Study Of Interlanguage Pragmatics Research Articles

FUNCTIONS OF THE PRAGMATIC MARKER LIKE IN ENGLISH AND HOW MACEDONIAN LEARNERS VIEW IT

The study presented in this paper is a part of the research project “Developing cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research and its practical implications” currently being implemented at Goce Delchev University in Shtip, Republic of North Macedonia. This project was partly motivated by the small number of studies in Macedonia on interlanguage pragmatics as well as by the growing need for development of new research methods. In compliance with the above, the objectives of thе project are as follows: 1. increase of the pool of cross-cultural, intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics studies; 2. development of modern methods for data collection and analysis; and 3. linking empirical research with educational and communication needs in the society. This paper in particular investigates the use of the pragmatic marker like by Macedonian learners of English. Two research questions have been posed: 1. What functions do MLE of English associate with like? and 2. How do they view speakers who use it? The standard for comparison for the first question is the native speakers’ usage of like as described in other studies. The second question was answered on the basis of an attitudinal questionnaire. The attitudinal questionnaire asked the participants to express their perception of like with respect to the age and gender of the speakers, formality of the situation, grammaticality, acceptability, distractiveness, and politeness of the utterances. They also rated users for fluency and their level of English. The participants were also asked to explain if they use like in a similar way and for what purposes as well as how they learned it. The attitudinal survey was adapted from Dailey-O'Cain (2000). The examples, however, are from my data. The participants of this study were 40 students of English enrolled at the Department of English language at Goce Delchev University, Shtip, age 19 to 25. Most of them were at B2, C1 or C2 level of English. All participants learned English for at least five years in primary school and four years at high school, which means they had English as a subject up to their graduation from high school. Very few of the students had been to an English speaking country. The findings of this investigation show that the pragmatic marker like is salient for the learners and that they use it in a similar way as native speakers. However, it is stigmatized and most learners view it negatively. Additionally, other factors that influence its usage were identified. Further research may investigate whether the use of like is influenced by the proficiency levels of English and whether a longer stay in an English speaking country influences the use of like. It would be also useful to investigate other pragmatic markers and see how they are used in learner English.

English language learners’ spoken interaction: What a multimodal perspective reveals about pragmatic competence

Broadly speaking, pragmatic competence can be defined as the ability to communicate appropriately in a social context. Learning how to use pragmatic features adequately in a particular setting is paramount for language users in order to achieve communicative purposes effectively. However, since communication involves the interplay of various semiotic modes such as spoken language, gestures, facial expression, head movement or gaze, researchers examining face-to-face interaction should go a step further to explore pragmatic competence from a multimodal perspective, which leads them to focus on multimodal pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to show how a multimodal approach can shed some light in the study of interlanguage pragmatics. We conducted a microanalysis of the performance of learners of English as an additional language at two different proficiency levels, who produced complaint sequences. Results suggest that spoken language is just one of the resources that learners use during the interaction, which is not always prevalent in all the moves in which the complaint is structured, the different roles, and the proficiency levels under examination. This confirms that the centrality of the linguistic mode in the analysis of this speech act will lead to a biased understanding of the interlanguage pragmatic competence.

Expressions of gratitude in corpus and DCT data: Vocabulary, formulaic sequences, and pedagogy

Our study explores the similarities and differences between a discourse completion task (DCT) and corpus data and discusses potential implications for using the two in a pedagogic context. The DCT has traditionally been used an instrument for the study of interlanguage pragmatics while both spoken and written corpora have mainly been used to facilitate language description. Corpora also have a place in the language-teaching context as they can provide the learner with patterns of language use in social interactions some of which are not open to intuition. By contrasting native speakers’ expressions of gratitude elicited by a DCT with those found in a five million word corpus of spoken English, we examine the advantages and disadvantages of both data sets with regard to the language-teaching context. The results suggest that a combined use of both instruments might aid the teaching of formulaic sequences in the classroom.

Terminology in Interlanguage Pragmatics

AbstractInter language pragmatics research has spanned a number of different areas in second language acquisition and pragmatics. In the large corpus of interlanguage pragmatics studies, basic terms such as “interlanguage pragmatics”, “speech acts” and “pragmatic transfer” have been referred to more often than not. But rarely have we stopped to re-evaluate the applicability and appropriateness of these terms. This paper aims to properly interpret or redefine their meanings and to propose more appropriate terms where possible.

Exploring the Interlanguage of Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Research Agenda for Acquisitional Pragmatics

G. Kasper and R. Schmidt (1996) have argued that the field of investigation known as interlanguage pragmatics has been essentially modelled on cross‐cultural pragmatics. Taking Kasper and Schmidt's argument one step further, this article shows how interlanguage itself has been ignored in research on interlanguage pragmatics. Research has not established that pragmatic competence is independent of grammatical competence. Although grammatical competence may not be a sufficient condition for pragmatic development, it may be a necessary condition. I outline a research agenda in which the study of interlanguage becomes more central to the study of interlanguage pragmatics.

Developmental Issues in Interlanguage Pragmatics

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics that shed light on some basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories that might offer explanations of different aspects of pragmatic development, and proposing a research agenda for the study of interlanguage pragmatics with a developmental perspective that will tie it more closely to other areas of SLA.

The Development of Pragmatic Competence

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in inter-language pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this talk is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics that shed light on some basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories that might offer explanations of different aspeas of pragmatic development, and proposing a research agenda for the study of interlanguage pragmatics with a developmental perspective that will tie it more closely to other areas of SLA.