L2 pragmatics as ‘intercultural pragmatics’: Probing sociopragmatic aspects of pragmatic awareness

Abstract

One of the important ‘current issues in intercultural pragmatics’ is how conceptual, theoretical, and empirical developments in this field can be used to help reconstitute the teaching and learning of second languages as an intercultural endeavor. The field of intercultural pragmatics raises important questions and presents challenges to prevailing perspectives within language teaching on what it means to know and use languages for intercultural communication, particularly how notions such as pragmatic awareness should be understood. This paper links recent views of pragmatics as social and moral practice (E.g. Kádár and Haugh, 2013; Spencer-Oatey and Kádár, 2016) with sociocognitive perspectives on pragmatic interpretation (Kecskes, 2014; McConachy, 2018) to offer a reconceptualization of pragmatic awareness for second language learning. The paper draws on data from an English language classroom in Japan to illustrate some of the ways in which collaborative meta-pragmatic reflection in the classroom opens up possibilities for exploring various cultural assumptions drawn from the L1 and L2 that come into play when interpreting aspects of L2 pragmatics. This will be used to suggest a conceptualisation of pragmatic awareness as a layered phenomenon that is inherently multilingual and intercultural.