer suggestions as what teachers can do to make classroom assessment work for them.1 9.1 Why Assess Pragmatics in the Classroom?

Tests of pragmatic ability have not tended to be part of classroom assessment. The view has been expressed in the literature that ‘theories of communicative competence and communicative language teaching have not been fully developed and … rigorous empirical studies need to be carried out (fi rst)’ (Yamashita, 2008: 209). Yet given the importance 211

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of pragmatics in communicating in a TL, it would appear important to be assessing it now in TL classrooms. Here are some of the reasons: •

• •

•

Classroom assessment of pragmatics sends a message to the students that their ability to be pragmatically appropriate in the comprehension and production of language in different sociocultural situations is a positive thing. Having items assessing TL pragmatics on a test motivates students to learn the material. Assessment of pragmatics gives teachers an opportunity to see the relative control their students have over this area of TL performance (e.g. the use of grammar in a pragmalinguistically appropriate way in the performance of speech acts). It gives NT and NNTs an opportunity to see the extent to which learners are capable of performing specific pragmatics elements that were included in their instruction.

9.2 Challenges Regarding the Assessment of Pragmatics in the Classroom

In the spirit of determining the impact of assessment itself on both teaching and learning, a study was conducted on the washback effect of assessing pragmatics on both NNTs of English and on their EFL students (Tajeddin & Dabbagh, 2015: 137). The study involved written discourse completion items such as the following apology item involving being late for a meeting with the boss: At the boss’s office a clerk (Jack) has a meeting with his boss. He is late because he had an accident while he was driving the company car. Everyone is OK. Jack: I’m terribly sorry I’m late. I had an accident

Boss: Really? I hope it wasn’t too serious. Jack: Boss: Thank goodness. The study, which involved both classroom observation and interviews with the teachers and with the students, also included a comparison group of NNTs and students where the pragmatic elements included in the assessment were not part of the instruction. The fi ndings showed that the inclusion of pragmatics items in assessment enhanced the EFL learners’ noticing of pragmatics in their listening materials, as well as enhancing the teachers’ use of pragmatics in their classroom talk. Therefore, there appear to be advantages to assessing pragmatics. The issue, though, is how to do it well. While there should be a good fit between what is taught and what is assessed, in practice it is not always the case since

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instructional content does not always lend itself to easy assessment. To make this more concrete, take the speech act of apologizing, as in the above item. Note for starters that the sample item from the above Tajeddin and Dabbagh study may not actually be assessing the ability to apologize. The first utterance by Jack, ‘I’m terribly sorry I’m late …’ is the expression of an apology. Jack’s rejoinder could simply be ‘No, it wasn’t.’ If so, that would not provide very much information on how effectively the respondent can apologize. Perhaps a lengthy explanation of the situation would work, especially if it functions as an excuse, but not simply ‘No, it wasn’t.’ Therefore, it would probably be best to leave the opening slot empty, to be filled in by the respondent. Examples will be given below of multiple-rejoinder DCTs. How, in fact, do teachers determine a standard for correctness in such items? Is the standard based on what NSs do or are supposed to do? Is it not the case that NSs may not necessarily get it right, such as when a halfhearted apology by an NS fails to appease a partner? For example, let us say that a husband, who is reprimanded by his wife for cutting her off in the middle of an utterance, says with a slightly facetious tone of voice, ‘Sorry about that, dear.’ The wife may actually respond with ‘Well, I’m still upset!’ But if the husband were to say with a sincere tone, ‘I’m really sorry about that, darling’, this might appease her, depending on how often he cuts her off in mid-sentence. It would make the item more interesting if NNS respondents were instructed to respond sarcastically. The fact of the matter is that until now if such items appeared on tests of pragmatics, they would be rather anomalous. This introduction to the topic of assessing pragmatics is simply intended to suggest that assessing pragmatic ability may be a challenge. First, teachers need to make sure that the context is clear since situations differ in terms of what the appropriate answers will be. And how is the score for performance determined? Depending on the situation, even highly competent speakers of the given TL may differ in their responses such that it is not clear what an acceptable or unacceptable answer would be (McNamara & Roever, 2006). Consequently, keeping the test practical in administration and scoring may not be easy. For instance, while role plays reflect real life performance more than responses on a DCT, they take time to conduct and may require a more complex rating scheme than DCT responses. In addition, it may be a challenge to compare one set of role-play response data with another. Also, constructing a DCT can be a challenge, especially given the need to make sometimes minute distinctions for testing purposes (McNamara & Roever, 2006: 54–75). Thus, it can take creativity to design instruments that test pragmatics reliably and without expending an excessive amount of time and effort (Roever, 2004). Setting up a role play or oral simulation in a language lab may help to make the results more productive, as demonstrated by Bardovi-Harlig et al. (2015b: 347, 348). They used tasks calling for agreement, disagreement or clarification in 15 scenarios delivered by computer, and ESL students listened

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through individual headphones. The students simultaneously heard and read each scenario on the screen, and then heard a turn (without written support) immediately after the scenario. Next they saw a screen that showed only ‘You say’, and then they were to provide an oral response. Learners were given 10 seconds to respond. The following are three of the scenarios: Your group is discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using the Internet to study. You think that looking up information on the web is not always a good use of time. Classmate: When you go online to look for information while studying, you can end up wasting time looking at websites. You say: Your class is discussing how to improve English language skills. Your opinion is different from that of one of your classmates. Classmate: Studying grammar is more important than practicing conversation skills. You say: Your group is talking about motivating other people. Your classmate uses a proverb. Check your understanding of the saying. Classmate: You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. You say:

The researchers pointed out that this format keeps the focus on communication. Respondents draw on their knowledge base for dealing with, in this case, agreements, disagreements and clarification, rather than using written clues (when the task is a written one). If the use of role play or naturally-occurring data in online group discussion is not a feasible way to collect data, then the challenge is to make sure that DCTs capture the speech act as effectively as possible. A study serving as a wake-up call to that effect looked at the speech act of disagreement as produced by 10 advanced NNSs of English. It contrasted written DCT data with naturally-occurring online group discussion with 59 instances of disagreement (Maíz-Arévalo, 2015: 190). As if to underscore the importance of the instrument itself in the data collection process, the sample DCT (completed in a class session) consisted of just one disagreement situation along with one situation calling for agreement. The respondents were to first provide the disagreement as they would in their native language (with seven or more native languages represented in the sample) and then as they would in English: You are preparing an essay with two of your classmates (who are both the same nationality as you are) and one of them has made a comment you do not agree with. How would you express your disagreement in your mother tongue? You would say: (please offer an English translation) You are preparing an essay with two of your classmates; the three of you belong to different nationalities and use English as lingua franca. One of your classmates has made a comment you do not agree with. How would you express your disagreement in English? You would say:

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The study found that the DCT prompts elicited simple expressions of disagreement, often including the expression of regret. In the naturally occurring data from the corpus, in contrast, there were far more cases of token agreement, requests for clarification and positive remarks about the addressee, and no expressions of regret. While a DCT is not going to elicit the rich array of data available from a corpus, the formatting of the DCT can be crafted so as to elicit more than one or two minimal patterns learned from a textbook. For example, the multiple-rejoinder DCT is intended to avoid minimal responses, as illustrated in the following example (Cohen & Shively, 2002/2003: 2): You completely forget a crucial meeting with the distinguished professor with whom you are doing an internship. An hour later you call him to apologize. The problem is that this is the second time you’ve forgotten such a meeting with your professor. Professor: What happened to you? You: Professor: I can imagine that you have a lot on your mind these days, but this is the second time you’ve missed a meeting you agreed to attend. You: Professor: Yes, indeed. I hope you won’t forget it next time. You: Professor: I’m afraid I can’t reschedule it for today. Let’s try again next week at the same time.

One real potential advantage of a DCT compared to a role play is the extra time that the respondent has to plan interventions. This can be particularly helpful for respondents who for reasons of personality or learning style preferences find it difficult to respond quickly in an online fashion. For them, having the extra time to plan out their language use can be beneficial. A study of Maltese HS students learning Italian FL requests and compliments involved exposing them either explicitly or implicitly through inputenhancement techniques and awareness-raising tasks to six weeks of film segments and other audio-visual (AV) material. The students were found to be likely to use more modifiers in their requests and compliments on the DCT than in oral role play, regardless of whether they were in the explicit or implicit instructional groups (Gauci, 2015). The explanation was that they had had more preparation time to respond in the written mode. (More will be said about role plays and about DCTs in Section 10.3.1 below.) A challenge that a teacher has in using instruments that collect more than basic speech act data is that such measures can be difficult to score, especially those that call for raters, as a study by Youn (2007) demonstrated. Her study documented the extent of interrater differences in TL pragmatics ratings among three trained NS raters. The raters were called upon to rate the results for three different test types (an open-ended

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written DCT, a language lab DCT and a role play), involving three speech acts (refusals, apologies and requests), and respondents at two different proficiency levels (intermediate and advanced learners of Korean as an FL). The results of the study indicated that the three NS raters showed different degrees of severity in their ratings, depending on the test type and speech act. In addition, the raters showed unique bias patterns in their ratings of given respondents (Youn, 2007). Hence, being an NT does not ensure that ratings for pragmatic appropriateness will be consistent with some measure of reliability. In addition, there is the issue of which statistics to use in the analysis of the test results. Brown (2008), for instance, took a close look at the statistical analyses used for five of the common pragmatics measures. His findings led him to recommend using generalizability theory as opposed to a classical theory approach to statistical analysis of the pragmatics data, which might create problems for teachers who do not possess the requisite knowledge to perform such statistical analyses and to understand the results. In fairness to Brown, those measures were not intended for classroom application, but rather for research purposes. The real challenge, then, is to come up with teacher-friendly measures of pragmatics that are intended for classroom application and which involve analyses that can be conducted effectively by classroom teachers. Despite the challenges posed by attempting to assess complex speech act behavior, there are enough largely routine patterns among NSs or near-NSs of the language to warrant both teaching these to learners and assessing their approximation of them. There are, in fact, benefits in including pragmatics among those language features that are assessed, especially if the intention is to compare key differences among language communities. The emphasis in teaching would be on situations where divergence from the NS norm in performance may lead to pragmatic failure – that is, where the result or uptake from the speech act interaction is not what the speaker desired, usually because the speech act somehow violated the norms of the TL speech community. If teachers agree that pragmatics has an important role to play, then they are encouraged to include its assessment in both short quizzes and longer tests. As suggested above, learners who want to do well in language classes pay extra attention to what they are going to be tested on. Therefore, let us say, for example, that the teacher provides instruction on how to complain effectively in the TL (e.g. a customer to a sales clerk about how long they had to wait before being served); it would then be useful to assess how effectively the students can both perceive and produce such complaints. A qualitative case study was conducted in a freshman English course at a Japanese university in order to demonstrate how pragmatics could be integrated into a classroom context and to demonstrate the effectiveness of teacher-based assessment of pragmatic competence grounded in

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Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory (Ishihara, 2009a). The NNT/researcher implemented pragmatics-focused instruction throughout a semester based on empirically-established information on speech acts in English. The instructor used collaboratively-developed, authentic assessment tools, such as reflective writing, rubrics, role plays and self/peer assessment, as a means for integrating assessment into regular classroom interaction. The case study served to illustrate how assessment could be effectively woven into the very fabric of classroom instruction, using sociocultural theory as a guide. Let us now explore principles for constructing tasks that assess learners’ pragmatic comprehension and production, and then consider frequently used approaches for doing so. Subsequently, six strategies for more effective assessment of pragmatics will be provided, along with two suggested activities in the Appendix to the chapter, one for assessing comprehension and the other for assessing production. 2 9.3 Approaches to Assessing TL Speech Act Performance

In this section we will look both at how to elicit speech act performance and also how to evaluate the students’ responses once they have been elicited. The prime concern is making sure that the student respondents understand the situations in which pragmatic performance is being assessed. It may be appropriate, for example, to describe the situation in the students’ L1, in order to make sure that they fully understand the contextual factors involved. Such factors might include among other things: (1) the degree of imposition in a request or the severity of the infraction in an apology situation; (2) the level of acquaintance between the speaker and hearer; and (3) their relative social status. A caveat with regard to the examples of pragmatics in this chapter is that they generally adhere to the more traditional approach of looking at speech acts in isolation; what has recently been referred to as ‘fi rstgeneration assessment of pragmatics’ (Taguchi & Roever, 2017: 230–232). While this approach may be beneficial for learners attempting to understand how speech acts function, arguments have been made for some time that this approach underrepresents the construct of pragmatic ability (Kasper, 2006). The contention is that tests need to include real-time measures of learners’ interactional abilities to allow defensible extrapolation to a target domain of social language use (Roever, 2011). The assessment of learners’ ability to produce extended monologues and to participate in extended dialogues is seen by experts like Roever as a missing component in existing assessments. For this reason, they would recommend the use of open role plays, an approach that will be addressed below.

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9.3.1 Measuring comprehension of pragmatics

Assessment of pragmatics looks both at comprehension and production. Measuring comprehension of the pragmatics in language behavior may take an indirect, metapragmatic approach. Learners are asked to assess how well they think that someone else has performed pragmatically. Therefore, for instance, assessment could entail looking at learners’ reactions to videotaped role play, screen plays (from TV series) or written descriptions of speech act situations. The learners indicate their reactions by completing rating scales or M-C items. Therefore, taking the issue of marital relations, let us suppose that the students viewed a video clip that had the following exchange between a husband and wife: Example 1 Wife:

I don’t like it, dear, when you criticize our children in front of other people. Like I must admit it made me uncomfortable last evening when you criticized them at the dinner party. I know you were trying to be funny, but people can take it the wrong way, and … Husband: Really? I don’t agree. I was just being funny and people got it. But if it makes you feel better, I’m willing to watch what I say about the kids.

A sample item could include the following: Indicate with an X how you would rate the level of the husband’s apology:

(1) (2) (3) (4)

High ___ Moderate ___ Low _X_ Nonexistent ___

In addition, learners of the TL could be asked to add their rationale for giving a certain rating. Therefore, in the above example, a given learner might add, ‘It isn’t apologetic enough. The tone seems sarcastic to me – he’s like criticizing his wife. It isn’t clear he will actually change his behavior.’ Learners may have differing reactions, many of which could prompt class discussion. If the focus is on the likely effect of the speaker’s delivery of a speech act on the addressee (i.e. the uptake), then we could start by assessing how the speech act is perceived by the learners. The following is a sample vignette where the students are to respond both in an M-C format and also to provide an open-ended comment as well: Example 2 George is doing his holiday shopping in Manhattan and has only about 15 minutes before the department store closes. He needs to get across the entire store to the opposite corner to check out the gift specials at the

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men’s accessories counter, but in front of him is a rather obese lady alongside her shopping cart which is filled with purchases. She is in the midst of a heated conversation on her cell phone, while she and her shopping cart are blocking the aisle. George tries to get around her, but in the process inadvertently knocks into her, tangling up her cell phone arm and causing her to drop her phone as well. Lady: My goodness! What are you doing, young man? George: Very sorry, lady, but you were in my way! How likely is the stout lady to consider George’s response an apology? (a) Very likely. (b) Somewhat likely. (c) Not very likely. (d) Not at all likely. What is the rationale for your choice?

The teacher may have taught the students how the intensifier ‘really’ in an apology would signal regret and ‘very’ would be more a marker of etiquette. Hence, the students should have answered ‘c’ or ‘d’ as the correct M-C response. In this case, the strategy of ‘acknowledging responsibility’ is the key concern here. A preferred rationale statement would be as follows: George isn’t really taking responsibility for knocking into the lady. He’s putting the blame back on her.

Tasks like this one would be intended to tap the learners’ understanding of speech act performance by others, and in this case, the added ingredient of annoyance or sarcasm. Sometimes the identification of the speech act is not so challenging, but its function in the interaction can depend on the tone or attitude of the person who delivers it. Assessment of the ability to comprehend pragmatics could also entail measuring it directly. For example, teachers could construct some items for their learners which have pragmatic input that is perhaps subtle in nature (e.g. veiled criticism about a talk the person just gave or a complaint about the person’s working style). The intent would be to see if the student respondents understand the illocutionary force of the message and are able to deal with it in an appropriate way pragmatically. NNTs constructing such items may wish to check with NTs, assuming they have easy access to them locally or through the internet, before administering them to their students. 9.3.2 Measuring pragmatic production 9.3.2.1 Oral role play

With respect to oral production, we can observe students engaged in spontaneous speech, although it is not easy to collect such data. Another

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problem with spontaneous speech is that it may not be comparable across students. Some students say more than others and are thus likely to provide more language in their oral speech act performance than are other students. Also, learners may give a faulty response either because they misunderstood the given testing task or because they are just generally having a bad day. When eliciting samples of speech from students, it usually helps to give them warm-up time, rather than to assume that they are ready to perform pragmatically upon request. Their minds may need to be primed in the TL first. Giving student respondents a chance to rehearse what it is they will need to say or write may make it more likely that their performance reflects their knowledge base. If their performance is to be oral, they could even be given time to rehearse it with a partner. Given the problems with assessing spontaneous speech, it is preferable to set up role-play situations, such as the following: Example 3 You completely forget a crucial meeting at the offi ce with the boss at your new job. An hour later you show up at his office to apologize. The problem is that this is the second time you’ve forgotten such a meeting in the short time you have been working at this job. Your boss is clearly annoyed when he asks, ‘What happened to you this time?’ Do your best to smooth over the situation.

The sociocultural factors of interest in measuring pragmatic ability, such as in a role play like this, often include the following: • • •

the relative status of the speaker and hearer; their level of acquaintance; and the degree of severity, imposition or other impact caused by the speech act situation.

In this case, the speaker is clearly of lower status in being an employee. Since it is a relatively new job, the speaker is probably not that acquainted with the boss. The meeting was crucial so the severity level is high. The responses in such role-play situations could be rated for: • • • •

the ability to use an appropriate speech act; the typicality of the expressions used; the appropriateness of the amount of speech and information given; and the appropriateness of the level of formality, directness and politeness.

Therefore, let us say the response from an NNS of English looks like this: Very sorry, Mr. Iverson. You see … uh … I have sleeping problems and … uh … then I missed the bus. But I can make it up to you.

In this instance, the speaker has apologized using the strategies of expressing an apology, giving an explanation and offering repair. Thus, three of

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the key apology-specific strategies were used. Nonetheless, it is likely that pragmatically competent speakers of American English would not state the explanation and the offer of repair that way. They would probably say something more like the following: Oh, I’m really sorry about that, Mr. Iverson. I’ve been suffering from chronic sleep disorder and as a result I have trouble getting going in the morning. I can get you a doctor’s note about it. And to make matters worse, I got to the bus stop this morning just as the bus was pulling away. I’m really sorry about that. What can I do to make it up to you? I’ll work overtime, whatever.

Let us assume that the excuse here is legitimate, both with regard to the sleeping disorder and the missed bus. A sympathetic boss in a US company would probably accept it, especially with a doctor’s note. Notice that NS performance would probably entail providing a little more detail as to the actual health problem by giving it a label rather than leaving it vague. Also, NSs would mention what happened with the bus. In addition, the apology would most likely include suggested ways to make it up to the boss, such as by working overtime. Here is another possible response from the NNS office worker: So sorry I missed the meeting. I had problem at home and then I forgot the meeting, and by the time I remembered, it was too late.

In this instance, the worker expresses an apology, gives an explanation and acknowledges responsibility. As in the previous response by a learner, the speaker used three strategies for apologizing. Is the response apologetic enough? Most English speakers might express the apology in a way that is similar to this. Would the boss accept it? In this instance, the average boss would probably point out that this has happened before and that the worker needs a better system for remembering meetings. The number of strategies called for in performing a given speech act will vary according to the situation and speech community. For example, the strategy of ‘expressing an apology’ may be sufficient for setting things right in an email exchange with a colleague in a US academic institution: ‘I’m really sorry for that inappropriate email I sent you.’ Likewise, the strategy of offering an explanation or an excuse, ‘The bus was late’, when an employee arrives late for a meeting in the Middle East, may be accepted by the boss as sufficiently apologetic, since busses can be late there and consequently employees are only partially responsible for getting to meetings on time. The following are two further examples of oral role-play prompts. Here is the first: Example 4 Your next-door neighbor keeps her dog out on his porch well into the evening and the barking is driving you crazy. Role play the part of the irate resident who knocks on the neighbor’s door and requests that

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the dog be kept inside at night. Your partner will play the role of the partially deaf, elderly neighbor, Grace, who wants to keep this dog happy since it was the pride and joy of her deceased husband. Elderly neighbor, Grace: Well, hello, ______________. What can I do for you? You:

Here is the second example of an oral role-play prompt: Example 5 You promised your classmate friend that you would get tickets in advance for a special showing of a movie, but you forgot and now the show is sold out. Classmate: What a bummer! I really wanted to see that movie this evening. I was supposed to report on it in film class tomorrow. You:

The barking dog situation calls for being tactful and understanding, while at the same time justifying a request for quiet. Presumably the course has covered how to make tactful requests and the rating here would be for the ability to make one that is appropriately tactful. The situation of forgetting to buy tickets calls for a profuse apology and a convincing one. The offer of repair here may be crucial (e.g. offering to drive the classmate to a more distant theater where tickets are still available). Openended speech production in situations like these requires that the learners perform a sometimes challenging search of their memory and that they then select the appropriate forms from various possible solutions (Kasper, 1999). Also, open role plays approximate authentic interactions in that turn-taking, sequencing of moves and negotiation of meaning can operate fully (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). In a cross-sectional design aimed at viewing the speech act of requests embedded in discourse, one assessment study involved the collection of open role-play data from learners at four proficiency levels and focused on the sequential organization of the interactions and the impact of participants’ proficiency level (Al-Gahtani & Roever, 2012). The three requests included: (1) a student asking a housemate who was engrossed in watching a TV show to go buy bread at a supermarket; (2) a student asking his professor to give him the lecture notes from the last lecture which he did not attend due to illness; and (3) a teaching assistant asking one of his students to inform the other classmates that there would be no seminar that day. Findings indicated that lower-level learners were less likely to lay the groundwork for the request by ascertaining the availability of the interlocutor to carry out the request and thereby gauging the likelihood of acceptance. They tended to rely on the interlocutor to elicit background information in support of the request. Hence, a teacher could give points

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in the assessment of role-play requests to students who do lay the groundwork for their requests. 9.3.2.2 Written discourse as if spoken

An alternative to assessing oral language production would be to have the students produce written responses, intended to reflect what they would say in the situation. Although it is a written test, it could still serve as an indirect measure of what they might say in that situation, especially if they are not permitted to consult dictionaries or other sources during the assessment. Actually, learners may be able to provide more thoughtful or socially desirable responses in such written tests, possibly even more indicative of their knowledge of what a speaker might say than when having to respond orally (Beebe & Cummings, 1996; Kasper & Dahl, 1991). As can be surmised from its frequent use in research, the DCT is a popular measure for assessing speech acts in written discourse. The format often calls for two or more turns by both the speaker and the hearer that the student needs to take into consideration in responding: Example 7 You arranged to meet a friend in order to study together for an exam. You arrive half an hour late for the meeting. Friend (annoyed): I’ve been waiting at least half an hour for you! You-1: Friend: Well, I was standing here waiting. I could have been doing something else. You-2: Friend: Well, it’s pretty annoying. Try to come on time next time.

Here are responses to You-1 and You-2, provided by a Hebrew NS: You-1: So what! It’s only an – a meeting for – to study. You-2: Yeah, I’m sorry. But don’t make such a big deal of it.

If the responses were being rated for the ability to be properly informal with a friend, then this respondent would come out high on that scale. The responses are informal. On the other hand, this reply is likely to be seen by the friend as not very apologetic and might get rated down on that basis. Here is another apology DCT, in which the severity of the infraction is major, the learner respondent as hearer in this situation is highly acquainted with the speaker (being the professor’s intern), but the learner’s relative status as student is considered lower: Example 8 You are a graduate assistant for a professor who requested that you pick up a library book to help him finish the review of literature for a research

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proposal which is actually due tomorrow. You arrive at the meeting without the book. The problem is that you were supposed to get the book to him at your meeting last week and it slipped your mind then. Professor: Do you have that book we need in order to fi nish up the review of literature? You-1: Professor: Yeah, but you actually said you were going to get it for our meeting last week, and you didn’t bring it then either. You-2: Professor: Still, I think you might need a better system of tracking your tasks as my RA. We have to get this fi nished today so we can submit it tomorrow. You-3: Professor: OK. I guess that’ll help but I’ll be teaching when you get back so you’ll have to work through that section on your own and leave your suggestions on my desk. You-4:

The query by the professor would presumably be answered by some explanation or excuse and then by an expression of apology with the appropriate intensity attached (Y-1: ‘Whoops! I forgot it. You can’t imagine how many things I’ve had on my mind lately … I’m really sorry about that.’). The professor’s reply might be met by a further expression of apology (Y-2: ‘Oh, well, I’m terribly sorry about that …’). The next turn calls for an offer of repair (Y-3: ‘I’ll go and get the book right now.’). But as often happens in life, the professor is no longer available at that point to work on the task. The graduate assistant would then need to apologize again and perhaps offer a promise of non-recurrence (Y-4: ‘I’ll make sure nothing like this happens again.’). As indicated above, if the person doing the scoring of the responses knows which apology strategies are likely to be used in each instance, then scoring the responses becomes easier. Ideally, the item has already been piloted so that there is some idea of the responses to expect. The use of multiple turns in a DCT task is intended to reflect an actual interaction more than is possible with a single prompt, a space for a reply and no subsequent turns by the addressee. A way to score the above interaction could be to give a ‘3’ if the response seems fi ne (which is probably the case for the responses offered in the preceding paragraph), ‘2’ if it is fair, and ‘1’ if it is weak for each of the four slots. So, 12 points would be the highest possible score on the item. The score could take into account the following elements in a holistic fashion: • • • •

the typicality of the expressions used; the appropriateness of; the amount of speech and information given; the level of formality;

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the level of directness; and the level of politeness.

The development of tasks such as these allows for the manipulation of the social factors (e.g. status, as in student-professor interactions) and situational factors (such as the level of imposition or of severity in an apology situation). The use of multiple turns represents an effort to make the DCTs more reflective of the conversational turn-taking that takes place in actual speech, the lack of which has been a criticism of written DCTs (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993). This multiple-rejoinder format makes the students structure their speech act behavior to conform to a given situation. It helps to indicate in the instructions that respondents are to respond according to what people would typically say. This then would give the instructor a sense of how aware they are as to the generally preferred or commonly used TL behavior. 9.3.2.3 M-C and short-answer completion items

Teachers can also assess oral production indirectly, such as by using M-C items since they are easier to score than are open-ended items. Such items may seem like measures of how well the respondents comprehend the pragmatics of the situation, but since the items are intended to tap the ability to produce the correct responses, they could be viewed as measures of ‘projected ability.’ Consider the following: Example 9 Indicate which of the following is most likely Bill’s response to Andrew in leave taking. Andrew: Hey, Bill. It’s been nice talking with you. Let’s get together some time. Bill: (a) Good idea – when would you like to do it? (b) You always say that but don’t mean it. (c) Sounds good. Take care. (d) I won’t hold my breath.

It is likely that for NSs of American English, ‘c’ would be the expected choice in that this is most likely what people might say. While response ‘a’ is possible, selecting it would mean departing from the expected speech routine since the vague statement ‘Let’s get together some time’ does not usually constitute an actual invitation in the average US speech community. Choices ‘b’ and ‘d’ may reflect what Bill is thinking, but it would be highly unlikely that he would say either of them as his response. Recent research used verbal report techniques to describe the 24 different strategies that German respondents used to answer M-C items on a comprehension measure of American English pragmatics (Timpe, 2012). The study demonstrated that respondents with more exposure to the TL

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context had an easier time contextualizing the items than those with less exposure, who had to rely more on the text of the items. With regard to the M-C format itself, the verbal report data confirmed that while numerous items were assessing the intended sociopragmatic aspects of the situations, some of the items were not. Another approach to assessing production of pragmatically appropriate forms would be to use a sentence completion format: Example 10 Herman is requesting a raise from his boss. Complete his request so that it sounds tactful: I was ___________ if you ___________ consider increasing my pay.

It is possible through this format to see if the students have control over certain grammatical and lexical forms that are routinely used in order, for example, to mitigate or soften their requests. The following would be an example of a ‘guided’ response situation if the learners were provided, say, with the base form of the lexical item to use: Example 11 I was ____________ if you ________ consider increasing my pay a bit. (to wonder) (will)

Items of this sort might precede the ones where no base form is given as a clue to the intended response for the given blank. 9.3.2.4 Dialogue production task

Another form of discourse completion task has been referred to as the free discourse completion task (Barron, 2003: 83) or the dialogue production task (DPT) (Schneider, 2008). Its primary use according to the research literature has been to get at differences in pragmatics across dialects. It is different from a multiple-rejoinder DCT in that the respondent has to write an entire dialogue, rather than having some of the text provided as clues or guidelines for how to complete it. In the case of the DPT, once a situation is described, it is left to the respondent to determine how to write the dialogue. Here is a sample task: A conversation between strangers. At a party one person (A) sees another person (of the same sex) who looks friendly (B). Write a short dialogue that represents language which would typically be used in this situation.

According to Klaus Schneider (Email exchange, 30 November 2016), the intention would be to collect data as to what respondents would or should say, or what is generally expected and considered the norm in a given social group or community. While the DPT certainly represents an innovative approach to assessing pragmatic, questions could be raised

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concerning the nature of the output. For example, how much disparity is there in responses? Are better writers advantaged by this type of task? Might some respondents let their creative juices flow more so than others? In addition, are the emergent dialogues for the given situation in the given TL influenced by the gender of the writer? For instance, would it be necessary to specify for each dialogue whether it is between two males, a male and a female or two females? 9.4 Suggested Strategies for Assessing Pragmatics

Now let us now consider six teacher strategies that both NTs and NNTs might use for assessing pragmatics. Then two activities will be suggested in which these strategies can be applied. 9.4.1 Keep the speech act situations realistic and engaging

If the students are learning an FL, the teacher could include a vignette about babysitting if this is likely to be a culturally acceptable activity in the given speech community, as opposed to having a family member do the babysitting. In terms of finding vignettes that are likely to occur and that are adequately engaging, the logical approach would be to check with locals of the given speech community. But another source can be the learners themselves since they are the ones who may be acutely aware of just those situations for which they would like guidance in pragmatics (McLean, 2005). Here is one such situation supplied by an EFL student in Japan: You are at a restaurant and someone at your table says something funny. You laugh and spray a little food. You are embarrassed and think you should apologize. What do you say? (McLean, 2005: 8)

By mobilizing students to furnish speech act situations, it should help motivate them to want to learn the appropriate pragmatics for those situations. The teacher could pose the issue in this way: Think of a social situation where you had problems communicating (e.g. making a request or refusal, apologizing for something you did, or complaining about something). Describe the situation briefly, and end it with ‘What do you say?’ 9.4.2 Check for key aspects of performance 9.4.2.1 The cultural appropriateness of the strategies in the given situation

In this assessment task, the students need to rate the following two questions addressed to co-workers at the office in terms of their cultural appropriateness in the TL community: (a) ‘I see you got a new car. How much did you pay for it?’ (b) ‘How much do you make a month?’

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The performance could be scored on, say, a broad four-point scale: (1) (2) (3) (4)

totally appropriate culturally; somewhat culturally appropriate; somewhat culturally inappropriate; and culturally inappropriate.

Alternatively, the task could involve rating these two questions according to three subscales – for level of formality, degree of politeness and the amount of language used: The appropriateness of the language forms used with regard to the level of formality (e.g. ‘too informal’, ‘just right’ or ‘too formal’), the degree of politeness (e.g. whether appropriate for that situation in that language and culture; 4 – appropriate, 3 – somewhat appropriate, 2 – somewhat inappropriate, 1 – inappropriate), and the amount of language used (e.g. ‘too much’, ‘just right’ or ‘too little’).

The best rule of thumb is for teachers to be generous in their ratings since there is variation among NSs. Under any circumstances, such a task could prompt interesting discussion regarding sociopragmatic concerns. 9.4.3 Have a discussion with the students after they have performed speech acts

Ask the students how well they understood the contextual factors, and have them identify the factors that most influenced their responses. 9.4.4 Have the students compare their performance with that of an NS, allowing for an expression of agency

It could be helpful to have the students respond to these questions: (a) What do they think an NS response would be? (b) How do they think the learners’ TL pragmatic performance might depart from the NS norms if they are unwilling to do it the way NSs would? These kinds of items allow for a discussion of how the students actually relate to the pragmatics of the TL speech community (see Ishihara, 2006). Therefore, in the situation of forgetting a meeting with their boss for the second time, students of Hebrew could be alerted by their teacher to the likelihood that Hebrew NS speakers might well express an apology without offering a repair. Then if the students were expressing their own agency as, say, an American speaking Hebrew, they might indicate that they would offer repair (e.g. ‘I can be there in 5 minutes and deal with the matter.’). While the score in this situation would be based on the awareness of the community norms, the teacher might not penalize the students

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for departing from those norms if they are able to state it as a conscious preference. Hence, students would be rated both for their awareness of the norms (e.g. 3 – high awareness, 2 – moderate awareness, 1 – low awareness) and for their explanation for why they departed from or resisted that norm (e.g. 3 – clear statement of reasons for resistance, 2 – some statement of reasons for resistance, 1 – no statement of reasons for resistance). If the students were to write that NSs would not offer repair (because it would be viewed as yet another infraction given their status as the boss’ employee), they would get a ‘3’ for being highly aware of the cross-cultural difference. If additionally they were to note that for them it would be imperative to indicate to the boss what they were willing to do to make it up, they would get a ‘3’ for noticing the gap between what was expected and their own preferred behavior. The teacher strategy of allowing for learners to express their agency in the assessment process appears to have gained a certain level of respectability in the literature on assessing pragmatics (e.g. see Eslami & Mirzaei, 2012). 9.4.5 Have the students provide a rationale for why they responded as they did in the given social situation

If the group is not too large, students’ reactions could be recorded digitally at the time that they are responding (if in writing) or afterward. Otherwise, they could provide a brief written rationale, which would be taken into account in the evaluation of their pragmatic understanding. The request for providing a rationale could look like this: ‘Please give a brief explanation for why you responded in this situation the way you did. What were the factors that influenced your response?’ 9.4.6 Be strategic about when to assess what

At the beginning of the course and with less proficient learners, less complex speech acts could be assessed, such as complimenting, thanking, leave taking and basic service encounters (e.g. simple requests). While there is a need to teach (and assess) some aspects of requesting, making invitations, refusing, apologizing and complaining early on since these speech acts do occur in even rudimentary interactions, the more complex aspects of such speech acts could be reserved for assessment later in the course or in courses for more advanced levels of instruction. The Appendix of this chapter offers two activities intended to provide an opportunity for constructing at least one task involving comprehension of a speech act and one task involving production of a speech act. The activities include both suggested situations and possible formats for the tasks, with the instructions either in the TL exclusively or bilingually.

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9.5 Assessing Pragmatics for Research Purposes

It would appear that most of the efforts to date regarding the assessment of pragmatics have focused on the assessment of pragmatics not for the purpose of classroom instruction, but rather as components of research studies. Hence, most measures of pragmatics reflect a level of rigor beyond the typical classroom setting. They also call for statistical analyses well beyond the typical types of analyses teachers might use to determine how well their learners are handling TL pragmatics. A brief but comprehensive coverage of these more rigorous assessment measures was provided by Brown (2015). In his brief review, Brown focused on the then pioneering assessment of pragmatics that he and colleagues had engaged in during the early 1990s (described below, Section 9.5.1). Then, he referred to subsequent assessment work that has covered other speech acts, plus various other areas in pragmatics, such as speech styles and implicature. He also described the rigorous statistical procedures undertaken to analyze the pragmatics data, such as the use of Rasch analysis, Facets analysis and Generalizability Theory, indicating which studies had used which statistical approaches. Sections 9.5.1 to 9.5.3 below give examples of research studies that have focused on the assessment of pragmatic ability, involving measures of speech act performance, assessment of implicature and the rating of speech act responses.

9.5.1 Measures of speech act performance

The first major project to development tests of speech act performance resulted in a series of measures in the 1990s: • • • • •

An M-C discourse completion task – requiring examinees to read a situation description and choose what they would say next, An oral discourse completion task – where examinees listen to an orally described situation and record what they would say next; A discourse role-play task – where examinees read a situation description and then play a particular role with an examiner in the situation; A discourse self-assessment task – where examinees read a written description of a situation and then rate their own pragmatic ability to respond correctly in the situation; Role-play self-assessment – where examinees rate their own performance in the recording of the role play in the discourse role-play task. (Hudson et al., 1992, 1995)

These tasks focused on three speech acts (requesting, refusing and apologizing) and three contextual conditions (level of imposition, differential power and social distance). At the time that these measures were constructed, the authors made it clear that they were not intended for classroom assessment.

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Based on the work of Hudson et al., Roever (2006) reported on what at the time was an innovative effort to construct a web-based test of ESL pragmalinguistics, which included a brief-response speech act section intended to assess knowledge of strategies for implementing the speech acts of request, apology and refusal. 3 The following is an example of an apology item: Sally is supposed to meet her friend Jack at her house at 5:30 pm but there was a last minute problem at the offi ce and when she gets home it’s 5:45 pm. Jack is waiting on her doorstep. She goes up to him and says: Sally: Jack: ‘No, not very long. I just got here.’

According to Roever, Jack’s rejoinder was constructed to elicit a question from Sally along the lines of ‘have you been waiting long?’ in addition to an expression of apology (‘I’m so sorry I’m late.’) required by the situation. The additional facework necessitated by the response was intended to make scoring of these brief response items easier as it limited possible responses more. It was also expected to increase item difficulty. Looking back at his earlier work, Roever (2013a) pointed out that his web-delivered test lacked the use of audio and video to make the assessment of pragmatics more authentic for the participants. Subsequent pragmatics instruments have included these features. More recently research has been conducted to further explore the question raised by Kasper and Rose (2002) as to the relationship between grammatical control and pragmatics (Grabowski, 2013). The reason for the study was because Kasper and Rose had found evidence inconclusive as to whether knowledge of grammar was necessary in order to interpret and convey a range of pragmatic meanings. Grabowski conducted roleplay interactions between ESL learners and a trained NS in an effort to operationalize the measurement of grammatical and pragmatic knowledge as part of communicative language ability across proficiency levels. The role-play interactions were evaluated by two trained raters. With respect to grammar, the raters used a rubric which included both grammatical accuracy and grammatical meaningfulness. With respect to pragmatic knowledge, the ratings included both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic appropriateness, as well as psychological appropriateness. The study found that intermediate learners were able to both interpret and convey pragmatic meanings even if they lacked grammatical accuracy. The researcher interpreted this fi nding as indicating that the ESL learners actually had knowledge of grammatical meaning, despite the inaccuracies (Grabowski, 2013). Perhaps more interesting was the fi nding at the expert level that greater grammatical accuracy did not ensure high

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performance in pragmatic tasks. Hence, even for advanced learners, grammatical knowledge is helpful but not sufficient if there is a concern for avoiding pragmatic failure. 9.5.2 Assessment of implicature

The following are two examples of studies involving research using measures of implicature. Taguchi (2008b) constructed a computerized listening test to assess learners’ ability to comprehend conversational implicature. The test had 58 items: 24 conventional implicature, 24 nonconventional implicature and 10 literal comprehension items. Conventional implicature included indirect refusals that took a form of giving an excuse to refuse someone’s invitation, request or offer. Nonconventional items were written as expressions used to convey opinions in a nonliteral manner and did not involve any discourse routines or conventions of language use. Here is an example of both a conventional and a nonconventional implicature item: Conventional implicature (indirect refusal) Susan: You look worried, Dave. What’s the matter? Dave: I need to turn in this paper by 6, but I’m still typing it. I’ve got to go to work in half an hour or so. Susan: Do you want me to type the paper for you? Dave: I think I’m almost done. Question: Does Dave need Susan’s help? Nonconventional implicature (indirect opinion) Dave: Hey Susan. I didn’t know that you’re working here on campus. Susan: Yeah, I’m working in the Student Union cafeteria. I work there Monday through Friday starting at six. Dave: You sound busy. Do you like the job? Susan: My mother wanted me to take it. Question: Does Susan like the cafeteria job?

The study found that accuracy and response speed were higher in the case of conventional implicature than in that of nonconventional implicature. The conventional implicature (in this case, an indirect refusal) was easier and faster for the learners to comprehend, and they showed a robust development over a short period of time, suggesting that the conventionality in this item type facilitated development. The learners were able to draw on their knowledge of normative patterns of refusal, namely, giving a reason for refusal, in order to correctly understand the speaker’s intention. Due to their context-dependent nature, nonconventional implicature required learners to make inferences from the overall context of a conversation, beyond their understanding the indirect target utterance, which resulted in slower development.

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In the second study, Roever (2013b) examined the use of implicature for the purposes of diagnostic placement testing among high-proficiency learners of English and NSs. A 10-item M-C task was used to test two types of implicature: idiosyncratic (general conversational) implicature and formulaic implicature (indirect criticism, irony, topic change). Each item consisted of a brief situation description, followed by a two to three turn conversation between two characters and the stimulus question, ‘What does [name of character] probably mean?’ Each item had four response options. Here is a sample item: Cathy and Alan are sharing a flat. Alan: Has the mail come yet? Cathy: Alan, it’s not even noon. What does Cathy probably mean? (a) There was mail for Cathy but not for Alan. (b) Cathy doesn’t feel like going to check the mail. (c) There is no mail because the mail never comes before noon. (d) There is a lot of mail even though it’s early in the day.

The results showed that NSs scored significantly higher than the learners. The study focused on different aspects of validity of the instrument, degree of difficulty for each group according to implicature type and amount of exposure to the target culture. 9.5.3 Research on the rating of speech act responses

Two recent studies gave credence to the distinction being drawn in this book between the way NTs and NNTs may handle pragmatics, in this case with regard to the rating of pragmatic performance. The studies looked at teachers’ criteria for rating FL learners’ performance of pragmatics. The first study focused on 60 American and 60 Iranian EFL/ESL teachers’ considerations when rating Iranian EFL learners’ performance of compliments in seven DCT situations (Alemi & Rezanejad, 2014). The teacher raters were requested to rate the appropriateness of each compliment (5–1) and also to indicate their criteria for making this judgement. The NNTs of English were locals, teaching at various language centers in Iran. The NTs were teachers of English and other areas of education, who mostly provided their data via email. A content analysis of the criteria used by the teachers when rating learners’ pragmatic performance was conducted. It was found that both the NTs and NNTs shared seven common criteria, albeit with differing degrees of frequency. In addition, the NTs reported using two other criteria that the NNTs did not mention, concern for feelings (of both the recipient of the compliment and for the person offering the compliment) – which they reported using extensively, and cultural appropriateness according to the

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Table 9.1 NNT and NT criteria for rating pragmatic performance NNTs: • politeness (22%); • interpersonal factors (relative age, gender, social status and level of formality) (19%); • tactfulness in delivery (17%); • naturalness (13%); • fluency (10%); • linguistic accuracy (10%); and • sincerity (9%). NTs: • tactfulness in delivery (29%); • concern for feelings (of compliment recipient, person offering the compliment) (13%); • politeness (NTs 13%); • interpersonal factors (relative age, gender, social status and level of formality) (11%); • linguistic accuracy (11%); • sincerity (8%); • naturalness (8%); • fluency (4%); and • cultural appropriateness (3%).

context and specific situation – which was only reported in several instances. For NNTs, politeness, interpersonal factors and tactfulness were the criteria mentioned with greatest frequency. For the NTs, it was tactfulness (by far), then concern for the feelings of the interlocutors and politeness in that order. Therefore, by and large, the criteria used by NNTs and NTs were not at the same level of importance (see Table 9.1). It is consistent with the survey results from Chapter 4 that the NTs and the NNTs had statistically significant differences in their frequency of reported criteria for rating compliments where they shared the same criteria for rating. By the same token, it is important to bear in mind that there was variation among raters within the NNT and NT groups as well, since raters most likely had their own idiosyncratic preferences with regard to criteria that they used in rating. The follow-up study focused just on the criteria that NNTs used for rating and commenting on 12 EFL learners’ requests elicited through video prompts in six situations (Alemi & Khanlarzadeh, 2016), so there was no comparison with NTs in this case. The results of the content analysis of the 28 male and 34 female Iranian EFL teacher raters’ comments revealed that the NNTs used nine criteria in their ratings: • • • • • • • • •

degree of politeness (26%); the nature of the relationship between the interlocutors (20%); level of formality (18%); explanation for the request (11%); use of query preparatory expressions and softeners (e.g. ‘could you …’, ‘if it’s OK with you …’) (9%); degree of directness/indirectness (8%); how the request compares with an ideal model (4%); accuracy in grammatical forms and lexical choices (3%); and cultural appropriateness (1%).

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Consistent with the previous study, politeness, interpersonal factors and level of formality were once again the most frequently mentioned criteria for the NNTs. The other criteria were appropriately focused on the nature of the given speech act, namely, requests, as compared to the previous study that dealt with compliments.

9.6 Conclusions

It would appear that even if pragmatics is taught in the TL classroom, it is not necessarily assessed. When learners get the pragmatics wrong, this can lead to pragmatic failure, which may mar the quality of their interactions. The chapter has given examples of how to conduct assessment of pragmatics and suggestions as to what to look for in responses. The chapter has also provided examples of recent research efforts regarding the assessment of pragmatics. The sample studies, concerning speech acts, implicature and criteria used in the rating of student responses help to remind us of complexities inherent in the assessment process. While this complexity should not discourage us from assessing pragmatics, we do need to be mindful that our measures will not be as precise as they are in other areas of language assessment which are more straightforward, such as when assessing basic grammar or vocabulary knowledge. Collecting pragmatics data from students is a challenge, given that some students are better at taking tests, especially with regard to performance of pragmatics. Some are more natural actors than others. Even more of a challenge is determining how to score the responses, taking into account the degree of imposition or severity of an infraction, the level of acquaintance of the interlocutors and the relative social status that is implied in the given situation. Examples were given in the chapter of how to open up the assessment to provide respondents an opportunity to express their take on the situation and to explain why they responded as they did. As suggested in this chapter and elsewhere in this volume for that matter, the process of assessing pragmatic ability offers numerous opportunities for research since we are still learning how best to conduct these assessments, especially in the classroom. This chapter has provided suggestions as to possible areas for research: • • •

Conducting qualitative studies of what constitutes effective pragmatics instruction in the classroom. Identifying the most effective means for assessing speech acts and other pragmatic behavior in a full, interactive discourse context, whether through open role play or other means. Continuing to collect data on the strategies reportedly used in responding to M-C pragmatics items so as to better understand what is being assessed.

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Continuing research on interrater agreement and disagreement in assessing pragmatic ability. Finding statistical approaches to analyzing pragmatics data that are both easy to use and to interpret.

It is hoped that future research will better inform us as to how to streamline such assessments in the years to come.

Appendix Activity 1: Writing a task to assess comprehension of speech acts

Format: Individual, pair, whole group Objectives: (1) To give you an opportunity to construct a task that checks for learners’ ability to appraise a speech act situation. (2) To select from among various formats in the construction of these speech act comprehension tasks. Time: 1 hour Materials: Four situations and two formats for the task construction: Situations and Formats for Writing a Speech Act Comprehension Task (see below). Directions: (1) Select a partner for this activity. (2) With your partner, start by reviewing the two speech act comprehension tasks presented above (Section 9.3.1, Examples 1 and 2 – the one between the husband and wife, and the bumping accident in the department store) with regard to how comprehension of speech act performance is assessed. (3) Jointly select your item formats for assessing comprehension of pragmatic ability – such as: (a) M-C items; (b) open-ended questions (to probe students’ rationale for their choice of M-C response); and (c) rank-ordering of responses (such as for politeness). (4) Select a situation (four are provided below, but you could use your own if you prefer).

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(5) Determine the criteria that you wish to use in your assessment (e.g. degree of regret in keeping with the nature of the infraction, sincerity of apology). (6) After you have blocked out your task, take turns responding to it, whether in English or in a TL that you both know. This will serve as a form of a ‘pilot’ for your task. If possible, audio-record your responses so that you can re-listen to them to facilitate analysis. (7) Each pair is to report back to the whole group as to what the task is intended to measure, how learners’ responses are to be scored, the relative ease in constructing such a task, and potential challenges associated with it. Discussion/wrap up: Look at ways that this exercise has helped sharpen your understanding of how pragmatic tasks can be constructed. Situations and formats for Activity #1, writing a speech act comprehension task

(1) Situations (a) Forgetting to get the medicine you promised to pick up at the pharmacy for the sick child of a single-parent neighbor. (b) Apologizing to your spouse for accidentally revealing personal information about her at a dinner party – information that she didn’t want revealed. (c) Apologizing to a college student for causing him to have to swerve on his bike due to your jaywalking. (d) Apologizing to your mother for forgetting to send her a birthday card. (2) Formats (a) M-C items: You could make up an M-C response to a situation where learners have to choose the most appropriate response for a given situation. (b) Rank order: You could have your students rank the order of responses (e.g. in terms of level of directness). You give a series of apologies which are on a continuum from more casual and detached to more regretful and engaged (e.g. ‘Oh, sorry about that …’ to ‘Oh, my goodness, I am really very sorry about that …’). (c) Open-ended questions: In this case, since it is for comprehension and not production, the use of open-ended questions would be, say, to

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probe students’ rationale for their choice of M-C response. Note that this is not a format for assessing comprehension directly, but rather as a means for probing cognition – to better understand the response process. Activity 2: Writing a task to assess production of speech acts

Format: Individual, pair, whole group Objectives: (1) To give you an opportunity to construct a task that has learners perform orally or in writing their ability to engage in a speech act interaction. (2) To establish criteria for judging the effectiveness of the given speech act performance. Suggested time: 1 hour Materials: Three situations and three formats for constructing a task: Situations and Formats for Writing a Speech Act Production Task (see below). Directions: (1) Start by reviewing the speech act production tasks in Section 9.3.2 of this chapter (four apologies – Example 3, forgetting to meet with the boss; Example 5, forgetting to buy movie tickets; Example 7, forgetting a study date with a friend; and Example 8, forgetting to get a library book for a session with a professor; and a complaint – Example 4: about the neighbor’s dog). (2) Select a format for assessing production of pragmatic ability from Section (2) of the worksheet below. (3) Select a situation, either from the list of suggestions or from your own experience. (4) Determine the criteria that you wish to use in your assessment (e.g. appropriateness of directness or politeness given the seriousness or severity of the situation with regard to a complaint, request, or apology). (5) After you have constructed a draft version of your assessment task, fi nd a partner and have that person respond to it, whether in English or in a TL that you know. This will serve as a form of a ‘pilot’ for your

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task. Pay attention to similarities and differences in the written answers that you produced, in an effort to be mindful of variation in responses (especially if you are both competent speakers of the language). (6) Each pair is to report back to the whole group as to what the task is intended to measure. Discussion/wrap up: Look at ways that this exercise has helped sharpen your understanding of how pragmatic tasks can be constructed. The discussion could include participants’ comments about the relative ease involved in constructing such a task, potential challenges associated with it and ways to address these challenges. Situations and formats for Activity #2, writing a speech act production task

(1) Situations – either using the example provided or creating your own. (a) Requesting a second opinion (e.g. from another doctor at the hospital when the diagnosis for your loved one’s situation is unacceptable to you). (b) Complaining (e.g. to the manager of a pricey restaurant manager about slow service and mediocre food). (c) Complimenting (e.g. a very modest friend in front of others on the good advice that friend gave you). (d) Apologizing (e.g. to a female colleague for your unpleasant behavior toward her at a meeting the previous day. You weren’t feeling well and took it out on her.). (2) Formats (a) Guided response: Multiple-rejoinder response: You could use this format of providing three or four responses that the hearer provides in the interaction and leaving the answers open for the learner to complete (as in the apology to the professor for forgetting the library book). (b) Open-ended response: Oral role-play response: You design a situation with a description such as in forgetting the meeting with the boss for the second time (see above). Possibly you provide an initial utterance from the speaker (in this case, the boss) in the interaction, as in ‘What happened to you this time?’

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(c) Open-ended response: Written: The format is like that in (b) above, but in this case the learner writes a response. It would most likely be in the form of a single answer. Notes (1) This material is based on Cohen (2014a, 2014c). (2) For a more research-based approach to assessing pragmatics, see Roever (2004) and Cohen (2004). (3) The test also included a measure of pragmatic routines and implicature with M-C responses. Assessment of implicature is addressed in Section 9.5.2.

10 Researching Pragmatics

The path to completing a research study effectively is fraught with obstacles, as documented impressively in a new volume edited by McKinley and Rose (2017). Their book has chapters dealing with everything from challenges selecting the sample to staying objective as a researcher as well as honest about the fi ndings, to dealing with a low response rate in surveys and with participant attrition in longitudinal research. The contributors provide suggestions for how to deal with these challenges. It is refreshing to see books like this one that document the struggles researchers face as they investigate applied linguistic phenomena. In conducting the study reported on in Chapter 4 and in writing it up, it was imperative to make comparisons between the NTs and the NNTs in the sample with the greatest of care. It is all too easy to make unwarranted generalizations based, for example, on the nature of the sampling. It is hoped that the study was conducted and reported in a manner that reflected the spirit of open investigation and fairness to the participants. I know that I learned a great deal from the fi ndings of the survey and that the often robust teachers’ responses contributed significantly to this book, especially to Chapter 6. The current chapter provides ideas for how to conduct pragmatics research, especially as concerns contexts involving NTs and NNTs. Various options are provided in order to illustrate that the design and execution of any research project entails making choices. Conducting a pragmatics study successfully involves navigating through some thorny issues, as was the case in writing this book on NTs and NNTs. For one thing, it is crucial not to view teaching contexts as static; rather they are constantly in flux, bringing with them ever changing patterns of interaction.

10.1 Taking a Multi-Method Approach to Research on TL Pragmatics

There is now a robust literature about research methods for investigating and assessing how well NSs and NNSs handle TL pragmatics in their receptive and productive performance in various contexts (e.g. see Félix-Brasdefer, 2010; Taguchi & Roever, 2017; Yamashita, 2008). Some studies even include rigorous statistical procedures in order to support 241

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statements about the advantages of one measure over another (e.g. Brown & Ahn, 2011). This chapter will take one research context – NTs’ and NNTs’ handling of TL pragmatics in their L2 or FL classroom – as the departure point for considering how to conduct research into pragmatics, especially with an eye to studying situations in flux and individual variation within these situations. The intention of the present study is ultimately to encourage multiple methods for looking at situations where L1 and TL pragmatics meet, which has been an approach favored by various researchers in pragmatics (e.g. Félix-Brasdefer, 2003). We look at the options available to researchers and weigh the relevance and advantages for each option with regard to studying pragmatics instruction in the TL classroom. 10.2 Viewing Pragmatics in Intercultural Contexts

In order to add an element of extra interest to the discussion, we will focus on contexts where intercultural rather than cross-cultural pragmatics might play a decisive role. For the purposes of this exercise, crosscultural pragmatics refers to a comparison of pragmatic behavior across two separate cultures, whereas intercultural pragmatics refers to pragmatic behavior where the two cultures are in constant contact, as in the case of Hispanic immigrants and non-Hispanic heritage Americans interacting in Spanish and in English in the USA. And, as Kramsch (2011) suggested, the nature of this interculturality is most likely different from the way that it was before Skype, smartphones and social media. In discussing interculturality, we see how labels such as L1 and L2 are simplistic at best, especially when the learning and performance of TL pragmatics can actually involve the influence of an L3, L4 and so on, and that both positive and negative transfer can occur in various directions. In addition, given the fluidity of global travel these days, speakers are continuously shifting from L2 to FL situations and back again, such that it makes it challenging at best to label their language community. As noted in Chapter 1, pragmatics deals with the intentions and interpretations attached to what is said or written, as well as what is not said and what may be communicated nonverbally. Thus, an NT or an NNT who handles TL pragmatics instruction well knows how to convey to students the rhetorical functions expressed in a written message and the sometimes subtle indications of tone or attitude in both oral and written communication (e.g. anything from a humorous, sincere, sympathetic or collaborative tone to one that is teasing, sarcastic, angry, threatening, patronizing or sexist). These teachers are able to point out to their learners how these verbal and nonverbal cues transmit to the interlocutors the level of politeness, directness or formality in an oral or written communication, as well as the intent (e.g. to be kind, loving or attentive, or to be devious, provocative or hostile). In oral interaction, the input involving pragmatics

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could be through language (e.g. through words, phrases or extended discourse), through facial expressions and gestures or through silence. Whether the instructional input is pragmatically comprehensible to TL learners depends on various factors, such as: (1) the learners’ level of interlanguage pragmatic development in that TL and possibly in other (especially related) languages; (2) their age, gender, occupation, social status and experience in the relevant TL-speaking communities; and (3) their multilingual/multicultural experiences in general. Pragmatics plays a role in numerous classroom interactions, including ones that may be face-threatening, such as when the teacher indicates to students that their performance is lacking. 10.2.1 Cross-cultural pragmatics

For the sake of those wishing to conduct cross-cultural pragmatic research, such research would compare how an interaction might unfold in two different language communities or subcommunities and the interactions that might take place among people from these respective communities and cultures (Kecskes et al., 2005). In our case, it could mean conducting observational research on, say, NNTs teaching a TL in their own community as opposed to teaching that language in a community where the TL is spoken. Perhaps in the former case, their handling of the TL pragmatics is influenced to a lesser or greater extent by the pragmatics of the home community. In the latter case, possibly the pragmatics instruction is more consistent with the norms of behavior in that TL community. The researcher could describe, for instance, a classroom lesson about a TL speech acts (e.g. a request, an apology, a complaint or all three) in the NNTs’ speech community and then compare it to a similar instructional segment in a classroom in the TL speech community. Perhaps there would be no discernible differences in the NNTs’ presentation about the pragmatics. This would depend on the given NNT, the amount of TL experience this NNT has and the length of time this person has lived in the TL community (if any), among other things that might emerge from an observational study of that kind. A key question for NNTs who teach in their own community exclusively would be the extent to which their teaching of the TL is influenced by various worldviews in their L1 community. An example of a striking conflict in worldviews would be, for example, the situation where at issue was how to deal with an Ethiopian baby’s epileptic seizures in Merced, CA – through Western medicine or through Laotian traditional healing practices (Fadiman, 1997). There were actually two issues at play in this case: medical knowledge and knowing how to communicate with the family about the sick child. Even if the American doctors in that California community had been able to speak Hmong to the family (which they were not), to what extent would their Hmong language use have been with a

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mainstream American cultural overlay and to what extent would it have been pragmatically appropriate for interactions in Hmong with the given family? Therefore, the question for researchers could be to investigate the extent to which the NNTs’ TL pragmatics instruction is consistent with the norms for pragmatic behavior as practiced in the TL community, rather than reflecting to some measure the influence of the L1 language and culture. If data were to show some deviation from TL norms, then an issue to explore would be the extent to which the teachers are aware of this deviation and their take on the matter. 10.2.2 Intercultural pragmatics

The conceptualization of intercultural pragmatics, which is the focus of research in this chapter, is more problematic than that of cross-cultural pragmatics, given that it concerns pragmatic behavior and variation behavior at the juncture of language and culture. Whereas with crosscultural pragmatics, the assumption is that the two language and cultural groups are intact and separate from each other, in the case of intercultural pragmatics it is likely to be more the case that owing to cultural shift and attrition, the speakers are moving away from one language and culture, perhaps in ways that are almost imperceptible to them and to researchers as well. In the case of immigrants, for example, they may well lose or ‘shed’ some of their L1 language and cultural behaviors, whether accidentally or perhaps willingly as they become a part of the TL community. If they return to their home culture for visits, their friends may well comment to them that they are ‘too polite’ or ‘too apologetic’ (or the opposite, depending on the nature of their new culture). In reality, they have adopted more of the language and cultural patterns of the language community in which they are currently living. What also makes definition problematic is that the very nature of intercultural pragmatics is undergoing a transformation in the current age of Facebook, Skype, Twitter and other means of social networking in order to stay in touch with the languages and cultures that immigrants have left behind. In the era of Eva Hoffman leaving Poland for Canada, she experienced anomie or a sense of being adrift between her Polish language and culture of origin and her new Canadian reality (Hoffman, 1989). At present, youth are no longer likely to experience the same kinds of detachment from their previous life, as documented by Lam and Rosario-Ramos (2009). These researchers investigated the ways in which recent young migrants of diverse national origins in the USA utilized digital media to organize social relationships with friends and families back home, and to engage with news and media products both in the USA and in their native countries. Based on results of interviews with 35 adolescents of diverse national origins and survey data with a larger group of youths, the researchers demonstrated how the use of digital media played a major role for these

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young people in maintaining and developing relations with people, media and events across territorial boundaries. Within their digital networks, the youths mobilized multiple languages to conduct interpersonal relationships and to seek out ideas and information from various sources in their home and host societies, and sometimes across a larger diaspora. Given these new configurations for cultural contact, researchers would want to be cognizant of the role that intercultural pragmatics could play for NNTs teaching in an FL situation. This would mean considering methodological means for getting at the NNTs’ perception and production of pragmatics under these circumstances. It would start with the selection of subjects for the given study, since the results will vary according to the age and status of the participant teachers (e.g. whether shortterm visitors or immigrants), and their facility with social media such as Facebook (Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 2009). Kramsch (2011) noted that the proliferation of global communicative technologies has made intercultural communication into a much more complex, changing and conflictual endeavor than just an L1/first-culture (C1) self-understanding another L2/C2 self from a third place in between them. According to Kramsch, the sphere of interculturality is a metaphor that attempts to capture through a place marker what is, in fact, a process of positioning the self both inside and outside the discourse of others. A research issue worth investigating, then, is one such as the following: When speaking an FL or, at best, a minority-group language in an intercultural situation in, say, the USA, how much are NNTs of this TL using mainstream American pragmatics and how much are they operating according to the pragmatic norms of the TL group?

It is likely that intercultural conflict is taking place at least some of the time and that the participants in these conflict situations are fi nding ways to cope. Thus, describing how pragmatics plays itself out in intercultural interactions presents a real challenge for researchers. Within the sphere of interculturality, for example, whose pragmatics is in force when an English-L1 NNT teaches Spanish in an HS classroom in the US Southwest? Is it the NNT’s L1 pragmatics with regard to interactions with students? What might be the consequences of the NT’s pragmatic choices for the students when they engage in interactions with NSs of the TL? What is the knowledge that this NNT has about the cultures and subcultures of NSs of the TL and what is the source of this knowledge (e.g. to what extent might the NNT be drawing from an empiricallyderived knowledge base or from other sources)? How familiar is the NNT with the pragmatics of the particular dialect or register spoken by the NSs that students are likely to encounter – either locally or on trips to countries where the TL is the dominant language? If we assume that the NNTs are still learners of TL pragmatics, at what level of development is their interlanguage pragmatics and with what consequences?

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There could, in principle, be a continuum regarding the extent of confl ict between the nature of the TL pragmatics conveyed through the NNT’s lessons and the actual norms of the TL community. For example, what is the relationship between the greetings (e.g. buenos dias ‘good morning’, adios ‘goodbye’) and the requests that are taught (e.g. Podria Ud. darme un vaso de agua? ‘Could you give me a glass of water?’), and the way these forms are used pragmatically in the TL community of interest? Therefore, at one extreme, the NNT’s language and cultural behavior are totally aligned with those of members of that speech community. At the other extreme, the NNT utilizes mainstream Anglo-American pragmatic norms, while speaking Spanish. At this end of the continuum, there is a total American cultural overlay even though the language of communication is Spanish. In other words, the NNT’s pragmatics would not change from what it would be if engaging in the same interaction in English. The points of pragmatic conflict could be numerous, despite the good intentions of the NNT. It may also be the case that the NNTs are well versed in the mainstream pan-Hispanic variety of Spanish taught in their classes, but are unfamiliar with the local dialect of, say, Mexican Spanish spoken in the area to which their SA students are going to live. 10.3 Options for Investigating Intercultural Pragmatics

The study being proposed here is intended to highlight the contributions to the investigation that differing approaches to research and different measures might make in elucidating the dynamics that arise for NTs and NNTs engaging in studying TL pragmatics. Here is the hypothetical research context under consideration: An Anglo-American NNT is teaching Spanish in the Southwest of the USA, in Tucson. He was born into a monolingual English-speaking family, but studied Spanish at college and did a year of study abroad in a Mexico town during his junior year. While in his MA program in teaching Spanish, he furthered his Spanish studies, so that his current Spanish skills place him at a high level. Consequently, he speaks Spanish well and gets a job as a HS Spanish teacher in Tucson, AZ. The question is how appropriate native Spanish-speakers in Mexico or Spanish-speaking immigrants in Arizona perceive his Spanish pragmatics to be.

The following are a series of possible research questions: (1) To what extent is the English L1 NNT’s Spanish-language pragmatics consistent with Mexican norms? How consistent is it with the pragmatic norms for Spanish L1 immigrants to the USA? (2) How would NTs teach the pragmatics of Spanish in an L2 classroom in Mexico? (3) How would an NT and an NNT compare in their teaching of the pragmatics of Spanish in an FL classroom in Arizona?

Researching Pragmatics

10.3.1 Basic research design issues 10.3.1.1 Sampling: determining the target group and selecting comparison groups 10.3.1.2 Range of pragmatics features sampled – NTs’ and NNTs’ handling of pragmatics, such as in greetings, requests, complaints, apologies, and criticism, and ways in which politeness is used 10.3.1.3 Number of measures included in the assessment – extent of triangulation

10.3.2 Types of naturalistic data

10.3.2.1 Corpus data - Possibility of identifying the pragmatic behavior through the data in the corpus - Extent to which the form reveals the function

10.3.3 Elicited data - Relevance and explicitness of situations - Comprehension or production of verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (e.g. hand waves, head nods, facial expressions, eye movements) - Elicitation prompt: visual (e.g. live or video, verbal or nonverbal), auditory, or written (and if written, the extent to which written prompts might provide clues to the correct response) - Extent to which the relationships of relative power, social distance, and absolute ranking of imposition are made clear to the respondents - What respondents say they would do vs. what others might do vs. what societal norms would dictate that they do or not do

10.3.2.2 Specially collected data

10.3.3.1 Role-play tasks

Means for collecting the data: - Hidden microphone with permissions - Screen capture programs

Extent of added stage directions: - Responding in a friendly, annoyed, angry, or compassionate way - Responding with appropriate intensity or severity - Responding in a cooperative, resistant, facetious, or rude manner

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Verbal report the measure or the data collection procedures - To understand the level of awareness behind the responses - To learn about response strategies – the depth and breadth of the respondents’ strategy repertoire - To determine the rationale for opting out (if it occurs) native L1 speaker or other model

10.3.3.3 Judgment tasks - Role-play self- & peer-assessment - Self-assessment of projected performance - Multiple-choice DCT - Appropriateness of speech styles

10.3.3.2 Discourse completion tasks (DCTs)

- Extent to which respondents select the situations to which they wish to respond - Single response or multiple rejoinders - Oral or written response

Figure 10.1 Options for investigating the handling of pragmatics by NTs and NNTs

(4) What about an English-L1 teacher of EFL in Mexico? To what extent would that teacher’s English pragmatics be consistent with mainstream US norms, especially if this teacher has lived in Mexico for many years? What would be the options for designing research to investigate these intercultural situations? The remainder of the chapter will deal with the issues that researchers would face in studying how both NTs and NNTs handle instruction dealing with pragmatics in both L2 and FL contexts. We will start with basic research design issues, such as the sampling of participants in the study, the pragmatics content to be considered and the measures to be used. We will also look at the types of data to be collected, whether naturalistic or elicited. Then we will deal with data analysis issues. Figure 10.1 provides an outline of these various concerns. 10.3.1 Basic research design issues 10.3.1.1 Sampling

There is a need to determine the target sample and to identify possible other groups for the sake of comparison. Assuming funding is available, it would be preferable to include a robust number of NTs and NNTs, in a

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variety of contrasting contexts, and also to observe and to interview students in the NTs’ and NNTs’ classes. One advantage of drawing data from corpora is that the sample may reflect that of hundreds of people. Therefore, if the pragmatic features are widespread in such data, using a corpus can be a means for obtaining a lot of data in a relatively rapid and unobtrusive way. This method could work for basic greetings and other speech functions that are prevalent and representative. In our case, the question would be whether existing corpora include samples of NTs and NNTs teaching TL pragmatics in L2 and FL contexts (see Section 10.3.1.5 on Corpus data below for more on this option). Whereas it can be benefi cial to have a large sample of data, the issue of representativeness is also a factor. Having a lot of coarsely-tuned, unfocused data may be of less value than having a smaller sampling of relevant, fi nely-tuned and informative data. While a corpus is indeed valuable for research, it is also limiting if the researchers themselves did not create it, since they are likely to lack background information on the speakers necessary for interpreting nuances in the data. For this particular study, it may make sense if there is adequate funding to have two different research sites. The first site would be a classroom in the US Southwest with an Anglo-American NNT who speaks Mexican Spanish relatively well, an NT originally from Mexico with good Spanish skills and at least two Mexican-American teachers – one who is comfortably bilingual and bicultural and one who is considered more of a heritage speaker of Spanish, who studied Spanish formally to get up to speed in the language. The second site would be a Spanish L2 classroom in a Mexican city, to get a sense of the type of context to which Spanish learners there would be exposed. The intent of having these two sites and five different types of teachers would be to be able to draw on both intercultural and crosscultural data. There would be a need to recruit five teachers willing to participate in the study, along with selected learners from their respective classrooms. Possibly the teachers and learners would be asked to role play different pragmatic situations (see under Section 10.3.1.7 Elicited data below). The teacher and learner respondents in the different classrooms would be informed that the intent is to study teacher-learner interactions in classrooms with an eye to improving the quality of Spanish instruction. The advantage to setting up specific instructional episodes involving pragmatics would be to avoid the collection of hours of data unrelated to the handling of pragmatics. While the staging of interactions creates ‘unnatural’ classroom episodes, with proper orchestration, such instructional episodes involving pragmatics could still be very informative as to similarities and differences of NTs and NNTs in L2 and FL contexts. Needless to say, this multi-context methodology assumes clearly identifiable cultures associated with the Spanish-FL contexts in the Southwest and the Spanish-L2 context in Mexico. It would make the study more

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interesting to have a sampling of NNTs and students of Spanish along a continuum from limited to more extensive contact with Mexican Spanish pragmatics. Whereas a rigorous sampling of different types of teachers and students would be ideal for comparative purposes, it also makes it more difficult to make generalizations, given the number of variables and the expected variation within these variables across the participants. 10.3.1.2 The targeted pragmatic features

The aim of such an NT and NNT study would be to gather data on how Spanish pragmatics is handled by the teachers and the learners in similar situations in these different instructional contexts. It would be necessary to have similar situations in the instructional episode involving pragmatics so that comparison is possible. Some such interactions could involve the following potential pragmatic episodes: (1) Greetings in the mid-afternoon, perhaps with students who arrive late to class and need to apologize for their tardiness. (2) Classroom episodes were the teacher is criticizing the students for misunderstanding the nature of the homework assignment. (3) Instruction on how to make polite requests – such as when students ask the teacher to speak more slowly in class. (4) Instruction on how to complain about the food in a restaurant. Of special interest in an FL context might be the extent to which aspects of an NT’s TL pragmatic behavior is perceived as divergent and possibly offensive to students who are used to classroom patterns more like those in their other classes in the L1 culture (as Kidd (2016) described with the Kiwi teacher of HS English in Japan; see Section 3.1.4 above). It could also be interesting to see how Mexican NTs teaching in the US Southwest deal with what they perceive as pragmatically inappropriate student behavior, such as student comments that seem to reinforce stereotypically negative images of Mexican immigrants to the USA. The research literature on pragmatics reminds us that while classroom instruction dealing with pragmatics tends to focus on speech acts such as requesting, apologizing or complaining, it could also include implicature (as illustrated in Section 9.4.2 above), routine expressions such as conversational rejoinders (e.g. ‘You know what I mean?’), hints such as ‘We’ll consider it’ meaning ‘no’, fi llers (‘well’, ‘uhm’), and other verbal and nonverbal behaviors (Roever, 2010; Yamashita, 2008). Yet the reality is that learners are fascinated by speech acts, which explains their popularity. For example, what happens pragmatically when a student is late for an important class session (e.g. one in which s/he was supposed to give a presentation)? Will the teacher scold the student? What kind of apology is expected here? At the end of the class, how does the teacher go about making a request regarding a hefty homework assignment? Perhaps for this study, the focus of pragmatics would just be on speech acts such as

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requests, complaints, apologies and criticism, and the ways in which politeness (through indirectness) is exercised. 10.3.1.3 The number of measures

The research literature tends to endorse the use of multiple measures so as to allow for triangulation of results (Félix-Brasdefer, 2003; Hudson, 2001). Whereas the thought of multiple measures resonates well with researchers, it may be a challenge to fi nd respondents for a study who are amenable to participating when they need to devote at least several hours to this effort, especially if they receive only limited remuneration for their time. Unobtrusive measures are less likely to incur resistance from subjects than those measures that call specifically for the subjects to spend special time producing the responses. Nonetheless, for studies conducted in US universities and other institutions, there is the need to secure the approval of an institutional review board, which includes obtaining the subjects’ consent to participate in the study. In addition, the researcher has to ask whether data collected in this manner are, in fact, of relevance in attempting to answer the research questions. 10.3.1.4 Naturalistic data

Since the collection of truly ‘natural’ data would imply that none of the participants are aware of the data collection process, it is likely that in most situations the data would be more ‘naturalistic’, implying the likelihood of some unnatural manipulation in the process. There are basically two kinds of naturalistic data that could be used to shed light on the research issue under study. One kind would be naturalistic data that are from a pre-existing corpus and the other would be data that are specially collected for the purpose at hand. While there are pros associated with the use of naturalistic data for the study of variation in intercultural pragmatics, there are also cons (cf. Félix-Brasdefer, 2010; Kasper, 2000). Obtaining precisely the kinds of naturalistic data that are needed can be a real challenge and once obtained, such data can be messy. 10.3.1.5 Corpus data

In some pragmatic situations, it can be useful to access a corpus for insights as to how users of a language are likely to employ the language. A corpus approach to the study of pragmatics may work well when words or phrases are easily identifiable in a data set such as in the case of greetings (see Reed, 2009) or expressions of gratitude (see Schauer & Adolphs, 2006). As noted in Section 7.1 above, the difficulty with trying to use a corpus to study apologies, however, is that words used in apologies can be used with another function, such as expressing regret (e.g. ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’). Another issue is whether the corpus provides pragmatics data on the dialect of the language of interest in the given study. A study by Vacas

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Matos (2017) yielded a corpus of pragmatics in Castilian Spanish, comprising three speech acts – refusals, compliments and apologies – as performed by three different groups of speakers: Spanish L1, English L1 with an advanced level of Spanish and English L1 with an intermediate level of Spanish. The corpus consists of videos and transcripts.1 While the corpus is an excellent one for samples of Castilian Spanish as spoken by NS and NNS students, it may have to be used with caution as a benchmark for a study of Spanish as spoken in one of the countries in Latin America. It also may need to be used with caution as a benchmark for older speakers, since the corpus is based on relatively young college students. 10.3.1.6 Specially collected data

Use of hidden microphones is one way to get naturalistic data. A study of intercultural pragmatics involving seven American SA students in Toledo, Spain used this approach in collecting data at the beginning, middle and end of a semester of interactions during service encounters (Shively, 2011). In Shively’s study, the participants made naturalistic audio recordings of themselves while visiting local shops, banks and other establishments. The analysis focused on openings and requests in 113 recordings and examined the ways in which the students’ pragmatic choices shifted over time, considering the role of language socialization and explicit instruction in L2 pragmatics in that development. In this case, the data were naturalistic rather than natural since the SA student with the microphone was aware of the recording. The Institutional Review Board at the University of Minnesota gave Shively permission to collect data without alerting those taped surreptitiously in the service encounters that they were being recorded. Another approach to collecting pragmatics data unobtrusively is with a screen capture program while participants are engaged in interactions on a website. A study of this nature looked at 10 intermediate learners of Spanish working with a Spanish pragmatics website ‘Dancing with Words’, where all online activity and oral comments were recorded using the Camtasia Screen Capture software2 (see Sykes & Cohen, 2008). The screen recordings allowed for observation and analysis of the participants’ interaction with the website. A negative aspect of this kind of unobtrusive data collection is that while a researcher can track the times that a participant visits a location on the website and clicks on a certain item, it is not known what the rationale for doing so is unless the subject is specifically prompted to provide this information. It would, of course, be an option to use retrospective verbal report as a vehicle for collecting such data (further described below). 10.3.1.7 Elicited data

Given the stated interest in collecting data on the handling of pragmatics by NTs and NNTs in their classroom contexts and comparing them,

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elicited data would be crucial here, especially if time is a factor. Commensurately, it is important that the data be relevant to the research questions. Sifting through reams of irrelevant data does not move the study along. Also, the situations need to be explicit enough to the respondents to be of value. The researcher needs to choose whether to deal just with the comprehension of the pragmatics in verbal (and nonverbal) behavior or with both comprehension and production (see Garcia (2004) for a study just of comprehension at the pragmatic level). In the selected research context, for example, the American NNTs who are teaching Spanish could themselves be asked to assess the pragmatic appropriateness of the pragmatics used in the classroom, both when the focus is on teaching pragmatics and when it is not. In addition, their students could be queried as to this issue. As was seen in the Kidd (2016) study, the students may, for various reasons, prefer to study with an NNT rather than with an NT. On the production side, the NTs and NNTs could be asked to produce oral or written language in response to an instructional situation that is described to them. It is also of concern whether the elicitation format is visual (e.g. video using cartoon figures or people; see Félix-Brasdefer, 2010: 46–47; Yamashita, 2001), auditory or written. Whereas a video prompt can be very informative, such prompts may take considerable time and energy to prepare effectively (see Zuskin, 1993). Written prompts are more expedient, but may inadvertently provide clues as to the language to use in the response, especially if they are written in the TL. In other words, respondents may simply lift pragmatically appropriate language from the prompt, perhaps without even fully understanding it. With regard to the explicitness of the prompts, it is imperative that in each interactive situation to which they are asked to react, the respondents be made fully aware of the power relationships involved, any social distance factors and the level of imposition that the situation might entail (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Spencer-Oatey, 1996). These issues need to be spelled out in the prompt. For example, for the sake of comparability, it would be beneficial to have situations at similar levels of formality and social distance in the various classroom contexts. And the researchers need to determine whose behavior the respondents are to be responding about – namely, their own (perhaps what they would do or say vs. what they should do or say) or that of other teachers. So on the perception side, the American NNTs in the Southwest may be asked to indicate what they might be expected to do or say in Spanish-language interactions with their students and their perception as to how likely they would be to do or say what is pragmatically appropriate in a given classroom situation. In addition, they could be asked for their perception of what a Mexican-American teacher would do or say or what an NT in Mexico might do or say. The use of piloting would hopefully determine whether these latter questions can be asked or not, depending largely on the level of awareness that the given NNTs have as to their own pragmatics in Spanish, as well as that of other Spanish speakers.

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10.3.1.8 Verbal report

Researchers in the field of TL pragmatics over the last decade or two have found that the use of verbal report techniques has helped to enrich their interpretation of the collected data in numerous ways (e.g. see Woodfield, 2012). Such verbal report has notably reflected a host of different approaches (see Bowles, 2010; Cohen, 2011: 79–86, 2013). For starters, there is self-report, where respondents provide descriptions of what they do (or rather, what they think they do), characterized by generalized statements. Then there is self-observation, which is the inspection of specific, not generalized, language behavior, either introspectively (i.e. within 20 seconds of the mental event) or retrospectively. A further distinction is made between immediate retrospection (i.e. within an hour or so of the mental event) and delayed retrospection (say, up to a week or more after the event). Finally, there is self-revelation, typically referred to as thinkaloud, which is characterized by the stream-of-consciousness disclosure of thought processes while the information is being heard and processed. In terms of what verbal report might be used for in this situation, it could be to check for any reactive effects of the measure and/or of the data collection procedures. In other words, it can be used both to get a sense of the validity of the measure (i.e. whether it is measuring what it purports to measure) and also whether it is doing so reliably (i.e. whether the same or similar results would be found if the measure is used again). Verbal report can also be used to get a better sense of how aware the respondents are of the issues involved in the given situation, since the level of awareness is usually not detectable just by analyzing the responses themselves (Ishihara, 2014). For example, respondents who are acutely aware of the formality of a situation may make an extra effort to be appropriately polite. In addition, verbal report can be used to learn about response strategies – the depth and breadth of the respondents’ strategy repertoire (Ishihara, 2009a). In other words, verbal report can be used to investigate the extent to which responses reflect reasoned pragmatic behavior, based on perceived or actual sociocultural norms. For instance, a more refi ned strategy repertoire may include strategies for dealing with the opposite sex in the target language and culture. If the respondents opt out of doing or saying what would be expected socioculturally, verbal report can help in determining the reasons for this choice (Hudson et al., 1995; Ishihara, 2009a). Finally, verbal report can also be used to fi nd out who the respondents modeled their response after, if such is the case: an NS of the TL or culture, a highly competent NNS or some other NNS. 10.3.1.9 Role-play tasks

Role play has been found to be an effective means for collecting pragmatics data (e.g. Félix-Brasdefer, 2003, 2007, 2010; Woodfield, 2012). Researchers are able to have respondents demonstrate what they would be

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likely to say or do in a given situation. Concerns about role play have included how carefully the respondents are following the instructions that they are given, their acting ability, and their willingness to perform as they would in real life or to give an honest appraisal of how they perceive the behavior of others. If the purpose is to get a truly accurate sense of what language might look like when the circumstances are varied, then perhaps respondents should be given stage cues. For example, respondents could be asked to respond in a friendly, annoyed, angry or compassionate way. In addition, NT and NNT respondents could be asked to role play their reaction to a serious infraction requiring a severe or intense response. Finally, they could be told to respond in a cooperative, resistant, facetious or rude manner. The intention of these stage directions would be to collect types of data that otherwise would not emerge. It would be especially interesting to see, for example, the relative ease with which both NTs and NNTs are able to add attitude, tone and mood to their verbal and nonverbal behavior. NTs may not pay much attention to how they do it until asked to, and NNTs are not usually taught these behaviors in language class and may find it difficult to acquire them on their own (e.g. adding expletives to their own discourse; see Daly et al., 2004). Giving role-play instructions would thus add another element to investigate, namely, the impact of instructions on performance. For instance, data could be collected on what happens when the teachers are asked to be stern in dealing with a student’s behavior (e.g. when the student is very late to class or did not complete a crucial homework assignment). It may be a learning experience not only for NNTs, but also for NTs to pay attention to just how sternness is conveyed in Spanish. There are reasons why instructing respondents in how to respond to role plays has not been common practice among researchers. An obvious reason would be that giving cues as to how to perform would distort the otherwise naturalistic response. But, especially if the intent is to focus on types of variation and to get a feeling for the pragmatic range available to given respondents, then perhaps this somewhat bold departure from the status quo of pragmatics research might make sense – if only on an experimental basis. 10.3.1.10 Discourse completion tasks

Over the years the DCT format has been utilized by many researchers because of its relative ease of construction, the ease with which it can be administered to large samples at the same time, and the relative ease with which the results can be analyzed and compared to those of others using the same or similar DCT situations. In addition, if researchers just want a rough sense of whether respondents have familiarity with, say, an idealized speech act interaction in terms of what is basic to the interaction, then the DCT fulfi lls expectations. Yet DCTs have also been criticized for not

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being sufficiently authentic. The written format gives participants extra time to plan what they would like to say, unlike in an actual situation where they must react right away (Takahashi & Beebe, 1987; Yamagashira, 2001). Whereas planning time is available in pragmatic interactions involving asynchronous communicative activities such as email, what is then unavailable to the researcher are face-to-face aspects of pragmatic knowledge that can be decoded through unplanned discourse and gestures (Taguchi, 2008b: 445). Furthermore, DCTs employ traditional writing formats that do not include the intonation and tone markers (e.g. capital letters, excessive exclamation points and vowel repetitions) that have evolved in internet-based communication to link it to more mainstream oral behavior. In addition, whereas M-C tasks and DCTs could measure the effect of input and receptive knowledge, it is likely that only role plays and other forms of language production can actually measure those aspects of pragmatic knowledge that come to the fore when learners are called upon to perform their knowledge (Grabowski, 2009; Tsutagawa, 2012). Needless to say, even oral role plays are not necessarily problem-free. In oral DCTs or post hoc interviews, for instance, participants may still provide what they believe is expected of them (Shimizu, 2009; Taguchi, 2011), rather than behaving as they normally would if they were not having their pragmatic performance measured and assessed by an external researcher. In addition, the acting ability of the individual may come into play, as well as any emotional issues tied to one’s performance history. Ultimately, some tasks really would benefit from the kinds of instructions and stage directions that accompany scripts for plays, namely, just how the given speech act or other pragmatic material is to be delivered (e.g. lovingly, happily, angrily, happily, teasingly, cynically or sarcastically). Given that traditional DCTs have been subject to criticism over the years (Félix-Brasdefer, 2003), efforts have been made to improve on the design of such measures (see Félix-Brasdefer, 2010). One interesting question with regard to DCTs is the extent to which the respondents have the opportunity to select or even create the situations to which they are asked to respond. The experience of a practicing EFL teacher in Japan is that if respondents have ‘ownership’ over the situations, then their responses may be more reflective of likely behavior on their part (McLean, 2005). In keeping with the research focus that has been proposed here, the NT, NNT and student respondents could be asked to describe situations in language classroom interactions that have frustrated them for whatever reasons – initially as a pilot activity, followed by situations crafted on the basis of this feedback. In the earliest DCTs, there was usually a single rejoinder, rather than multiple ones. In multiple-rejoinder DCTs, the respondent is asked to give an appropriate initial response to the situation and then must supply at least two more responses that are prompted by the rejoinders provided for

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that situation (Cohen & Shively, 2002/2003). The use of multiple rejoinders represents an effort to make the DCTs more reflective of the conversational turn-taking of natural speech, the lack of which has constituted one criticism of written DCTs (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1993). The multiplerejoinder approach requires the speakers to shape their speech act behavior so that it conforms to a given situation. Although it is true that respondents are therefore not free to reply as they would like, Roever (2001) made the case that for researchers the interest is not necessarily in how respondents would prefer to reply, but rather in how they are able to reply when such constraints are imposed. Of course, verbal report could also be used to collect data on the reactions of the respondents to this type of measure. Another issue is whether to have the response format be oral or written. Fortunately, the research literature on the assessment of pragmatics has provided some answers. Research has been conducted to investigate the effects of respondents, raters, item functions, item types, item characteristics and interactions among these factors simultaneously on the dependability of four different L2 pragmatics tests (Brown & Ahn, 2011). The researchers found that it made a significant difference in how the participants were assessed relative to each other whether the measure was: (a) a written DCT; (b) an oral DCT; (c) a role play with an NS; or (d) a self-assessment of a video- or audio-recorded role play. As it turned out in this particular study, the self-assessment of role playing was the best measure statistically and the role-play task itself was also found to be successful. The researchers concluded that the use of two or more measures in a given study would enhance the overall dependability of the results. In the language classroom situation under discussion here, it may be helpful to have NTs, NNTs and students self-assess their performance in order to get a better sense of what they see as acceptable norms of behavior. Verbal report could assist in providing background information as to the reasons for the participants’ perceptions. 10.3.1.11 Judgment tasks

As researchers, we could make use of various judgment tasks. One was already mentioned in the last section, namely, self-assessment of role-play performance (see Ishihara, 2009a). In addition, there are variations on this approach. One is to have respondents self-assess projected performance, so instead of reacting to how well they think they have done, as captured by a video- or audio-recording, respondents could be asked to indicate how well they think they would handle the pragmatics in a given situation and perhaps why they think that. They could be asked to indicate the extent of their knowledge of what the appropriate pragmatic behavior would be in that situation under different conditions. Another approach would be to have their peers evaluate their performance. In judging the appropriateness of nonverbal behavior, there could be a video prompt and then M-C alternatives to get at comprehension of, say, culturally-specific

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gestures. Rating scales could also be used to understand a learners’ use of gestures, gaze and head nodding in an interview. In terms of teacher-student interactions, it would be possible to have Mexican immigrant NTs in the Southwest rate the Spanish-language performance of the NNTs in terms of the appropriateness of the pragmatics or in terms of how likely they would be to do it that same way and, if not, what they would do instead (both verbally and nonverbally). Student respondents could also be asked to assess the performance of the NNTs and of the NTs as well. A problem with asking peers to rate the acceptability of performance is having some benchmark against which to evaluate the appropriateness, especially when aside from individual variation, there is the likelihood that the norms for such behavior may be in flux in these kinds of intercultural situations. Another way to conduct peer rating is by using an M-C DCT format. In that way, respondents are given, say, four possible utterances and they must rate them in terms of their appropriateness for that situation. This format could be combined with a multiple-rejoinder approach, but rather than the respondent producing the rejoinders, the task could call instead for having the respondents judge the most appropriate from a series of alternatives. Another type of task would be that of judging the appropriateness of speech styles. The case has been made that this judgment is an important type of pragmatics activity because it deals with the totality of discourse and numerous aspects of pragmatics at the same time (Roever, 2010). The example is given of a study involving recordings of simulated self-introductions from three applicants for a job as a bilingual Japanese-English clerk at a clothing store in Honolulu, in which subjects had to judge which applicant would be most suitable for the position (Cook, 2001). The three monologues differed as to the degree of appropriateness of the speech style, given the job for which the candidates were applying. One applicant employed a clearly inappropriate speech style, inconsistently using polite forms and overusing plain forms, not hedging appropriately, and underutilizing fi xed expressions and honorifics. This applicant also used the Japanese emphatic fi nal particle yo and contracted verb forms, all of which conveyed an impression of casual speech without the humility and formality required by Japanese cultural norms for interactions between lower- and higher-power interlocutors in a job interview situation. The other two applicants displayed a more appropriate speech style and followed cultural norms in not asserting their qualifications for the position as directly and on-record as the fi rst applicant. It is possible to see how the speech styles approach could be used effectively in the TL classroom context. Respondents could be shown, say, three different approaches by teachers to greeting students and to giving students feedback on their pragmatic performance, and then be requested to rate the effectiveness of the interaction involving each of these approaches.

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10.4 Approaches to Data Analysis

While employing appropriate means to collect the data from NT, NNT and student interactions is an important fi rst step in the research process, the follow-up step of making sense of the data is crucial, especially if the data are from a variety of different sources. Here it can be imperative to have a clear notion of just what kind of data are being sought. Presumably, the main concern in this case would be to see the ways that NTs and NNTs use pragmatics in their L2 or FL classrooms, and their handling of the teaching of pragmatics in the various contexts in the US Southwest and in Mexico. In addition, there would be a concern to weave in the perceptions of the students about these issues. The task would include the analysis of data regarding the norms for pragmatic performance in Spanish L2 classrooms in Mexico and in Spanish FL classrooms in the US Southwest in its various iterations: an NT, an NNT or a Mexican-American teacher who may be a heritage user of Spanish, on a continuum from more NT-like to more NNT-like in abilities. The focus of data analysis is on identifying adherence to and deviation from TL norms for pragmatic behavior. The role of the applied linguistics researcher is to provide a description of the extent to which teacher’s language and cultural behavior approximates the pragmatic norms or expectations of students. It is for the players involved to determine which behaviors are ultimately appropriate for these intercultural interactions, where behavior not only varies but may also be in flux. How should the data be analyzed? Figure 10.2 provides a listing of points to consider in determining how to conduct the analysis of the data that have been collected.

10.4.1 Issues of general concern

The data analysis would most likely benefit both from general, holistic ratings, as well as from multitrait ratings that evaluate, for instance, the vocabulary and grammar in the service of pragmatics. But since the focus is on teacher-student interactions, there would also be interest in the nature of the discourse – that is, the actual words and phrases used. In addition, we would want to look at the appropriateness of the speech styles, such as with regard to the directness of the language and the politeness levels. Thus, the analysis would go beyond just establishing the level of perceived politeness (e.g. the respondent as student referring to the teacher and vice versa), and would entail a fine-tuned analysis of just what was or was not polite about the language in the eyes of the interlocutors. Of course, if the teachers are annoyed by some student behavior, they may purposely want to show their annoyance, and not be overly polite or obsequious. In going through the various speech-act measures, the analysis could look at the extent to which the desired speech acts or other pragmatic

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10.4.1 Issues of general concern the service or pragmatics, as well as appropriateness of directness and politeness levels - Extent to which performance of the desired speech act or other pragmatic behavior was elicited - In receptive tasks, degree of perception of comprehension of the speech act or other pragmatic behavior - In productive tasks, ability to carry out the functions associated with the speech act – e.g. the appropriate quantity of speech or writing (e.g. verbosity vs. terseness) for the medium, sociopragmatically acceptable language forms given the expected level of directness, formality, politeness, and intensity (depending on the severity of the situation) - In role plays, checking for the acting ability of the participants - Extent to which there is clarity as to criteria for what is considered normative pragmatic behavior for the particular interaction within the given context.

10.4.2 Data analysis in the language ability areas Verbal report: - To understand the thinking behind the judgments made by the data analysis

Reading - Reading a series of messages and perceiving the pragmatic functions involved (e.g. humor, sarcasm, or compassion) Writing - Having to write a series of messages conveying one or another function (e.g. anger, joy, or skepticism) Listening - Listening for the pragmatic functions (e.g. truth value, tentativeness, or enthusiasm). - Beyond listening to gestures, facial expressions, and the use of silence Speaking - Delivering oral messages that conform to the norms for appropriate pragmatic behavior (e.g. praising or criticizing). - Appropriate pragmatic tone for the situation (e.g. consternation).

Figure 10.2 Data analysis

behavior are actually present in the data and the extent to which the performance of these pragmatic behaviors is appropriate in comparison to the norms for acceptable behavior within the given TL speech community. An added challenge would be to identify the norms for that speech community, especially if the given speech community is linguistically and culturally in flux, as is most likely the case for the Hispanic speech community in the US Southwest. In comprehension tasks, it could also be part of the analysis to establish the extent to which respondents perceive the pragmatic behavior as being appropriate in terms of its function in the given interaction. For example, if the teacher makes a humorous comment about a problematic student’s tardiness, does the student understand the nature of the humor (e.g. a bit facetious) and respond appropriately (if a response is deemed necessary)? In productive tasks, there would be far more to analyze: the ability of the respondents to carry out the discourse functions associated with the speech act (e.g. the appropriate quantity of speech or writing [e.g. verbosity vs. terseness]); the sociopragmatic acceptability of the speechact-specific strategies; and the pragmalinguistic acceptability of the language forms given the expected level of directness, formality, politeness and intensity (depending on the severity of the situation). In role plays, checking for the acting ability of the participants may be an important part of the data analysis, but it would need to be operationalized, which can be problematic to do (Hudson et al., 1995).

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Going into the study, there may not be clarity as to what is acceptable pragmatic behavior. For this reason, it is crucial to do pilot work in order to establish criteria for what is considered normative pragmatic behavior for the particular interaction within the given context. It is likely that the study itself would contribute to a description of what is considered normative pragmatic behavior for teacher-student interactions in the classroom settings under study. It may also be helpful to collect verbal report data from the data analysts while they are in the process of conducting their data analysis in order to understand better the thinking behind the judgments that they make about the data at the very moment that they are making them. There are usually critical moments when the data analysts are unsure of how to deal with one kind of data or another. Unless information about moments of indecision is recorded systematically, it tends to be lost. In other words, it is usually difficult later on to reconstruct the rationale at a given moment for making certain decisions with regard to data analysis. Such data may provide crucial insights regarding the decision-making process. Such data, therefore, can have an important bearing on interpreting the results of the study. The handling of these moments of indecision can have a direct impact on both the reliability and the validity of the study. 10.4.2 Data analysis in the language ability areas

At times NTs may have some difficulty rating pragmatic appropriateness in their students’ performance. Depending on an NNTs’ grasp of the TL pragmatics in the given situations, it can be even more of a challenge for them. Therefore, let us now take a brief look at how difficulties in dealing with the pragmatics of the TL (both in pragmatic performance, in teaching about it and in assessing it) could manifest themselves across the language abilities, especially for those NNTs at an intermediate proficiency level and even beyond. Seemingly simple reading tasks can pose difficulties both for NNTs and for their students, such as reading a series of messages and perceiving the pragmatic functions involved (e.g. humor, sarcasm or compassion). The students may assume that a message is serious when in reality it was written facetiously, perhaps to tease them or perhaps it was purposely meant to be snide. The question is whether the students pick up on these cues. In student-teacher interactions, it could be a matter of how moods and attitudes are conveyed between the two. If the communication is at all indirect, then the students may not understand. In some cases, NNTs may not perceive the pragmatic tone (e.g. sarcasm) of a text that they are teaching, in cases where NTs would be likely to do so. It would be the role of the data analyst to identify and evaluate reading comprehension problems arising from gaps in pragmatic knowledge.

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NNSs, whether teachers or students, may have even more difficulty writing messages intended to convey one or another function (e.g. anger, joy or skepticism). To do so would entail having control over sometimes subtle innuendos associated with, for instance, certain adjectives. Perhaps an NNT wants to use an email message to reassure students regarding the oral presentation that they gave in class, but the message instead conveys distance, disinterest and lack of concern without that being the intent. This is one reason for the rise in the use of emoticons. They at least serve to indicate to some extent the writer’s mood to the reader of the message ). Again, data analysis sensitive to pragmatics would want to ( include evaluation of the pragmatic accuracy of written material. Perceiving the pragmatic function of an oral message (e.g. its truth value, its level of tentativeness or the level of enthusiasm with which it is delivered) is not necessarily an easy task. NNSs and some NSs as well may fail to notice certain clues to pragmatic meaning that are subtly transmitted through tone of voice, or may also be indicated through gestures, facial expressions or simply the use of silence (see Gregersen & MacIntyre, 2017). Some of these nonverbal cues are particular to a given subculture. Others are more generally used in the speech community but not easily acquired by NNSs. It may require a pragmatically aware NS pointing them out for an NNS even to notice them at all. Whereas the NNTs in this focal study would certainly know how to use a reassuring tone in their L1 or dominant language, would this also be the case when using Spanish as an FL? This area of listening also poses problems for those analyzing the data; for instance, whether the pragmatic signals are given in an unmistakable manner and then whether they are picked up by the listener(s). Delivering oral messages that conform to the norms for appropriate pragmatic behavior in some ways is even more taxing than writing them (e.g. praising or criticizing). Using appropriate pragmatic tone for the situation is not necessarily easy to do (e.g. consternation). Actors may do a number of takes on a scene before the director deems it to be acceptable for performance purposes, yet an NNT may be called on to deliver a stern message or a compassionate one without so much as a moment’s rehearsal. In addition, it is not an easy task for data analysts then to evaluate how effectively messages are delivered pragmatically, especially when the messages may have a high-stakes value. 10.5 Discussion and Conclusions

This chapter focused on possible options for researching interactions within intercultural pragmatics, especially when there is variation due to the language and culture being in flux. The intention was to encourage the use of multiple methods for looking at truly intercultural situations where L1, L2 and FL pragmatics meet and where there is potential

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variation in the factors that come into play in the interaction. We looked at a situation in the sphere of interculturality where language and culture may come into confl ict – that of NT and NNT interactions with students in L2 and FL classroom contexts. The aim of this chapter was to highlight the contributions to the investigation that differing approaches to research and different measures might make in elucidating the dynamic variations that arise. Given the number of variables involved and the range of variation within them, an exploratory study may need to devote a fair amount of time to investigating what constitutes ‘appropriateness’ in such intercultural situations – namely, in contact situations in which two cultures are not separate from one another, but rather have adopted each other’s pragmatics and cultural patterns to a greater or lesser degree. If an Anglo-American NNT uses Spanish language but with mainstream US pragmatics in terms of interactions with students, how will this be received by the students? Whereas some of them might feel they are missing out on exposure to FL pragmatics, others may be more comfortable when the teacher abides by the norms of the students’ L1 culture (e.g. in terms of topics talked about in class and how they are broached). In other words, for some learners might there not be something reassuring about the NNTs’ adherence to the local community’s pragmatic norms? Needless to say, there are also variations in personality across NNTs, so this variable needs to be accounted for as well. The product of such research could be the determination that some form of instructional intervention would be advisable, such as tips about TL pragmatics for NNTs (say, in the form of electronic or hardcopy pamphlets). It is likely that in the NNTs’ own language instruction, there was only limited attention to pragmatics and, if so, it probably reflected a cross-cultural approach (e.g. ‘us’ compared to ‘them’), rather than the more complex intercultural variety. For classes taught in the Southwest, there are mainstream attitudes about what ‘being on time to class’ means. In a given Mexico town there may be a different set of norms for what is considered acceptable behavior. Just recently I had a fi rst-hand experience of a similar kind when I gave a talk at a university in south-central Cuba. The talk was scheduled for 9 am, but it started more than 20 minutes late because the participants needed to arrive by bus and there was no certainty as to how long this would take. Most students could not afford to buy bicycles or to come by car, so consequently the buses were overcrowded. The burden was clearly on me to wait patiently before starting and to accommodate to latecomers without expecting them to apologize for their tardiness. The main issue would be to acknowledge that these interactions are taking place within a sphere of interculturality and that there is inevitable variation in how these interactions play themselves out, especially given

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the globalization that is taking place throughout the world. Finally, further research could look at the extent to which the findings from this study could apply to other varieties of Spanish. Notes (1) See: http://www.lllf.uam.es/coremah/ (accessed 6 November 2017). (2) See: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp (accessed 27 December 2017).

11 Conclusions

This book has dealt with intercultural pragmatics and has focused on how both NNTs and their NT colleagues may be able to enhance their classroom instruction regarding TL pragmatics. While the ultimate goal is to improve the teaching of pragmatics for the sake of learners, who gain to benefit from insights as to how to be pragmatically appropriate in their TL of choice, teachers and teacher educators are intended to be the primary users of the material presented in the book. The aim has been to provide ideas for how to make pragmatics as accessible as possible to learners. As the numerous examples in the book would suggest (such as concerning the pragmatic import of fi lling pauses or not in Japanese), the real challenge for learners is that pragmatic behavior can be very complex. Therefore, the issue is how to simplify this complexity enough so that language learners do not get discouraged and are able to gain facility with at least some of the more crucial pragmatic behaviors, especially the ones that could readily lead to pragmatic failure if not performed appropriately. That is why I personally see advantages in having learners focus on idealized pragmatic behaviors, rather than those found in corpora which may be fully authentic but also highly complex. In other words, I am in favor of learnable pragmatics. The first aim of Chapter 2 was to problematize the defi nition of pragmatics. The terms sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics were seen to help in conceptualizing the different types of norms that learners need to grapple with in gaining control over TL pragmatics. Nonetheless, it was pointed out that what may appear to be sociopragmatic failure may actually be pragmalinguistic failure – that the learner had every intention of abiding by the norms, but perhaps overgeneralized the use of some language form incorrectly to a context where it is not appropriate. The chapter went on to examine in depth three factors that contribute to the development of pragmatic ability. The fi rst factor was the role that the L2 and FL environments actually play in the development of learners’ TL pragmatic ability, highlighting the possibility that individual factors may offset the advantages that learners have by being in the L2 context while they are learning. The second factor was the role of pragmatic transfer, particularly as it appears in FL as opposed to L2 contexts. Just as in the early days of contrastive analysis back in the 1980s, it may well 264

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be that for numerous reasons the predicted cases of negative transfer (especially in FL contexts) do not appear, very possibly because learners are especially mindful of the need to avoid making such transfers from their L1 or dominant language. The third factor was the role of motivation in the development of pragmatic ability. The literature review simply underscored the complexity of this variable, again leaving the door open for highly motivated learners to achieve results against supposedly insurmountable odds. While L2 contexts generally afford more opportunities for pragmatic development than FL settings, the dynamic relationships among context, pragmatic transfer and motivation all indicate that individual differences have a greater role to play than just exposure in the TL community. Thus, theory, research and, most importantly, language pedagogy must evolve to address the complexity and difficulty of developing and assessing pragmatic ability. Chapter 3 made an effort to treat any comparison between NTs and NNTs carefully, given the real danger in making unwarranted generalizations about a particular teacher group. For this reason, the important thing is to stay grounded in the real issue at stake, namely, the outcome for learners in the language classroom. If the goal is that they improve their understanding of pragmatic norms in the target speech community – whether they be the pragmatics for some local variety of the language or mainstream pragmatics – then the question could be asked as to who the most effective teacher would be. And the answer might be a team-teaching effort between an NT and an NNT, which was what I had in my prep school instruction in French. Perhaps this approach provides the best of all possible worlds. It certainly enhanced my learning of HS French, a language that I have used effectively both personally and professionally throughout my lifetime. It is difficult to say off hand whether NTs or NNTs have an advantage in handling pragmatics in TL instruction since it depends on a host of factors, some potentially tending to favor the NTs and some potentially favoring the NNTs. Therefore, NTs and NNTs alike who really want to enhance their teaching of pragmatics may wish to take action in order to compensate for possible gaps in their knowledge. Teacher awareness as to issues regarding TL pragmatics can go a long way toward compensating for any such gaps. For instance, NTs may wish to take a closer look at the interface between the grammar that they are teaching and its role in pragmatics, and NNTs may wish to enhance their knowledge of certain speech acts like criticizing, as well as improving their understanding of how teasing and sarcasm work in the TL. The international survey described in Chapter 4, dealing with the ways in which NTs and NNTs compare with regard to their handling of pragmatics in TL instruction, yielded numerous insights, many of which were incorporated into materials presented in Chapters 5 and 6. The 30 NTs and 83 NNTs who responded to the survey not only represented

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many different L1s and TLs, but also many different regions of the world. The NNTs responding to the survey indicated feeling less knowledgeable about the teaching of TL pragmatics and somewhat less comfortable at it as well. NTs reported that they were more likely to teach about how to criticize and how to be sarcastic. They also indicated greater use of digital media and a greater willingness to use their students as data gatherers in cases where they were unsure of some issue in pragmatics rather than relying on their intuition. Perhaps the most valuable part of the survey was the respondents’ listing of activities that could be used to teach TL activities both in FL and L2 situations. Furthermore, survey responses included ideas for motivating learners to want to study TL pragmatics, as well as a listing of areas in pragmatics about which teachers would like more information based on both research and practice. Chapter 5 dealt with the topic of raising awareness about pragmatics. It also looked at the value of including pragmatics as a module in its own right in teacher development programs. It noted that a challenging issue is that of obtaining appropriate pragmatics materials. It raised the issue of improving learners’ understanding of teacher talk about pragmatics. Whereas with DVDs or streamed movies, the viewer has the advantage of subtitles and can replay segments, this is not the case with live interactions, where it may be awkward for students to ask their teachers to repeat what they just said. The chapter provided some suggestions for how to ensure better comprehension of teacher talk. The real challenge is how to handle metatalk about pragmatics, including the issue of whether to provide it in the L1 of the students or, if possible, in the TL. The chapter also considered the issue of pragmatics in SA and just how ‘unsheltered’ this experience might seem for students, who perhaps envisioned that the SA environment would be just as supportive as the TL classroom had been. The chapter also considered teacher efforts to get learners to relate to NS norms. In many cases. it may be that the teacher will have to point out to the students just what normative behavior entails because left to their own devices, the students will not discover this easily. Then, once the students have an idea of L1-TL pragmatic differences, as well as what it would take to be more nativelike in, say, their use of pragmalinguistic forms, the teacher could serve as a provider of possible ways for students to behave appropriately, given their level of proficiency and their specific language needs. It may also be valuable to have teachers provide insights as to the sociopragmatically appropriate situations in which to use these forms (e.g. knowing when, in fact, an apology is called for). And if the teacher is not sure of the appropriate pragmatic behavior for a given situation – based on the relative ages and status of the interlocutors, their gender and their work relationship (if relevant) – this may be a good opportunity for data gathering on the part of the students. It would seem to me that there is still much work to do to prepare SA-bound students for the pragmatics of the numerous situations that

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they will encounter. Teachers could serve to encourage students not to spend their time in a cocoon-like bubble where the L1 is spoken regularly and where adherence to the L1 culture is the norm. This might entail coaching the students with regard to matters such NS tone, what to look for in terms of TL speakers’ behavior and what to be observant about, and how to interpret speech acts in the TL (such as cursing, teasing and so forth). A major aim of Chapter 6 was to consider ways to make TL pragmatics truly accessible to learners. It provided ideas for teachers on how to fi nd sources for pragmatics materials, how to analyze these materials, and how to showcase this material in classroom and out-of-class tasks. In order for key features of the material to become part of the learners’ repertoire, they would most likely need to be taught explicitly. Given that authentic pragmatics material (such as corpora) may be overwhelming for learners to deal with, teachers can play an invaluable role in helping their learners see the key elements of pragmatic behavior in any given situation. I would also like to reiterate the call for textbooks that expressly demonstrate how grammar and pragmatics interrelate, such as by illustrating the pragmatic functions that can be performed by grammar (e.g. subtle differences in the use of verb tenses) in communicative interactions. It is likely that such textbooks could serve as motivators for students who spend hours grappling with TL grammar without necessarily knowing which grammatical forms they should be using when for best pragmatic results. Another source of motivation would be to encourage learners to have regular sessions with tandem partners, in part to make sure that they have correctly interpreted how to make use of newly acquired insights about TL pragmatics. The aim of Chapter 7 was to look at the contributions which innovative technologies have made to the learning and performance of TL pragmatics, and to consider current and future ways in which to harness technology in the service of pragmatic development. The chapter started with a focus on corpora. Fortunately, publications have appeared that illustrate how corpora can be used most effectively in pragmatics instruction. The main concern would be that a given corpus actually reflects the language used by members of the TL community. If there is uncertainty on this score, then all the more reason to have learners gather their own data regarding, for example, the high-stakes speech acts that they wish to perform appropriately. The chapter also dealt with how to incorporate this material into what is taught and what is subsequently learned so that it shows up in interactions. The chapter also gave attention to social media sites for oral and written chat, and for video communication. Social media sites are increasingly providing opportunities for NNSs to try out their pragmatics and as motivators to get learners to use the language in meaningful ways. As social media plays an ever more commanding role

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in daily interaction, it is not surprising that elements of pragmatics are being studied in these interactions, such as the role of hashtags in tweets to signal tone. The chapter also looked at the possible role of telecollaboration in a world characterized increasingly by global communication. In addition, digital classroom interventions were discussed, including the recent addition of gaming, which includes both virtual and real spaces. Moreover, attention was given to the possible ways in which technology could contribute to the creative use of fi lms in the language classroom, as well as to the quality of the SA experience. Finally, a new CARLA pragmatics wiki was described as a venture aimed at creating a repository for pragmatics materials on numerous languages of the world. It is hoped that this book will serve to give readers ideas as to instructional materials that they themselves could post to this wiki. The main purpose of Chapter 8 was to illustrate how learner strategies can contribute both to the learning and performance of TL pragmatics. Especially since there is so much to learn with regard to pragmatics, the use of well-chosen strategies can make this effort more effective and enjoyable. Given that strategies for pragmatics are likely to have more of an impact if they are specific, the chapter offered guidelines and suggestions for how to make the pragmatics of both input and output more comprehensible. Then, multiple examples were given of situations in which strategies could have an important or even crucial role with both the input and output sides of what is comprehensible pragmatically. Since there are pragmatic features that most likely would benefit from explicit instruction if the intention is to have the learners achieve relative control over them within a reasonable amount to time, learners may need to be proactive and seek out special coaching in order to comprehend and produce TL pragmatics appropriately. Such coaching could deal with the basic speech act areas of requests, apologies and complaints, or with the even more challenging areas of criticizing, teasing and the use of sarcasm. Chapter 9 underscored the point that more can be done in the classroom to promote the assessment of pragmatics. The chapter provided examples of how to conduct assessment of pragmatics and suggestions as to what to look for in responses. Assessing pragmatic control in the classroom is undoubtedly a challenge. For one thing, some students are better test takers than others. Especially with regard to performance of pragmatics, some students are better at oral role play than others because they have acting skills. Lest we forget about scoring in our zeal to elicit pragmatics from students, the really challenging task is to assign scores and grades to pragmatic performance, taking into account matters such as the degree of imposition or severity of an infraction, the level of acquaintance of the interlocutors and the relative social status that is implied in the given situation. In addition, if we wish to cater to student agency, then we might consider scoring according to how effectively the respondents

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indicated their knowledge of the pragmatics involved in a given situation, rather than how they actually responded. It was also indicated in Chapter 9 that the process of assessing pragmatic ability offers numerous opportunities for research both on the areas of pragmatics that are most teachable in the TL classroom and on strategies for conducting classroom assessment in these areas. It also offers researchers an opportunity to look at different kinds of pragmatics probes, from those which consider TL pragmatics features in a more integrated fashion as compared to those which look at given features on their own. In addition, the field of pragmatics can benefit from studies into how to achieve greater interrater agreement and into the best kinds of statistics for classroom use. Chapter 10 focused on possible options for researching interactions within intercultural pragmatics, especially when there is variation owing to the language and culture being in flux. The intention was to encourage the use of multiple methods for looking at situations where L1, L2 and FL pragmatics meet, and where there is potential variation in the factors that come into play in the interaction. The situation selected was that of NT and NNT interactions with learners of Spanish in L2 and FL classroom contexts. The chapter considered a host of research tools that could be used to investigate this issue. Therefore, instead of conducting survey research such as reported on in Chapter 4, this chapter provided suggestions for how to conduct research that would entail actual observation, all the while pointing out the various decisions to be made in how to conduct such research, as well as the pluses and minuses of the different approaches. Reiterating what was said at the outset, what prompted the writing of this book was a concern to bring out into the open an issue that in some cases has been downplayed or even ignored, namely, the role that NS control of a language might have in dealing with pragmatics. My sense is that, as with anything, it is important to avoid being simplistic. As with any issue, the reality can be most complex. The concern in this volume has been not to discredit any of the crucial players, but rather to support all of them in producing the most successful results for learners. There is no question that pragmatics has a crucial role in TL performance. The concern has been how to best utilize the instructional staff to give proper attention to that role. This book has provided numerous suggestions for how to make that a reality.

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Author Index

Abdul-Rashid, 281 Abrams, 165–166, 270 Adeh, 283 Adolphs, 282 Ahn, 272 Aijmer, 282 Akikawa, 57, 77, 270 Alcón Soler, 272, 285 Alemi, 270 Alemi & Khanlarzadeh, 234 Alemi & Rezanejad, 233 Arrufat-Marques, 283 Aslan, vii, 57, 60, 63, 78–80, 99, 109, 270 Asmari, 14, 58, 270 Atkinson, 68, 278

Bouton, 51, 270–271, 285 Bowles, 253, 272, 283 Boxer, 27, 271–272, 281 Boxer & Pickering, 51 Brady, 270 Braine, 272 Brecht, 278 Brosh, 66, 272 Brown & Ahn, 242, 256 Brown & Levinson, 252 Bruthiaux, 278 Canagarajah, 180, 272 Chapelle, 272, 283 Chen, 160–161, 272 Cheng, 275, 279 Cheung, 272 Cheung & Braine, 67 Chuang, 272 Chuang & Hsieh, 72 Chun, 60, 272 Cohen, 5–6, 24, 29, 32, 51, 104, 136–138, 140, 150, 153, 166–167, 180, 184, 186, 191, 204–205, 210, 240, 253, 271–273, 275, 277, 280–281, 283–284 Cohen & Ishihara, 100, 169–170 Cohen & Olshtain, 104 Cohen & Pinilla-Herrera, 186 Cohen & Shively, 116, 195, 215, 256 Cohen & Weaver, 206 Collins, 282 Connor, 272 Consolo, 273 Consolo & Furtoso, 146 Cook, 257, 272, 274, 279, 282 Coombe, 274 Corrizzato, 285 Coyle, 284

Bai, 108, 270 Bardovi-Harlig, vii, 7–9, 42–46, 48, 111, 127–129, 155, 173, 213, 270–271, 273–276, 278–280, 282–283, 285 Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei, 33, 52, 106 Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 225, 256 Barraja-Rohan, 275 Barron, 37, 49, 52–55, 147, 226, 271, 282 Bartoshesky, 276 Beebe, 36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 271, 284 Beebe & Cummings, 223 Beebe & Waring, 120, 148 Belcher, 272 Bell, 150, 271 Belz, 126, 155–156, 271, 285 Belz & Vyatkina, 161 Bhatia, 279 Bianchi, 275, 279 Björkman, 113, 271 Blake, 189, 192 Blattner, 271 Blattner & Fiori, 157–158 Blum-Kulka, 282

287

288

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Crane, 276 Cummings, 271 Cunningham, 41, 274 Dabbagh, 284 Dabbagh , 213 Dahl, 278 Daurio, 283 Davidson, 274, 278 Davies, 1, 9, 274 Davoudi, 281 Dervin, 279 Detmer, 277 Dewaele, 19–20, 274 Dewey, 14, 274–275, 278 Diao, 274 Diao & Trentman, 30 DiBartolomeo, 115, 274 Dörnyei, 42–46, 271 Doughty, 283 Dunken, 275 Dykstra, 105, 274 Edmondson, 277 Eggington, 278 Elias, 274 Emert, 273 Eslami, vii, 25, 274 Eslami & Mirzaei, 229 Eslami-Rasekh, 25, 274 Ezgi, 78, 99 Fadiman, 243, 274 Fahim, 276 Farrar, 274 Fatahi, 274 Félix-Brasdefer, vii, 51, 152, 196, 241–242, 250, 252–253, 255, 270–271, 273–276, 278–280, 282–283, 285 Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen, 152 Félix-Brasdefer & Hasler-Barker, 115–116 Felix-Brasdefer & Koike, 4 Fernández, 19, 34, 275 Fernández-Amaya, 17, 275 Fernández Guerra, 277 Filipi, 275 Filipi & Barraja-Rohan, 208 Fiori, 271 Flores-Salgado, 34, 275 Flottum, 280

Foote, 283 Fraser, 139, 275 Freed, 115, 275 Frodesen, 271 Fukuya, 275 Fukuya & Martínez-Flor, 25 Furniss, 155–156, 275 Furtoso, 273 Gabriele Kasper, 169 Al-Gahtani, 270 Al-Gahtani & Roever, 222 Galloway, 12, 15, 275 Garcia, 252, 275, 282 García, 60, 180, 275 García & Placencia, 172 Gauci, 109, 215, 275 Gesuato, 32, 104, 129, 275–276, 279 Ghobadi, 276 Ghobadi & Fahim, 25 Giri, 279 Giroux, 274 Godwin-Jones, 166, 276 Goertler, 166, 276 Gomez-Laich, 209, 276, 283 Gómez-Morón, 275 Gonzales, 164, 276 Grabe, 278 Grabowski, 26, 76, 231, 255, 276 Gregersen, 197, 276 Gregersen & McIntyre, 197, 261 Grice, 83 Griffiths, 284 Gumperz, 280 Haidy, 191 Hamilton, 27, 276 Hartford, 271 Harumi, 15, 276 Hasler-Barker, 25, 275–276 Haugh, 18, 276 Herman, 226 Hernández-López, 275 Hijirida, 272 Hinkel, 273, 278 Hiranoi, 130, 153, 276 Hoff, 273 Hoffman, 244, 276 Holden, 276 Holden & Sykes, 145, 164 Holmes, 197, 274, 281

Author Index

Holten, 271 Hood, 277 House & Kasper, 117 Hsieh, 272 Hudson, 42, 230–231, 250, 253, 259, 277, 285 Ide, 72, 277 Ishihara, vii, 12, 57, 62–63, 105, 110, 124, 127, 133, 150, 158, 170, 192, 217, 228, 253, 256, 273, 277, 284–285 Ishihara & Cohen, 35, 38, 52, 54, 98, 105, 117, 140, 155, 168, 170, 200–201 Ishihara & Paller , 124 Isoda, 283 Iverson, 220–221 Janicki, 52, 123, 277 Jenkins, 13, 277–278 Jeon, 278 Jeon & Kaya, 24 Jian, 18–20, 278 Johnson, 66, 278 Jones, 134 Jordan, 34, 122 Jucker, 275 Judd, 280, 282 Jung, 274 Kachru, 285 Kamhi-Stein, 71, 76, 278 Kamhi-Stein & Mahboob, 77 Kao, 273, 281 Kaplan, Robert B., 278 Kappler, 280 Kasper, 48, 51, 53, 105, 217, 222, 231, 250, 274, 276–278, 280–282, 284 Kasper & Dahl, 222–223 Kasper & Rose, 27, 51, 76, 121 Kaya, 278 Kayoko, 18 Kecskes, 11, 243, 278 Kempchinsky, 274 Khanlarzadeh, 270 Khavari, 281 Kidd, 15, 60, 102, 117–118, 249, 252, 278 Kinginger, 34, 45–46, 278 Kirkpatrick, 12–13, 278 Klaus Schroeder, 226 Kleyn, 282 Kobayashi, 14, 278

289

Koike, 42, 275, 279, 285 Kramer, 131 Kramsch, 242, 245, 279 Krashen, 182, 206, 279 Lam, 244, 279 Lam & Rosario-Ramos, 245 Lasagabaster, 279 Lasagabaster & Sierra, 67 Lassegard, 280 Leich, 122 Levinson, 272, 280 Li, 180, 275, 283 Lidstone, 285 Limberg, 103, 108, 209, 279 Lin, 273, 281 Liu, 279 Liu & Dervin, 10 LoCastro, 4, 279 Macaro, 284 Madden, 279 Madrid, 90, 279, 285 Madrid & Pérez Cañado, 67 Mahboob, 58, 277–280 Maíz-Arévalo, 17, 214, 279 Malden, 280 Marlina, 279 Marlina & Giri, 26, 58, 117 Marlise, 153 Márquez Reiter, 210, 279 Márquez Reiter & Placencia, 172 Martínez-Flor, 25, 272, 274–275, 277, 279, 285 Martínez Sánchez, 209, 279 Masaeed, 270 Masaeed & Waugh, 189 Masuhara, 273 Matos, 251 Matsuda, 26–27, 58, 280 Mauranen, 113, 280 McCarthy, 282 McIntyre, 197, 276 McKinley, 50, 241, 280 McLean, 227, 255, 280 McNamara, 280 McNamara & Roever, 213 Mejias-Borrero, 275 Menke, 283 Merced, 243 Mills, 285

290

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

Mirzaei, 274 Mossman, 128, 271 Mugford, 25, 74, 135, 280 Mullock, 66, 70, 75, 280 Nabuko, 63–64 Naoko Taguchi, vii Nelson, 68–69 Neu, 271 Newton, 110, 274, 281 Nguyen, 25, 280 Niezgoda, 43–45, 280 Niezgoda & Roever, 33, 43, 46, 50 Nishizawa, 126, 284 Norazman, 281 Norris, 278 Ochs, 35, 280 Ohashi, 72, 280 Ohta, 284 O’Keeffe, 282 Olshtain, vii, 104, 169, 273, 280 Olshtain & Cohen, 6, 104 Omar, 270, 274, 278, 285 Omundson, 283 Ortega, 278 O’Sullivan, 274 Oxford, 272, 277–279, 281, 283–285 Padilla-Cruz, 275 Paige, 124, 166, 273, 280 Paller, 110, 124, 127, 133, 277 Pasfield-Neofitou, 159, 281 Pérez Cañado, 279 Perpiñán, 283 Peterson, 139 Pfeiffer, Michelle, 131 Pham, 280 Pickering, 272 Piñeros, 274 Pinilla-Herrera, 273 Pitzl, 13–15, 281 Placencia, 90, 210, 275, 279 Rafieyan, 47, 50, 54, 161–162, 281 Ramanathan, 278 Ramezanzadeh, 281 Ramírez Gómez, 182, 281 Reed, 250, 281 Relinque-Barranca, 275 Ren, 108, 281

Reza Adel, 207, 281 Rezanejad, 270 Riddiford, 110, 281 Riddiford & Holmes, 24 Riemer, 277 Ritchie, 279 Roever, vii, 43–45, 74, 107, 152, 213, 217, 231, 233, 240, 249, 256–257, 270, 280–281, 283 Rosario-Ramos, 244, 279 Rosenstein, 273 Ross, 130, 276, 281 Rossner, 27, 281 Rühlemann, 155, 282 Rühlemann & Aijmer, 155 Russell, 174, 282 Russell & Vásquez, 173–174 Ryan, 68 Sato, 33 Sauro, 283–284 Savić, 102, 282 Schauer, 33, 44–46, 282 Schauer & Adolphs, 250 Schmidt, 37–38, 43, 47, 76, 206, 282 Schneider, 151, 226, 282 Schneider & Barron, 172 Schröder, 282 Schröder & Schneider, 195 Schumann, 33, 282 Scott, 158–159, 274, 282 Segalowitz, 275 Seidlhofer, 14, 282 Seltzer, 282 Seltzer & Collins, 191 Shadi, 274 Sharafi-Nejad, 281 Sharifian, 278 Sharpless, 285 Shibamoto-Smith, 282 Shibasmoto-Smith & Cook, 49 Shimizu, 37–38, 50, 255, 282 Shively, vii, 72, 116, 121, 153, 166, 251, 273, 282–283 Siegel, vii, 100 Sierra, 279 Smith, 284 Spencer-Oatey, 252, 278, 283 Stoynoff, 274 Stubbe, 274 Swain, 206, 283

Author Index

Sydorenko, 283 Sydorenko & Daurio, 141 Sydorenko & Tuason, 206 Sykes, vii, 145, 157, 162–163, 168, 276, 281, 283–284 Tagashira, 33, 46, 50, 53, 283 Taguchi, vii, 24, 33, 38–39, 47–50, 52, 72, 107, 114, 146, 152, 162, 232, 255, 276, 281–284 Taguchi & Roever, 154, 217, 241 Taguchi & Sykes, 168 Tahara, 272 Tajeddin, 213, 283–284 Tajeddin & Adeh, 10 Tajeddin & Dabbagh, 212 Tajeddin & Zand Moghadam, 55 Takahashi, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44–46, 50, 284–285 Takahashi & Beebe, 33, 49, 52, 147, 255 Takamiya, 158, 284 Takeuchi, 49, 210, 284 Takigawa, Yuzuru, 69 Tangen, 285 Tateyama, 25, 284 Tatsuki, 126, 280, 284 Thomas, 21, 28, 284 Thompson, 57, 270 Thorne, 159, 284 Timmis, 62, 284 Timpe, 54, 225, 284 Tomasello, 76, 284 Tomlinson, 271, 273, 277 Traverso, 9, 58, 284 Trentman, 274 Tsai, 165, 284 Tsujihara, 284 Tsujihara & Ohta, 49 Tsutagawa, 255, 284 Tuason, 283 Turkle, 126, 284 Urquhart, 113–114, 285 Usó Juan, 274, 277 Üstünlüoglu, 67, 285

Vacas Matos, 129, 250, 285 van Compernolle, 107, 152, 285 Vásquez, 111, 174, 282, 285 Vásquez & Sharpless, 105 Vassallo, 146, 285 Vellenga, 38, 110, 271, 285 Vellenga & Ishihara, 105 Vettorel, 285 Vettorel & Corrizzato, 14 Vyatkina, 156, 271, 285 Vyatkina & Belz, 25 Vygotsky, 217 Wang, 210, 273 Waring, 271 Watanabe, 24, 285 Waugh, 270 Weaver, 273 Wei, 279 Williams, 283 Wolfson, 280, 282 Woodfield, 253, 285 Wu, 285 Wu & Takahashi, 40–41 Wyner, vii–viii, 26–27, 48, 56, 101, 106, 111–112, 120, 122, 124 Xiao, 39, 283, 285 Yamagashira, 36, 49, 51, 255, 285 Yamashita, 211, 241, 249, 252, 285 Yamato, 283 Yang, 72, 285 Youn, 208, 215–216, 285 Yuan, 207, 285 Yule, 5, 285 Yun, 49, 285 Zand Moghadam, 284 Zeff, 110, 285 Ziv, 275 Zufferey, 4, 285 Zuskin, 252, 285

291

Subject Index

AAAL. See American Association for Applied Linguistics ability interactional, 217 noticing, 55 pragmalinguistic, 177 projected, 225 accents, 14, 195 teacher’s, 113 acceptability, 211, 257 cultural, 79 acceptability judgment task, pragmatic, 115 acculturation, 115, 282 accuracy, 39, 44, 161, 232, 234 linguistic, 234 pragmatic, 50, 261 speaker’s, 110 act communicative, 28, 172 head, 157 activities awareness-raising, 140 explicit consciousness-raising, 25 involving asynchronous communicative, 255 jigsaw, 120 mini-research project, 147 noticing-the-gap, 44 suggested motivating, 148 African-American Vernacular English, 52, 117 age, relative, 20, 124, 184–185, 188, 234, 266 age factor, 182, 185 agency, 22, 28, 49, 52, 63–64, 101, 117, 120, 125, 192, 209, 228–229 expression of, 119, 192, 204, 228 agreeing/confirming, 129

agreements, 127–128, 155, 213–214, 277, 279 interrater, 236, 269 Alexandria, 270 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), 270–271, 275, 283–285 American cultural overlay, 244, 246 anger, 18–19, 191, 259, 261 apologetic, 8, 72, 189, 218, 221, 223, 244 apologies acceptable, 104 expression of, 6–8, 104, 133, 170, 189, 224, 231 halfhearted, 213 heartfelt, 104 minor, 133 profuse, 222 robust, 104 sincere, 133 apologizer, 7 apologizing, 5–7, 70, 72, 85–86, 103–104,187-189, 190, 213, 215, 220–221, 224, 229–230, 237, 239, 249, 262, 279 apology DCT, 223 apology expressions, 103 apology situation, 188, 217, 225 apology speech act interaction, 104 apology strategies, 8, 163, 224 apology word sumimasen, 170 appropriateness, 19, 30, 32, 70, 79, 114, 177, 192, 211, 220, 224, 228, 233, 238, 256–259, 262 cultural, 227, 233–234 degree of, 107, 257 pragmatic, 24, 28, 42, 66, 106, 205, 207, 216, 252 psychological, 231 sociocultural, 76 sociopragmatic, 29

292

Subject Index

apps, 145, 166 Arabic apologies, 270 Arabic curses, 122 Arabic English, 59 Argentinian Spanish, 185 asking directions, 186 assessing pragmatics, 212–213, 227, 229, 235, 240 assessing spontaneous speech, 220 assessment, 28, 61, 75, 105, 156, 208, 212–213, 216–219, 223, 229–230, 235–238, 247, 270 effective, 217 game-based, 174 role of, 23, 211 assessment process, 229, 235 at-home programs, 115–116 attention getter, 7, 139 authenticity, 52, 71, 126 awareness, 10, 16, 20, 22, 30, 39, 42, 44, 51–52, 54, 75–76, 80, 99, 102–103, 107–108, 156, 160, 166, 174, 208, 228–229, 247, 252–253, 285 critical, 57 cultural, 79, 102 heightening student, 120 pragmalinguistic, 284 awareness-raising, 101, 110, 118, 123, 266 explicit, 277 pragmatic tasks, 170 tasks, 110, 215 backchanneling, 165 behavior acceptable, 259, 262 actual, 126 appropriate, 18 expected, 11 eye, 197 non-verbal, 249 normed, 18, 63 pragmalinguistic, 121 sociocultural, 4 beliefs, 44, 53, 62, 69, 272 blogging, 111, 143, 152, 158, 208, 284 British norms, 15, 27, 59 CARLA (Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition), 23, 167–169, 173–174, 179, 190, 273, 280

293

CARLA pragmatics websites, 103, 129, 139, 167–168, 173–175, 187 catcalls, 122 off-colored, 98 CBI (concept-based instruction), 284 Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. See CARLA characters, non-player, 163–164 chat, 161 oral, 157 rooms, 147 sessions, 164–165 in Spanish, 164 written, 157, 179, 267, 283 Chinese, 3, 10–12, 18–19, 40, 59, 72, 83, 134, 141, 152, 160, 176, 279, 283, 285 learners of, 18, 20, 73 closings, 164, 175 clusters, 185, 210 COCA, 91, 100 cohesion, 71, 113–114 collaboration gameplay behavior, 163 peer, 60 communication academic, 141 asynchronous, 29, 159 authentic, 160 computer-mediated, 41, 158 diplomatic, 97 face-to-face, 126 failure, 13 informal online, 159 intercultural, 11, 45, 168, 245 mediated, 162, 274 strategies, 191 styles, 69 written, 242 communicative ability, 33, 42, 54, 117, 207, 211, 231, 282 communicative functions, 163 communicative purpose, 166 communities of practice, 187, 193, 197, 199–201 complaints, 5–7, 12, 20, 28, 30, 80, 84–86, 110, 123, 155, 169, 172–173, 187, 210, 216, 219, 227, 229, 238–239, 243, 247, 249–250, 268, 272 formal, 174

294

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

complaints (Continued) prolonged, 164 public, 29 complements, 22, 111, 154, 276 complexity, 24, 55–56, 157, 163, 209, 235, 264–265, 270 compliments, 5–6, 12, 17–18, 20, 28, 37–38, 40–41, 49, 56, 65, 69, 72, 77, 85–86, 115, 126–127, 129, 133–134, 149, 155, 169, 172, 175, 201, 205, 215, 229, 233–235, 239, 251, 270, 275, 284 in Chinese, 40 evaluative, 35 hearer-oriented, 115 informal, 174 negotiated, 17 performance of, 18, 233 to professors, 35 rating, 234 recipients, 234 response strategies, 37, 40–41, 282, 284–285 comprehensibility, 128 comprehension, assessing, 217, 236, 238 comprehension tasks, 47, 259 computer-mediated communication (CMC), 41, 158, 161–162, 274 computer simulations, 141 concept-based instruction (CBI), 284 Concordia Language Villages, 27, 80 condolences, conveying, 35, 97 congratulations, 20 connotations, 70, 139, 176, 204 content analysis, 233–234 contexts contrasting, 248 pragmalinguistic, 92–93 contextual assumptions, 159 conditions, 230 factors, 11, 77, 170, 217, 228 variables, 78 continuum actual, 9 possible, 106 contrastive analysis, 55, 156, 264 conversational analysis, 60 conversational management, 5, 15–16, 61, 73, 175, 208–209

conversation analysis, 107, 209, 275 conversation closings, 164 conversation opener, 157, 195 corpora Corpus of Contemporary American English, 100, 127 corpus searches, 129 multimodal, 285 natural, 173 regional, 128 spoken, 127 corpus-based instructional website, 156 corpus-based materials, 129, 155, 271 corrections, 25, 51, 160 explicit, 144 faulty, 51 performing effective, 51 countries inner-circle, 27 outer-circle, 77 criticism, 72, 80, 84, 210, 218, 249, 259, 261, 265, 268 genuine, 175–176 Croquelandia, 145, 162–163 cross-cultural analysis, 188, 230, 285 cross-cultural pragmatics, 11, 167, 242–244, 277 defined, 69 crowdsourcing, 174 cues nonverbal, 24, 73, 197, 203, 242, 261 social, 159 visual, 72 cultural behaviors, 162, 244, 246, 258 clashes, 35, 60 differences, 68–69 stereotyping, 68 values, 69 cultural background, 60, 67, 162, 244, 246, 258 culture differences, 199 global, 161 identifiable, 248 local, 64, 278 mainstream, 50 norms, 18, 116 shared, 97, 160 strategies, 167, 273 studying, 68, 166, 280

Subject Index

teaching of, 68, 79 term, 68 cursing, 5, 18–20, 23, 73, 84–86, 96, 100, 121–124, 175–176, 187, 197–198, 200, 267 teaching of, 84, 98 in Vietnamese, 123 Dancing with Words website, 139, 172–174, 251 data empirical, 170, 173 naturalistic, 247, 250–251 naturally-occurring, 126–127, 214, 250 normative, 40 notebook, 148 qualitative, 45, 47 verbal report, 191, 226, 260 data collection procedures, 21, 82, 161, 247, 251, 253, 271, 274, 278 data gathering, 22, 88–91, 98, 117, 120–121, 203, 266 DCTs, 25, 36–37, 40, 52, 54, 110, 158, 174, 207, 213–215, 223–226, 230, 247, 254–256, 271, 274, 279 earliest, 255 format, 254 free, 226 language lab, 216 multiple-choice, 247 multiple-rejoinders, 213, 215, 226, 255–257 oral, 37, 52, 115, 187, 230, 255–256 computerized, 47 prompts, 215 responses, 213 written, 37, 51, 105, 216, 225, 256 results, 158, 174 situations, 233, 254 traditional, 255 degree of imposition, 9, 217, 235, 268 deixis, 5–6 denial, strategies for, 38 deviations, pragmatic, 97 diagnostic placement, 74, 233 dialect, 90–92, 100, 139, 172, 194–195, 226, 250 differences, 22, 81–82, 87, 94, 139, 172, 210 local, 246 dialogue production task (DPT), 226

295

dialogues, 47, 128, 130, 133, 140, 142, 149, 165–166, 226–227 collaborative, 107 emergent, 227 extended, 217 rapid-fire, 70 short, 226 written, 166 dictionaries, 146, 184 differences, cross-cultural, 188, 229 digital media, 3, 81–82, 87, 98, 244, 266 directness, 36, 192, 207, 220, 225, 237–238, 242, 258–259 disagreements, 133, 214 direct, 128 expressed, 128 local pragmatic practices, 280 sequences, 209 disarmers, 142, 207 discourse business, 209, 243 electronic, 159 functions, 259 honorific, 49 interactive, 158 level, 279 of online reviews, 111, 285 routines, 232 self-assessment task, 230 spoken, 120 unplanned, 255 written, 223 discourse analysis, 209 discourse completion task. See DCTs discourse markers, 5–6, 15, 61, 74, 85–86, 113, 139, 151, 275 contrastive, 139, 275 key, 113 disengagement, 61 diversity, pragmatic, 57 domains, 27, 32, 66, 272 downgraders, 165 DPT (dialogue production task), 226 EFL apologies, 153 classroom activities in Japan, 15 contexts, 36, 38, 43, 282 environment, 42–43, 50 pragmatics, 40, 58 textbooks, 58, 103, 108, 279

296

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

e-journaling, 166, 277 ELF, 12–14, 23, 285 communication, 13 interlocutors, 15 literature, 113 movements, 13, 59 pragmatics, 97 research, 14 variety, 207 emotions, 5, 18–20, 23, 120, 189, 191, 274, 278 etiquette, 29, 133, 176, 219 pragmatic, 205 euphemisms, 97 excuse, 6–7, 38, 105, 133, 213, 221, 224, 232 unacceptable, 203 expectations, 15, 18, 27, 34, 66–67, 198, 254, 258 normative, 17 transmitted, 69 explanation, explicit metapragmatic, 25 explanation or account, 7–8, 79, 103, 105, 130, 133, 135, 150, 167, 177, 180, 207, 213, 215, 220–221, 224, 229, 234 expletives, 254, 274 explicitness, 22, 81, 113–114, 247, 252 expressing an apology, 221 strategy of, 6, 106 expression of acknowledgement, 200 expressions facial, 72, 120, 187, 192, 197, 199, 243, 247, 259, 261 fixed, 257 grunting/shrieking, 95 idiomatic, 71 impersonal, 152 leave-taking, 45 preparatory, 234 proper, 194 routine, 249 textbook, 155 expressions of gratitude, 18, 129, 250, 274 expressions of regret, 215 eye movements, 140, 247 Facebook, 29, 82, 154, 157, 160–162, 244–245 FaceTime, 154, 157

facetious, 120, 141, 247, 254, 259 factors interpersonal, 234–235 motivational, 43, 54 sociocultural, 220 failure avoiding pragmatic, 232 sociopragmatic, 29 unintended pragmatic, 139 features communicative, 47 cultural, 47 formal, 138 key, 267 learnable, 130 mainstay, 6 positive, 47, 142 programmatic, 48 salient, 79 target pragmalinguistic, 44 feedback, vii, 61, 73, 80, 100, 111, 121, 142, 158, 162, 164, 169–170, 172, 255 accessible, 172 corrective, 79 explicit, 47 fine-tuned, 142 metalinguistic, 111 positive, 35 films, 22, 94, 126, 129–130, 143, 165–166, 270, 284 creative use of, 165, 179, 268 film clips, 95, 130, 215 transcripts, 166 fluctuation, 98, 185–186, 210, 273 fluency, 37, 40, 42, 114, 234 native, 70 pragmatic, 15, 277 formality, 63, 77, 108–109, 138–139, 142, 200, 203, 242, 253, 257, 259 appropriate, 64 conventions of, 77 level of, 63, 151, 155, 171, 203, 220, 224, 228, 234–235, 252 formats elicitation, 252 multiple-rejoinder, 225 sentence completion, 226 web-based, 174 written, 255

Subject Index

form-focused instruction, 25 implicit, 280 forms acceptable, 57 actual, 207 appropriate, 185, 222, 226 conditional, 200, 202 honorific, 204 plain, 257 pragmatic, 102, 204 preferred, 144 form-to-function approach, 155 formulaic, 7–9, 17, 74, 126, 271 expressions, 114, 283 implicature, 233 patterns, 58 sequences, 282 speech, 118 formulas, 8–9, 36, 156, 270 routine, 156 teaching apology, 279 thanking, 276 fossilization, 13 pragmatic, 51 function, shifting, 185 functions affective, 185, 192 cognitive, 185 metacognitive, 185, 190, 192 metapragmatic, 192 social, 185 f-word, 139, 198 gender, 20, 29, 51, 68, 77, 121, 124, 142, 147, 184–186, 193–194, 200, 227, 234, 243, 266 genres, 155, 157 hybrid, 138 written academic, 71 genuine criticism, 175–176 gestures, 72, 112, 120, 140, 144, 187, 192–193, 196–197, 200, 202, 205, 243, 255, 257, 259, 261 nontransparent, 202 gift-giving actions, 95, 144 globalization, 11, 14, 68–69, 263, 274 goodbye, 110, 183, 246 grammar flagrant mistakes, 32 role of, 101, 195

297

rules, 10, 51, 65, 75–76 teaching of, 67, 75–76, 152, 201 textbook, 65, 152 Grammar Strategies Website, 210 grammatical development, 76 grammatical errors, 42–43, 46 perceived, 45 ranked, 42, 106 grammatical forms, 112–113, 139, 152, 201, 234, 267 grammatical issues in pragmatics, 42–43, 76, 226, 231 ability, 51, 76, 101 accuracy, 76, 231 appropriateness, 46 awareness, 280 complexity, 108 grammatical appropriateness, 46 grammatical development, 76 grammatical meaningfulness, 231 gratitude, 5–6, 18, 32, 72, 129, 134, 151, 169, 172, 195, 250, 274, 276, 282, 285 greetings appropriate, 101 bare, 151 basic, 157, 182–183, 248 greeting/return, 208 memorize, 193 non-inclusive, 157 opening, 165 ordered, 108 proper, 183 regular, 204 teaching of, 110 grounders, 142, 157, 195 hand gestures, 196, 202 hashtags, 158–159, 179, 268, 282 hedging, 34, 130, 207, 257 hesitation phenomena, 203, 211 honorifics, 49, 83, 192, 204, 257, 282 irregular, 204 verb mesheagaru, 192 humor, 4–5, 17, 19, 61, 71, 73, 79, 81, 85–86, 90, 96, 100, 130, 133, 139, 150, 175, 242, 259–260 incomprehensible, 271 intended, 130

298

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

idealized norms, 4, 12, 14, 106 idealized pragmatic behaviors, 24, 264 identities, 11, 13, 27, 37, 49, 52, 54, 62, 160–161, 278, 284 collective, 160 cultural, 209 culturally-shaped, 118 international, 161 linguistic, 52 negotiating , 284 new L2 , 54 offline, 159 online, 160 professional, 78, 283 shared L1, 60 social, 49 transportable, 159 idioms, 16, 32, 91 illocutionary force, 183, 193, 219 illocutionary meaning, 8 implications, 14, 45, 186, 279 pedagogical, 54, 285 sociocultural, 33 implicature, 4, 74, 84, 112, 230, 232–233, 235, 240, 249, 271, 281 assessment of, 230, 232, 240 comfortable teaching, 74 comfort level teaching about, 74 conventional, 232 conversational, 5–6, 85–86, 232 nonconventional, 232 tasks, 47 type, 74, 233 impoliteness, 5, 17–19, 23, 74, 135, 201 impolite speech styles, 274 on purpose, 17 teaching of, 280 imposition, 9, 109–110, 136–137, 207, 217, 220, 225, 230, 235, 247, 252, 268 imposition minimizer, 207 inappropriateness, pragmatic, 53, 189 indirectness, 40, 192, 207, 250 indirect refusals, 38–39, 232 included, 232 infelicities, pragmatic, 43, 50, 199 inferences, 232, 282 inner-circle countries, 27, 77 input authentic, 33, 36, 45, 48 classroom-based, 45

computer-generated sensory, 145 enhancement, 44, 143, 215, 284 pragmatic, 33, 43–44, 219, 279 salient, 43 instruction corpus-based, 271 explicit, 24–25, 37, 53, 72, 82, 106, 111, 123–124, 146, 148, 167, 204, 210, 251, 268 implemented pragmatics-focused, 217 intensifiers, 6, 29, 133, 165, 219 appropriate, 28 intensity appropriate, 224, 247 range, 18 reported, 115 intention, 1, 4, 8, 19–20, 24, 31–32, 55, 58, 72, 122, 142, 148, 158, 168, 210, 216, 226, 242, 254, 261, 264, 268–269 good, 246 implied speaker, 38 interpreting pragmatic, 3 speaker’s, 232 writer’s, 31 interactional competence, 5, 275 interactions authentic, 38, 50, 54 complex, 108 contextualized, 166 depth of, 39 everyday NS, 45 idealized, 126 imaginary, 190 intercultural, 245, 258 model, 104 oral, 126 peer-based, 102 phone, 144 real-world, 52 teletandem, 273 unstaged, 190 virtual, 162 interculturality, 177, 242, 245, 262 intercultural pragmatics, 1, 11, 242, 244–245, 250–251, 261, 264, 269, 272, 278 interference, 10, 13, 83 interlanguage pragmatics, 243, 245, 270–271, 278, 281–285 pragmalinguistic knowledge, 281

Subject Index

research, 271, 276, 281, 283–284 internet-mediated communication, 255 asynchronous, 120 message board, 146 partnerships, 154 websites, 111, 176 intervention, digital classroom, 22, 162, 179, 268 interviews exit, 164 focus group, 207 participant, 38 qualitative, 45 retrospective, 37, 49 semi-structured, 102 intonation, 10, 19, 71–73, 110, 113, 186, 208, 255 appropriate, 20 proper, 30, 183 intuition, 71, 78, 91, 98, 103–104, 168, 189, 266 invitations, 6, 8, 36, 39, 70, 77, 82, 108, 148, 172, 232, 271 actual, 225 making, 229 refusing, 157 irony, 4, 72, 74, 141, 207, 233, 283 items closed, 83 literal comprehension, 232 nonconventional implicature, 232 open-ended, 225 short-answer completion, 225 Japanese pragmatic norms, 37 Japanese pragmatics, 64, 175, 204 addressee honorifics, 49 apologies, 211 cultural norms for interaction, 15, 38, 257 culture, 18, 29, 35, 38, 64, 148 ESL refusals, 285 honorifics, 49, 284 Japanese English, 15, 27, 58, 76, 118 norms for politeness, 40 refusals, 33, 158 silence, 203 student requests, 201 website, 167, 169–171 jokes, 61, 73, 79, 150 judgment tasks, 247, 256

299

keigo, 49, 204 keyword mnemonics, 182 language appropriate, 42, 104, 252 authentic, 127, 155 dominant, 2, 5, 64, 153, 192, 245, 261, 265 formulaic, 9 oral, 6, 67, 112, 137, 139 spoken, 73, 137–138 target, 54, 87, 91, 96, 253, 276 written, 6, 21, 70–71, 137–138, 211, 252 language ability areas, 259–260 language learner strategies (LLS), 23, 168, 184, 207, 210, 273, 284 language proficiency, 39, 42, 193 language teaching, pragmatics in, 66, 274, 277–278, 280, 284 language testing, viii, 273, 280–281 language variation, 16, 23, 174 learner attention, 44 learner motivation, 53 learner strategies website, 273 learner subjectivity, 28, 277 learning pragmatics refusal strategies, 158 sociopragmatics, 207 speech acts, 169–170, 173 strategies for, 171–173, 181, 183, 185, 193, 273 learning style preferences, 25, 148, 190–191, 199, 215 measure for, 69 length of residence, 34, 39, 45, 47, 274–275 lingua franca, 12, 59, 214, 270–271, 274, 277–278, 280–282 listener responses, appropriate, 5, 61, 85–86 Livemocha, 164–165, 180 LLS. See language learner strategies markers, 9, 219, 245 explicit cohesive, 114 topic shift, 208 materials authentic, 111–112, 126, 155 pragmalinguistic, 31, 126 textbook, 47, 58, 133, 205

300

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

measures elicited, 52 indirect, 223 multiple, 250 projected, 51–52 real-time, 217 metadiscourse, 15, 113 metalanguage, 113 metaphor, 4, 147, 245, 271 metapragmatics, 276 approach, 218 awareness, 156 information, 34, 124, 133 explicit, 108 instruction, 44, 144, 276 explicit, 36, 44, 274 metatalk, 112, 266 Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE), 91, 100, 127–128, 153, 155 miscommunication, 13–14, 149 motivation, 21, 33, 41–42, 44–47, 50–51, 53–54, 56, 75, 101, 119, 150, 152, 167, 187, 265, 267, 284 effects of, 34, 46 extrinsic, 46 intrinsic, 44 lack of, 44, 46 measuring, 44 questionnaire, 44 role of, 26, 41, 55, 265 motivators, 109, 130, 146, 148–149, 152, 267 list of, 148–149 movies, 38, 70, 72, 87, 96, 105, 112, 126, 130–131, 148–149, 202, 222, 276 native-speaker (NS), model, 62 naturalistic, 247, 250–251 naturalistic audio recordings, 251 negative transfer, 35–36, 40, 49, 54–55, 61, 64, 72, 98, 137, 147, 195, 201, 205, 242, 265 negotiation, 14, 209, 222, 274 nonverbal behaviors, 4, 187, 193, 197, 247, 254, 256 observing, 120 nonverbal communication, 69, 197 normative behavior, 16, 49, 60, 97, 100, 119, 266 preferred, 16

requests, 41 turn-taking, 208 norms acceptable, 256 actual, 246 appropriate, 58 approximating, 52, 157 idealized, 63 local, 22, 58–60, 111, 209 pragmalinguistic, 30, 61 so-called, 4, 102 social, 95 societal, 247 sociopragmatic, 30–31, 188 traditional, 11, 18 NS model, 62 NS-NNS partnering, 161 NS raters, interrater differences, 215–216 nuances, 10, 54, 93 interpreting, 248 understanding, 49 NYC rudeness, 153 obscenities, 52, 131 observations, 54, 78–79, 99, 120, 182, 187, 199, 206, 251 anecdotal, 90 outer-circle countries, 77 output, comprehensible, 195, 200, 204–205 overgeneralization, 31, 90, 104, 194–195, 203, 205 overuse, 49 unknowing, 31 pauses, 24, 50, 195, 203, 209 extended, 197 filled, 24, 50, 70, 203, 205, 264 unfilled, 16 perceived TL, 205 performing pragmatics, strategies for, 189, 193 politeness appropriate level of, 140, 142 behavior, 284 degree of, 20, 228, 234 excessive, 135 and impoliteness, 85–86 levels of, 83, 258–259 linguistic, 282 markers of, 41, 108

Subject Index

negative, 207 perceived, 258 positive, 207 strategies, 207, 276, 281 negative, 208 positive, 208 teaching of, 279 posture, body, 144, 187, 199 pragmalinguistics acceptability, 259 appropriateness, 231 constraints, 168 errors, 31, 112 exercises, 170 failures, 28, 264 forms, 30, 48, 106, 123–124, 149, 189, 266 input enhancement, 25 knowledge base, 94 making choices, 32, 117, 121 pragmatic ability acquired, 207 assessing, 213, 235–236, 265, 269, 273 developing, 19, 34, 41 measuring, 34, 220 pragmatic behavior acceptable, 172, 260 appropriate, 4, 92, 121, 181, 256, 259, 261, 266 crucial, 24, 264 pragmatic development comprehension, 281 determiners of, 49–50 enhancing, 22, 154 pragmatic routines identifying, 129 noticing, 129 pragmatics breakdown, 198 collecting data, 235, 251, 253 comprehension, tests, 47 cultural, 23 developing awareness, 50 discursive, 278 errors, 42–46, 106 instruction, 38, 77, 105, 126, 152, 155, 243, 267, 274–275, 277, 282 effective, 57, 235 explicit, 31 judgment task, 140 materials

301

appropriate, 22, 101, 123 authentic, 110, 151, 267 selection of, 103, 107 sources for, 125, 151, 266–267 research, 168, 254, 274, 278 routines, 37, 101, 128, 155–156, 240, 271, 284 strategies, 15, 141, 150, 164, 184, 209, 285 tone, 120, 138, 259–261, 271 websites on, 23, 111, 167–168, 173 pragmatics wiki, 22, 172, 174–175, 178 pragmatic transfer, 33–34, 36–37, 39, 53–54, 56, 101, 265, 285 developmental patterns of, 40 evidence of, 36 positive, 48 potential positive, 53 role of, 21, 26, 34, 54–55, 264 pragmatic variation, 108, 172, 275, 285 production activities for, 128–129 assessing, 217, 226, 238 oral, 52, 219, 225 questionnaires, 37 spontaneous speech, 37 tasks, 25, 52 real-time, 54 prompts, 221–222, 228, 252 written, 247, 252 punning, 73, 134, 150 questionnaire retrospective awareness, 44 written, 46 questions, open-ended, 236–237 raising sociopragmatic awareness, 276 raters, 215–216, 231, 234, 256, 272 ratings criteria, 270 hesitation behavior, 211 holistic, 258 multitrait, 258 for pragmatic appropriateness, 260 for pragmatic performance, 234 scales, 218, 257 readability, 285 reflective journal, 143 reformulation, 13 of email messages, 136

302

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

refusals appropriate, 36 direct, 157 interlanguage, 274 making, 39 negotiating, 281 in Spanish, 51 strategies for, 158 written, 36 register, 138–139, 245 informal, 138 mixed, 32 regret, 28, 176, 215, 237 expressing, 250 really signals, 133 rejection, 17, 139 rejoinders, 126, 255, 257 conversational, 249 multiple, 247, 256, 273 single, 255 reliability, 91, 216, 260 repair offering, 6–7, 104–105, 220 an offer of, 170 requests for directions, 95, 144, 185 email, 106, 144 formal, 205 high-stakes, 141–142 indirect, 164 invitations as, 8 polite, 201, 249 refusing of, 187 service-encounter, 201 tactful, 222 toolkit, 147 unreasonable, 30 well-mitigated, 140 research case-study, 55 conducting observational, 243 conducting survey, 269 cross-cultural pragmatic, 243 designing, 138, 247 longitudinal, 241 resistance, 49, 101, 119, 165, 192, 204–205, 209, 229, 250, 277 justification of, 165, 209 perceived, 176 pragmatic, 277 retrodicting, 270

retrospection, 253 role-playing, 142, 158, 256 assessment of, 110 rubrics for assessment, 110, 217, 231 rudeness, 17, 19, 32, 49, 75, 120, 148–149, 176, 271, 280 teaching of, 135 rules, 24, 63, 79, 104, 107, 143, 152, 203–204 sampling, 82, 193, 210, 241, 247–249 a representative sample, 248, 254 systematic, 99 sarcasm expressing, 5, 84, 98, 120, 132, 218, 242, 266 intended, 72 perception of, 72 teaching of, 72 scoring, 213, 224, 231, 268 scripts, 130, 142–143, 255 actual, 130 rehearsed, 126 self-agency, 192 self-assessment, 230, 247, 256 self-identity, 22, 26 self-repair, 15, 113 self-report studies, 99 semantic formulas, 7–8, 37, 40, 103 semantic maps, making, 182 service encounters, 58, 94, 96, 121, 148–149, 172, 251 in Spanish, 283 service requests, 271 severity, degrees of, 216, 220 silence, 15–16, 24, 50, 60, 102, 197, 200, 203, 205, 209, 243, 259, 261 situations face-threatening, 96, 149 guided response, 226 high-stakes, 51 intercultural, 195, 247, 257, 261–262 negative, 149 Skype, 146, 154, 157, 161, 242, 244 slang, 52, 71 SNSs (social network site), 160 social media sites, 22, 130, 157, 179, 267 social networking, 244 social network site (SNSs), 160 sociocultural contexts, 21, 91–93

Subject Index

issues, 92, 170 norms, 20, 38 actual, 253 appropriate, 208 perspective, 26, 66, 278 sociocultural theory, 107, 217 sociopragmatic acceptability, 259 appropriateness, 29 assessment tasks, 284 awareness, 271 behavior, 35 choices, 52 exercises, 170 failure, 28–29, 31–32, 55, 175, 264 features, 126 import, 155 instances, 35 level, 32 realities, 31, 105, 121 sociopragmatic-pragmalinguistic distinction, 31 spaces an affinity, 164 immersive, 163 social networking, 272 virtual, 145 Spanish chat, 164 Spanish grammar strategies website, 190 Spanish pragmatics website, 167, 171–173, 251 speech acts appropriate, 220 assessing, 223, 235, 272 common, 6 complex, 163, 229 comprehension tasks, 236–237 defining, 8 delicate, 72, 206 high-stakes, 267 idealized interactions, 254 key, 187, 209 multi-turn, 274 norms for, 176 performance of, 190, 219, 230, 236, 271, 274 production tasks, 238–239 rating of responses, 230, 233 situations, 218, 220, 227, 236 speech act sequences, 158

303

speech act set, 6–7, 25, 134, 280 speech act strategies, 7–8, 41 speech acts website, 169 speech routines, 225 speech styles, 230, 247, 257–258 statistics, 216, 269, 272 analyses, 83, 216, 230 procedures, 230, 241 strategies actual, 167 bald off-the-record, 207 bald on-the-record, 207 best, 201 classifying, 184, 186 communicative, 104 concrete, 181 developing appropriate, 170 effective, 201 intelligibility-enhancing, 113 for learning speech acts, 169, 173 for memorizing, 185 negative, 37 one-size-fits-all, 184 preparatory, 195 resistance, 165 sequence of, 185–186, 208–210 speaker-oriented, 163 speech-act-specific, 37, 40, 259 teachable, 272 teaching of, 200 for turn-taking, 16 strategies instruction, 210, 273 web-based, 167 strategy repertoire, 200, 247, 253 strategy set, 188 student agency, 268 style preference inventory, 190 style preferences, 8 personality-related, 206 styles, 69, 173, 202 conversational, 81, 84–86, 282 informal, 158–159 speaking, 52, 79 styles and strategies-based instruction, 273 subcultures, 8, 69, 121, 175, 186–187, 245 subjectivity, 62–63, 101, 192, 277 subtitles, 130, 266 survey of NTs and NNTs, 80, 106 swapping classes, 144

304

Learning Pragmatics from Native and Nonnative Language Teachers

synchronous interaction, 41, 162 online peer response groups, 284 SCMC, 41, 162, 164–165 context, 165 peer response, 165 tact, 72, 111 tandem partners, 50, 141, 146–147, 150, 153–154, 267 tasks constructing, 217, 236 out-of-class, 151, 267 pragmatic-eliciting, 275 productive, 259 reading, 260 receptive, 259 textbook, 165, 207 teacher-centeredness, 10 teacher corrections, 142 teacher development, 105, 168, 285 teacher flexibility, 101 teacher intelligibility, 112 teachers effective, 61, 265 good, 66, 280 teacher talk, 112, 123 teaching explicit, 24–25, 182, 276 good, 66, 113 implicit, 24–25, 284 teasing, 5, 61, 73, 80, 85–86, 96, 100, 124, 132, 210, 242, 260, 265, 267–268 technology global communicative, 245 innovative, 22, 154, 179, 267 mobilizing, 157, 161, 267 telecollaboration, 22, 156, 161–162, 179, 268, 274, 281 tests, 31, 38, 74, 106, 173, 212–213, 216–217, 232–233, 235, 240, 276, 281 computerized listening, 232 listening comprehension, 162 low-stakes, 284 oral, 208 oral language, 209 picture response, 285 web-based, 231, 281 web-delivered, 231 written, 223

textbooks, informed, 65 texting, 21, 126, 157 thanks, 31–32, 41, 73, 118, 133, 136, 139, 169, 195 expressing, 135 no, 203 thank you, 18, 41, 49, 118, 129 theory generalizability, 216, 230 social cultural, 107, 152 third cultures/spaces, 161 time length of, 21, 51, 65, 243 warm-up, 220 TL culture, 20, 47, 54, 71, 75, 149 TL norms, 16, 22, 45, 49, 51, 61, 63, 100–101, 103, 111, 116–117, 125, 147, 149, 192, 201, 209, 244, 258 adopted, 44 appropriate, 55 particular, 209 TL politeness, 77 TL pragmatics idealized, 16 instruction, 24, 59, 63, 98–99, 102, 152, 154, 168, 242, 244, 266 learning of, 4, 11, 116, 154, 167, 182 materials, 109, 126, 168, 177 means for learning, 125 norms for, 22, 59, 95, 170 performing, 137, 154, 179, 184, 190, 192, 242, 267-268 research on, 54, 241 tone, 18–20, 72–73, 117, 120, 133, 139–140, 159, 175, 187, 192, 199, 218–219, 242, 254, 261, 271 appropriate, 132 assertive, 120 collaborative, 242 elated, 159 facetious, 213 heavy, 73 intense, 120 neutral, 18 normal, 72 reassuring, 261 sarcastic, 72, 120 signal, 179, 268 sincere, 213 tone markers, 255

Subject Index

305

topics controversial, 19 political, 30 taboo, 202 transfer, 15–16, 36–41, 49, 55, 137, 147, 153, 193, 265 positive, 54 sociopragmatic behavior, 35 universal, 54 translanguaging, 177, 180, 191–192, 272, 275, 282 translation, 78, 130, 166, 186, 276 translation errors, 32 translation strategies, 186 written, 272 triangulation, 247, 250 turn-by-turn talk, maintaining, 60 tweets, 29, 158–159, 179, 268 Twitter, 29, 158–159, 244, 282

prestige, 26, 59 regional, 16, 58, 172, 282 verbal report, 32, 191, 225–226, 247, 251, 253, 256, 259–260, 272 collecting data, 32, 191 introspection and retrospection, 253 self-observation, 253 retrospective, 251 self-report, 253 self-revelation, 253 video clips, 112, 120, 176, 218 attaching, 175 video communication, 179, 267 video prompts, 234, 252, 256 videos, selfie, 190 videotaping, 144 virtual community, 160, 281 virtual environments, 162, 283 visualization, 184, 189–190

variation acceptable pragmatic, 77 age-based, 147 dialect, 23, 174 expected, 249 individual, 242, 257 intralingual, 109 sociolinguistic, 45 varieties informal, 64

washback effect, 212 web-based tutorial (WBT), 173–174, 282 websites, 65, 82, 106, 111, 158–159, 167–174, 177–180, 187, 210, 214, 251, 273, 283 wiki, 22–23, 174–179, 268 wlpragmatics, 177 workplace, 97, 187–188, 197–198 World Englishes, 12, 14, 16, 58, 111, 117, 176, 271, 278, 282