Second Language Pragmatics

This study examines the respective influence of three factors on the realization of requests by Japanese EFL learners in high-imposition situations. These three factors were the Length of Stay in an English-Speaking Environment, the use of Syntactic Downgraders and the use of Lexical Downgraders. Request realizations in four different situations on a Discourse Completion Test were judged for appropriacy by a native speaker. These appropriacy scores were compared with each of the three independent variables above. It could be seen that all three factors had a significant effect on the appropriacy of requests. Qualitative analysis of the data, in which the requests of JEFLLs were compared with those of NSs, showed that JEFLLs used a limited range of syntactic downgraders and very few lexical downgraders at all, other than 'please', which was shown to be an ineffective downgrader as compared to other lexical downgraders. Conclusions could be drawn from this, concerning the positive effect of spending an extended period of time (more than three months) in an ESE, and also concerning the need for a greater variety of syntactic and, in particular, lexical downgraders to be included in teaching materials and explicit teacher input in the classroom.

Theoretical, empirical, and practical interest in pragmatic competence and development for second language (L2) learners has resulted in a large body of literature on teaching L2 pragmatics. This body of literature has diverged into two major domains: (a) a group of experimental studies directly testing the efficacy of various instructional methods in pragmatics learning and (b) research that explores optimal instructional practice and resources for pragmatic development in formal classroom settings. This article reviews literature in these two domains and aims at providing a collective view of the available options for pragmatics teaching and the ways that pragmatic development can best be promoted in the classroom. In the area of instructional intervention, this article reviews studies under the common theoretical second language acquisition paradigms of explicit versus implicit instruction, input processing instruction, and skill acquisition and practice. In the area of classroom practice and resources, three domains of research and pedagogical practices are reviewed: material development and teacher education, learner strategies and autonomous learning, and incidental pragmatics learning in the classroom. Finally, this article discusses unique challenges and opportunities that have been embraced by pragmatics teaching in the current era of poststructuralism and multiculturalism.

Pragmatics plays a fundamental role in mediating meaning and facilitating effective communication across cultural boundaries. This narrative review aims to examine the role of pragmatic competence in intercultural communication by synthesizing theoretical and empirical evidence from diverse contexts. Literature was systematically collected from databases including Scopus, PubMed, and Google Scholar using keywords such as “intercultural pragmatics,” “speech acts,” and “pragmatic competence.” Studies were included based on relevance, methodological rigor, and empirical contribution, encompassing research from educational, professional, and societal settings. The results highlight five key themes: speech acts and politeness strategies, pragmatic failures and communication barriers, technology in pragmatic learning, cultural and religious pragmatics, and teacher and curriculum integration. Findings reveal that pragmatic competence is culturally contingent, with speech acts and politeness norms varying widely across societies. Pragmatic failures are shown to disrupt communication and, in high-stakes domains such as aviation and healthcare, may have critical consequences. Technology-enhanced learning, particularly through AI and gamification, demonstrates potential in fostering pragmatic competence, while culturally embedded expressions and religious idioms illustrate the importance of contextual awareness. The integration of pragmatics into teacher education and curricula emerges as essential for preparing learners to navigate intercultural interactions effectively. This review concludes that systemic reforms, policy innovations, and targeted pedagogical strategies are required to address persistent gaps in pragmatic education. Future research should examine long-term pragmatic adaptation and digital communication contexts to further advance understanding and practice. These findings emphasize the urgent need for pragmatic competence as a core dimension of intercultural communication.

In this article, I discuss current research issues and practices in second language (L2) pragmatics research, focusing on how mixed methods are applied in the existing literature. The paper begins by introducing fundamental principles and three core mixed methods approaches, in each case synthesizing unique characteristics in terms of the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods and data interpretation. A critical review of different mixed methods approaches intends to help readers understand the strengths and weaknesses of each approach and make a principled decision. I then provide an overview of the recent trend in applying mixed methods in L2 pragmatics research, examining research purposes and the type of mixed methods designs utilized. I also offer an in-depth discussion of exemplary L2 pragmatics research that employed mixed methods focusing on underlying rationales for using the mixed methods and ways to achieve high degrees of integration at various stages of the study. The paper concludes with challenges in applying mixed methods and suggestions on how to advance the current practice of mixed methods in L2 pragmatics in future research.

The field of language teaching and curriculum development has been characterized by its constant development, with a concomitant impact on the quality of education and training. The drive is mostly due to the rapidly changing world characterized by globalization and the result of openings on other fields of research. One area that has informed this field is the teaching of L2 pragmatic competence, with the commonly expressed generalization being that there is a gap between what research in pragmatics has found and how language is generally taught today (Ishihara & Cohen, 2010). On this view, this paper purports to investigate the role of pragmatic competence in the teaching of English. We provide evidence that language proficiency should not only be equated with grammatical well-formedness, but also with how to use it appropriately and efficiently in the target language. This being the case, however, we will show that the implementation of this view is far from being easy, especially in a trend that has for long been characterized by a focus on the grammatical competence, both in terms of training and curriculum design. This is paired with a similar difficulty in terms of how to translate the pragmatically-based approach into L2 classroom practices and how to identify modes of assessment. Addressing these issues, we believe, will shed light on some of the challenges and implications on the teaching of English along with the applicability of the suggested approach to the current ELT reform in the Arab world in general and in Morocco in particular.

Requests by Australian learners of Indonesian

How language teachers can go beyond speech etiquette: Adapting L2 Russian coursebooks to improve pragmatic competence

This paper starts by giving a rationale for why there is value in explicitly teaching second-language (L2) learners pragmatics in the target language. The importance of a research basis for choosing pragmatic materials to teach is underscored, and the focus is put on sources for materials on pragmatics and the means of data collection. Issues in the teaching of pragmatics are considered, including determining which material to teach, how to prepare teachers to teach it, and the role of teachers in facilitating the learning of pragmatics. Next, L2 pragmatics is viewed from the learners' perspective, in terms of the learning and performance of pragmatics, as well as approaches to assessing what it is that learners are able to do in a pragmatically appropriate way. Finally, consideration is given to the role of technology in making pragmatics accessible to learners, with reference to a website for teachers and curriculum writers and to websites designed for learners of specific languages such as Japanese and Spanish. Recent work on virtual environments for practicing Spanish pragmatics is discussed and preliminary findings from a small-scale study of this effort are reported.

The question of “how second languages are learned” (Gass & Selinker 1994:1) is central to second language acquisition (SLA) research; however, although a number of longitudinal studies have been carried out examining second language (L2) grammatical development, very little attention has been devoted to L2 learners' development of pragmatic competence over time. As Achiba points out, the majority of previous studies on L2 (or interlanguage) pragmatics have observed the single-moment pragmatic realization of a group of L2 learners with similar proficiency levels and compared it with that of native speakers or L2 learners with different proficiency levels or first language (L1) backgrounds. The current paucity of knowledge regarding the developmental aspect of L2 pragmatic competence has led to calls for detailed longitudinal interlanguage pragmatic studies (cf. Kasper & Schmidt 1996, Kasper & Rose 1999). Achiba's study, which carefully observes the pragmatic development in English requestive realization of a seven-year-old Japanese girl over a period of 17 months, certainly meets these essential needs.

Pragmatic Competence Between langue and langage. Some Linguistic Remarks on Teaching/ Learning Pragmatics in a Second Language

Request teaching has been a hot topic in interlangauge pragmatics and second language acquisition. Learning pragmatics is an important task for language learners to be a competent second language speaker. And pragmatic competence is as important as linguistic competence for a foreign language learner, it’s important for teacher to enhance the students’ awareness of speech.

Background:Obtaining the right image dataset for the medical image research systematically is a tedious task. Anatomy segmentation is the key step before extracting the radiomic features from these images. Objective:The purpose of the study was to segment the 3D colon from CT images and to measure the smaller polyps using image processing techniques. This require huge number of samples for statistical analysis. Our objective was to systematically classify and arrange the dataset based on the parameters of interest so that the empirical testing becomes easier in medical image research. Materials and Methods:This paper discusses a systematic approach of data collection and analysis before using it for empirical testing. In this research the image were considered from National Cancer Institute (NCI). TCIA from NCI has a vast collection of diagnostic quality images for the research community. These datasets were classified before empirical testing of the research objectives. The images in the TCIA collection were acquired as per the standard protocol defined by the American College of Radiology. Patients in the age group of 50-80 years were involved in various clinical trials (multicenter). The dataset collection has more than 10 billion of DICOM images of various anatomies. In this study, the number of samples considered for empirical testing was 300 (n) acquired from both supine and prone positions. The datasets were classified based on the parameters of interest. The classified dataset makes the dataset selection easier during empirical testing. The images were validated for the data completeness as per the DICOM standard of the 2020b version. A case study of CT Colonography dataset is discussed. Conclusion:With this systematic approach of data collection and classification, analysis will be become more easier during empirical testing.

The field of instructed SLA (ISLA) has grown rapidly in recent years to examine how systematic manipulations of instructional conditions can lead to the development of second language (L2) knowledge and use (Loewen & Sato, 2017). Following this trend, L2 pragmatics researchers have implemented various instructional methods and examined their effectiveness using experimental designs (Taguchi, 2015; Taguchi & Roever, 2017). The critical issue in this practice is how to assess learning outcomes in order to make a claim that certain instructional methods can produce robust pragmatic knowledge. To address this question, this chapter presents an overview of assessment methods used in analyzing pragmatics learning outcomes. The chapter surveys instructed L2 pragmatics studies published in the last four decades to identify common assessment methods (i.e., discourse completion tasks and role-play tasks). We provide step-by-step illustrations of expert studies in order to demonstrate how researchers design an assessment task, evaluate learning, and interpret results. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the challenges and limitations of current methods and provides direction for addressing such challenges in pragmatics research.

Abstract: The issue of EFL teachers� rating criteria and patterns in Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) assessment is new and needs rigorous analysis. The purpose of this study was to reveal important variables such as raters� criteria and rating patterns by analyzing the ILP assessment process of Iranian non-native English speaking raters (NNESRs) of both high and low proficiency levels based on the request speech act. The data for this study was collected through a discourse completion test (DCT) and a rating questionnaire from 40 Iranian EFL teachers and were later analyzed through descriptive analysis-test and chi-squares. The results showed that raters considered 9 criteria, including pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic components of language which raters noted differently through eight request situations. The results showed that raters considered nine criteria, including pragma linguistic and socio-pragmatic components of language which were noted differently through eight request situations. Among the considered criteria, the highest frequencies belonged to the criteria of authenticity, query of preparatory and softness, and interlocutors� relationship used by high proficiency teachers, whereas low proficiency teachers used the highest frequencies of accuracy, style, and directness. The result of the study can have important connotations for teachers to consider teaching L2 pragmatics in language classes and in teacher training courses.Keywords: Interlanguage pragmatics; request; speech act; pragmatic assessment.

This case study examines the development of a general analytical inductive approach to qualitative research. It critically assesses the research design and analytical processes that have facilitated the development of a framework for understanding the development of collaborative partnerships between Business Schools and Industry. I have adopted an interpretivist approach which according to Gill and Johnson is about understanding (verstehen) how people make sense of their world. The research design follows Thomas, and the outcomes of this case study demonstrate how an analytical inductive analysis, one that refers to detailed readings and interpretations of raw data, can be rigorously used in order to drive the identification of concepts, themes, and models. In developing the analytical approach, I gathered data from both University Business School and firms; I transcribed and analyzed 24 interviews, which led me to produce a provisional list of common features. I established the similarities between categories and accommodated deviant features either by linking them with other common features or by generating a new category with unique features. Eventually, I did cross case analysis within the groups and between groups at the Business School and firms. A number of themes emerged which form the basis of a proposed model for initiating collaboration, one linked with Vangen and Huxham's 'trust building loop'. Through a practical application of the research design, data collection and analytical approach, this case study demonstrates the credibility of a general analytical inductive research strategy based on a qualitative research methodology; a strategy that promotes the linking of theory and practice. The benefits from the research are seen as facilitating the development of effective business relationships between local universities and domestic firms.