to demonstrate refusal strategies in their successful instructional treatment, and Bagherkazemi (2014) found an improvement in learners’ productions of apologies, requests, and refusals following manipulation of materials from the series Lost and Friends and the movie Doubt. Some implicit feedback in the form of recasts has also been shown to be effective in teaching L2 speech acts (Koike & Pearson, 2005; Martínez-Flor & Fukuya, 2005) and also in improving learners’ confidence in their pragmatic skills (Martínez-Flor, 2006). To a much lesser degree, other areas of pragmatics that have been investigated with regard to instruction include the use of hedging devices, discourse and interactional markers, indirect speech acts, and implicature. As we address these different areas of pragmatics in the following chapters, we’ll look more at what kind of instruction has been used and shown to be effective.
There may also be some drawbacks to classroom instruction. Compared to outside the classroom where learners will engage in multiple roles and relationships with others, the classroom is a far more confined environment with a strict social hierarchy in which much of the discourse is managed by the teacher. This can result in classroom-induced errors (Stenson, 1983). For example, Kitao (1990) reports that Japanese learners rated the request strategy will you? as more polite and used it more often than native speakers did and suggests that this is the result of EFL classroom instruction. Wilkinson (2002) found a similar effect with American study abroad students when they were interacting with their French family hosts. She found a number of examples of sequences that mirrored classroom IRF exchanges (i.e., Initiation–Response–Evaluation) that reflected the “omnipresence of instructional norms” (p. 168) despite the homestay context.
There is also a perennial debate as to whether some things, such as cursing or other kinds of taboo language, should form part of a classroom curriculum (see also Chapter 5 on impoliteness). Traditionally eschewed from language syllabi, more recently, teacher-researchers have begun their own debates regarding whether they want to specifically address these things. Mercury (1995) argues for the importance of assisting ESL learners in their comprehension but not necessarily production of obscene language largely for sociolinguistic purposes:
There is much for ESL students to learn about the social forces behind swearing in English and among English speakers. It is useful still if students only learn to understand for practical reasons why a speaker would choose to use obscenities and when she or he would choose not to.
(p. 29)
Dewaele (2008) also adds a note of caution with regard to production. Following his use of a swearword in his L4 that was not accepted by his native speaker interlocutors, he notes that “My first thought was that this was unfair. I later realized that L2 users do not enjoy the same pragmatic freedom as [native speakers]” (p. 252). Horan (2013) discusses some of the same issues in a foreign language learning context and also addresses production by referencing a number of materials that teachers can find to address the topic.
2.4 Is There a Developmental Path for Pragmatics?
The gold standard for describing a possible developmental path in pragmatic competence is longitudinal data. Perhaps the most famous early study of this nature is Schmidt (1983) who undertook a three-year study of Wes, a 33-year-old native speaker of Japanese. Schmidt focused on Wes’s development of directives (a set of speech acts that includes orders, requests, and suggestions). Initially Wes relied heavily on formulaic utterances or fixed expressions (e.g., I’ll have X, Can I have X, Shall we X). As his language developed, one way in which it showed was an elaboration of these initial patterns, for example, OK, if you have time please send two handbag, but if you’re too busy, forget it (p. 154), and he was also more confident in producing face-threatening acts such as complaints, for example, excuse me, this milk is no good, sour I think (p. 154). However, issues remained when he began parsing out these formulaic phrases that then led to problematic utterances, for example, if you back to room, can I bring cigarette? (“please bring me a cigarette”) (p. 155). Although longitudinal studies continue to be rare in comparison to cross-sectional research, more recent studies have agreed with Schmidt’s original findings that learners initially stick to routinized utterances and unanalyzed chunks to express meaning (Taguchi, 2010).
With regard to request development specifically, Kasper and Rose (2002) compiled the results of studies to suggest a five-stage development of requests that expands from a formulaic stage to a gradual “pragmatic expansion” in which new forms are added and more complex linguistic patterns are employed and expanded beyond a one-to-one mapping between specific forms and specific functions. Although it is unclear precisely how grammatical and pragmatic competence map onto each other, it seems clear that a certain level of grammatical competence is required (although that can vary considerably, see Bardovi-Harlig, 2013; Yang, 2016). Focusing again on request strategies, Cook and Liddicoat (2002) used a multiple choice questionnaire to assess low- and high-proficiency learners’ interpretation of direct and indirect requests. There was a significant difference between the two groups of learners in their ability to process the context and form of indirect requests, and lower proficiency learners relied more heavily on linguistic knowledge (i.e., bottom-up linguistic knowledge) to interpret the requests. That said, the converse does not appear to be true: a higher level of grammatical competence does not guarantee an equally high level of pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003; Mirzaei & Esmaeili, 2013). This is particularly the case with pragmatic areas other than speech acts. Exposure to nonliteral meaning such as implicature, for example, has not been shown to necessarily enhance acquisition of this pragmatic concept (Bouton, 1994). We will come back to this in Chapter 4.
Other areas of pragmatic development that have been investigated, beyond speech acts, include a variety of conversational features including adjacency pairs (see Section 8.1.2), topic management, and interactional markers. For example, in a relatively early longitudinal study of interactional markers, Sawyer (1992) traced the development of the Japanese sentence-final particle ne by JSL learners over one year in an immersion environment through semi-structured interviews. Ne is described as a sentence final particle that indicates very generally a seeking of confirmation from the hearer or a rapport marker signaling expectation of common ground. As with other pragmatic phenomena, it always occurred initially as part of fixed phrases learned as formulaic chunks. However, it was developed later and more inconsistently than other vocabulary items and the success of individual acquisition varied widely. We look more closely at interactional markers in Section 7.3.
A final area to be considered here is the impact of context of use in the development of pragmatics. Traditionally, this has been defined as the difference between ESL and EFL contexts (Rose, 1994); however, more recently it encompasses the manifestation of pragmatic phenomena in English as a Lingua Franca (House, 2010) and the pragmatic development of third-language or plurilingual users (Jordà, 2005). We will come to this in Chapter 11.
2.5 Is Acquisition of Pragmatics Different for L2 Child and Adult Learners?
The answer to this is yes, to the extent to which the language acquisition experience of adults and children is always different. On the one hand, Kasper and Rose (1999, p. 87) argue quite rightly that L2 speakers of any age when engaging in a similar action in any language “will rely on the same strategies to perform such an action.” For example, an L2 child understands the function of a request and will learn to use the L2 to perform that function as far as their grammatical proficiency allows. However, adults understand the societal value of politeness markers in a way that children do not (Wildner-Bassett, 1994). In other words, they are very aware of the importance of sociopragmatic work and so will piece together routine formulas or coin new ones in order to meet this perceived requirement, for example, I very appreciate/I never forget you kindness (Kasper, 2001,
