“Shall we talk? Everyone is talking”

Combining computer-mediated communication with data-driven instruction: EFL learners’ pragmatic development of compliment responses

This study investigates the pragmalinguistic features of Korean as a Foreign Language (KFL) learners’ request speech acts in power-asymmetrical situations, focusing on interactions with social superiors. Through a discourse completion test (DCT), 31 KFL students and 12 Korean native speakers (KNS) were analyzed using a coding system which is developed based on the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989). Despite acquiring basic linguistic elements, KFL learners struggle to apply them effectively, particularly in nuanced social contexts. The findings underscore the necessity of explicit instruction on the pragmalinguistic functions of grammatical forms to bridge the gap between classroom learning and real-world language use. This study contributes valuable insights into the intercultural pragmatics of KFL learners, addressing gaps in the literature regarding the detailed analysis of learners’ language use in request speech acts, especially in situations involving social superiors. The pedagogical implications emphasize the need for enhanced instruction in KFL pragmatics to cultivate learners’ pragmatic awareness.

Journal Article Pragmalinguistic Awareness: Is it Related to Motivation and Proficiency? Get access Satomi Takahashi Satomi Takahashi Rikkyo University, Japan Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Applied Linguistics, Volume 26, Issue 1, March 2005, Pages 90–120, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amh040 Published: 01 March 2005

A large body of literature has examined the role of explicit teaching on L2 pragmatics. Previous research findings confirmed that explicit teaching has a positive impact on the development of L2 learners’ pragmatic competence. Many studies attempt to explore the efficacy of instruction in improving pragmatics competence in terms of learners' speech acts of requesting. However, little attention has been focused on teaching request strategies to young learners. This study aims to investigate whether explicit instruction of request strategies may enhance the young learners’ L2 pragmatic awareness and whether there will be an increase on the learners’ awareness based on social power, distance, and imposition factors. Twenty-two second-grade Turkish students from a private school participate in the study. The participants are divided into experimental and control groups and each group consists of eleven students. The experimental group receives four hours of treatment in two weeks while the control group follows conventional instructions without any metapragmatic teaching on requesting strategies. The quantitative data is gathered by administering Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as both the pre and the post-tests. To increase the reliability and validity of the research results, the triangulation method is used. For triangulation, the teacher-researchers employ teacher observation with a rubric and semi-structured interview is conducted with purposefully chosen students. The results of quantitative analysis showed that there is no significant difference in learners’ pragmatic awareness on L2 requesting. However, according to the qualitative results, there is a noticeable difference in the learners’ pragmatic awareness on requests and pragmatic factors.

The act of refusal takes place in everyday lives, but it has been discussed to be a difficult speech act for nonnative speakers. This study seeks to investigate Korean EFL learners’ refusals in extended discourse along with their pragmatic perceptions. Sixteen college students were engaged in oral role-plays with two native English speakers and instructed to refuse the interlocutor’s request. The refusal performances were analyzed using conversation analysis framework with respect to the interlocutors’ different powers and the learners’ proficiency levels. Learners also participated in retrospective verbal reports. Findings depict different verbal and nonverbal features illustrating learners’ sensitivity towards higher status and their different linguistic abilities. Furthermore, their verbal reports revealed that despite their pragmatic awareness, learners were not fully equipped with appropriate L2 pragmatic knowledge.

Emile Zola's La Curee (1872) is a spatial novel. On the most basic level of the plot, it tells the story of the early years of Haussmann's radical remaking of Paris during the Second Empire, and paints a portrait of a profoundly corrupt and degenerate society that is forged in the process. La Curee is organized around a number of emblematic urban spaces that generate the novel's meaning. The story moves seamlessly from Aristide Saccard's extravagant mansion, whose brand new ornate facade conceals the ephemeral nature of the protagonist's paper fortune, to the somber Hotel Beraud (Renee's parental home) which embodies traditional bourgeois values and morality, from the salons and ballrooms of the novel's courtesans to the city's recently created public spaces such as boulevards, cafes, restaurants, and parks. Famous sequences of carriage traffic jams in the Bois de Boulogne provide the novel's bookends. La Curee brings into a sharp relief numerous ways in which social and moral meanings are mapped onto the literal spatial organization of the newly reconstructed Paris. Space is never neutral in La Curee. Rather, it contains a deep symbolic moral and social meaning. (1) Although Zola meticulously reproduces the topographical reality of the recently Haussmannized Paris, famously compiling detailed dossier on every aspect of the city that makes its way into his novel, what emerges most powerfully is not merely a recognizable realist setting but a system of moral geographies --a term I borrow from Priscilla Ferguson's Paris as Revolution --which are central to the novel's overall social critique of the corrupted and degenerate Second Empire (Ferguson 134). In this essay, I focus on three urban spaces that appear at key moments in the novel: the park, the restaurant, and the omnibus. Although these spaces were neither invented nor created during the Second Empire, they underwent important transformation and were undoubtedly invested with a new significance during this time. In Haussmann's Paris, the park, the restaurant, and the omnibus represent an attempt to impose order--both topographical and social--on the city and its inhabitants. While the park is supposed to embody the state's desire to regulate public leisure by designating precisely where one may or may not walk and by imposing order upon nature, the restaurant is meant to order public consumption, regulate taste, and offer the bourgeois consumer a stage for performing respectability as well as a privileged viewpoint from which to judge and classify the passing urban spectacle. The omnibus organizes urban movement as it travels along assigned routes with its rigidly classed seating structure and pay schedule. All three spaces participate in Napoleon Ill's overarching project of urban reconstruction whose main ideological goal is to maintain hierarchies, to clearly demarcate classed and gendered spaces, to impose social order, and to enforce strict norms of proper bourgeois behavior and respectability. In La Curee, however, Zola radically rewrites these social spaces, investing them with a meaning opposite to what Haussmann intended to them to signify. Parc Monceau, cafe Riche and the Batignolles omnibus are not sites of bourgeois social order, but rather spaces of chaos, corruption, and moral degeneration. All three spaces are key to the construction of the novel's main (anti) romantic plot--the illicit and quasi-incestuous love affair between Renee and her stepson Maxime, a relationship that, in Zola's novelistic universe, encapsulates all the moral failures of the Second Empire. What makes the park, the cafe and the omnibus crucial to an understanding of the spatial economy of the novel is their liminality - each located on the cusp of the private and the public, the interior and the exterior, they thus capture the ambiguities and the complexities of nineteenth-century urban culture. In what follows, I will briefly sketch the historical context for each of the three spaces under consideration here, and will then show how Zola recasts and disorders the spaces of the park, the cafe and the omnibus in La Curee, charting instead his own alternative moral geographies of Paris. …

‘I no say you say is boring’: the development of pragmatic competence in L2 apology

Production of speech acts and the strategies akin to their production by foreign language learners are key to understanding the development of interlanguage pragmatics. The speech act of apology has received great attention in interlanguage pragmatic studies due to its frequent use in spoken communication and its pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic variations across languages and cultures. This study aimed to determine what strategies are used by EFL learners in the Iranian context to produce the speech act of apology. Data for the study were elicited through a written discourse completion task from two groups of lower- and higher-proficiency learners studying English at a language center. Consistent with many previous findings, the results revealed that when apologizing all participants considerably preferred “direct apology strategy” to other strategies. By contrast, the indirect strategies of “offering promise of forbearance” and “expressing concern for the hearer” were used the least frequently. The findings did not substantiate any meaningful effect on the appropriateness of EFL learners’ apologies in terms of their proficiency. This study suggests that (1) there is a gap between L2 learners' linguistic development and their pragmatic development, (2) incidental exposure to speech acts is not sufficient for pragmatic development, and (3) there is a need to increase EFL learners' pragmatic awareness.

Developmental pragmatics can be understood as growing the skills of using a language appropriately in context. In other words, it concerns the evolution of abilities to cope with the interplay between language, language users, and context. To become pragmatically competent, language users need to have linguistic resources, understand the context of interaction, and employ the resources in the context appropriately. This competence takes time to develop, which is the focus of developmental pragmatics research. Researchers in this field study how language users improve pragmatic competence over time or what contextual factors affect the development of pragmatic competence. Different points of time are the key to revealing the development of pragmatic competence and distinguishing developmental pragmatics from other subfields of pragmatics. These different points of time can be indicated by language users’ ages or language proficiency levels. Language users can develop their pragmatic competence in a first language or a second language. This article is organized around two broad topics—first language pragmatic development and second language pragmatic development. Under these two general topics are more specific subtopics about preverbal pragmatic development, development of conversation organization, communicative acts, pragmatic awareness, among others.

This manuscript reports the results of a research study that investigated the effect of a web-based tutorial (WBT) on 13 Spanish language learners’ pragmatic development during the semester prior to studying abroad in Spain. Students who anticipate living abroad with a host family may be particularly motivated to acquire pragmatic competence in order to better assimilate into the target language culture. The WBT was designed to teach the speech acts of complaints and requests to Spanish language learners whose first language is English. The content in the WBT is based upon available empirical evidence at the time of development. Data were collected at pretest and posttest and the analysis employed a mixed methods approach. The results revealed that the WBT was more effective with intermediate- than with novice-level learners of Spanish. In addition, learners’ comprehension gains were greater than their production gains. In other words, learners improved in their ability to recognize appropriate pragmatic strategy use; however, they still had difficulty producing pragmatically appropriate features after completing the WBT. It is possible that pragmatic awareness may precede learners’ ability to use appropriate pragmatic strategies in their linguistic output.

Research has shown that being multilingual is a valuable asset for learning pragmatics. By adopting a multilingual turn perspective, this study investigates patterns of pragmatic development in the multilingual classroom setting of the Valencian Community in Spain, where English, Catalan and Spanish coexist. Participants were 313 learners of English and 15 teachers. Each learner wrote three argumentative essays over one academic year in three languages: English, Catalan and Spanish. A mixed method approach was followed to examine learning trajectories of two types of discourse-pragmatic markers: textual and interpersonal markers. Quantitative results revealed significant gains in the production of textual discourse-pragmatic markers in English, while interpersonal discourse-pragmatic markers followed an irregular pattern. Findings also revealed variations in discourse-pragmatic marker learning trajectories in English, Catalan and Spanish: learning trajectories in the minority language (Catalan) and the L3 (English) were more fluctuating and the patterns interacted with each other, which contrasted with the linear development found in the majority language (Spanish). Qualitative findings are discussed to illustrate how factors such as learners' pragmatic awareness, teachers’ practices and the sociolinguistic context of the study may interact in the process of pragmatic learning in the multilingual classroom.

The most important thing for any child in the preschool period is the formation of a completely coherent statement (ask questions, answer, explain, object or agree, etc.) because it is during this period that the foundations of his development are laid. Free communication is an integral part of the communicative function of the child with the people around him at all periods of his life and further into adulthood. Based on this, the problem of language development in general of preschool children with normal speech development and general underdevelopment of speech determines the relevance of the study. Insufficient coordination of the fingers of children with general speech underdevelopment is considered a feature of developing fine motor skills. Based on research and numerous surveys, the following pattern has been determined: if the development of fine motor skills is delayed, then the development of speech is inhibited, but general motor skills may be expected since the development of fine motor skills of the hands develops speech development. Plasticineography – helps to involve children in the educational process, increase vocabulary, learn sensory-aesthetic and the environment; educates attention, cleanliness and beauty, as well as a great opportunity to develop fine motor skills and prepare your hand for writing. Research and monitoring work include initial and intermediate diagnostics for the 2018-2019 academic year and the 2019-2020 academic year. In the 2018-2019 academic year, the plasticine method was not conducted as a lesson option. In the 2019-2020 academic year, 9 variable classes were held once every two weeks according to the methodological manual “Mektep zhasyna deyingі zhalpy til damuy zhetilmegen balalardyn shygarmashylyk kabiletin plasticineography adіsimen damytu”. The inclusion of a variable lesson had a beneficial effect on the vocabulary and attention of children. Children have become attentive and observant. By stimulating the centres of the brain responsible for fine motor skills, we increased the activity of the areas responsible for speech.

This paper reports on a longitudinal study that investigated how international students’ personal network mediated their pragmatic choices during studying abroad in China. Data were collected over a year through different ways, including Study Abroad Network Questionnaire, role-plays, retrospective verbal reports, ethnographic interviews and observation field notes. Findings showed that with respect to pragmatic performance, the students exercised their subjectivity to converge to or diverge from the native-speaker norms. The ethnographic accounts revealed that the changes in learners’ pragmatic choices were closely related to the composition and structure of their social network. Using two case learners, we highlighted that social network may work in synergy with pragmatic subjectivity to contribute to the trajectory changes over learners’ socialisation processes. We discussed how social network may serve as both a theoretical lens and an analytical tool for investigating pragmatic development in study-abroad contexts.

Introduction: This paper describes some of the features of family medicine consultations in one clinic in India. In the United Kingdom (UK) there is a significant difference in the success rate in the Royal College of General Practice postgraduate licensing assessment (MRCGP) between those doctors who graduated MBBS from overseas but who trained and work in the UK, and those who graduated in the UK. The reasons for this are not known, but are likely to be multifactorial. India is the country of origin of one of the largest groups of UK International Medical Graduates (IMGs) and some doctors from India feel that their difficulty in passing this exam is in part due to family medicine being performed differently in India. Methods: The reported experiences of family medicine trained doctors in India about contextual aspects of practice are explored through a thematic analysis of focus group and interviews. A conversation analysis of work done by talk-in-interaction in video recordings of actual family medicine consultations in India is also presented. Results and Discussion: The impact of family medicine training, or the lack of it, and Indian structural and societal norms in the practice of family medicine are considered. The Clinical Skills Assessment element of MRCGP (CSA) heavily emphasises talk as used in all three assessment domains - data gathering, clinical management and interpersonal skills. The phrase ‘interactional fluidity’ is coined for the marker of competence with talk that RCGP examiners seek. This has implications in a high-stakes, yet simulated, assessment for those consulting in a second language. Using a model that differentiates between ‘core business work talk’, ‘work-related talk’ and ‘small talk’, the talk from video-recorded real-life consultations in India will be analysed. The risk of UK examiners mistaking unfamiliar patterns of talk for lack of medical competence is discussed. Conclusion: The differential attainment of IMGs has been described for some time and this paper aims to move the discussion on to potential training interventions in response.

A crucial part of language competency is understanding social interactions to extract pertinent semantic cues in any expression's implied meaning besides grammatical and strategic competencies (Taguchi, 2011). Teaching of pragmatics is around 40 year older concept (Chen, 2011) while it is teachable (Bardovi,1999). The purpose of any language is communication (Locke, 1975) and avoiding face-threatening responses. Penelope (1987) elaborates on ways that are used to develop positive social interaction. Politeness theory is based on the concept of "face," which refers to a person's sense of self-esteem. Penelope’s (1987) “Politeness Theory” has been used in this study as a guiding theoretical framework. A mixed method approach has been adopted for getting real insight into the matter as the development of pragmatics. The study aims to find out the better way of teaching pragmatics and the impact of implicit and explicit teaching on the pragmatic production and awareness of communicative competence (Glaser, 2009).