Pragmatic Competence

The issue of whether polite language usage should be taught in a foreign language classroom is actually preceded by the equally complex question of what gestures, language strategies, or attitudes represent politeness for a given culture. While many may view politeness as a conceptual, or even ideological matter, it can also be interpreted as an opportunity to translate daily practice and customs into an essential classroom exercise. In the course of my work as an educator of Hungarian as a Second Language and researcher in the field of empirical pragmatic linguistics, it is rather the latter aspects of these questions – those pertaining to the instruction of foreign language students in the nuances of how Hungarian culture constructs politeness – that have fueled and continue to fuel my interest.

Este estudio investiga la producción a través del role-play de tres actos de habla en español por parte de tres grupos diferentes de hablantes: nativos de español, nativos de inglés con un nivel avanzado de español, y nativos de inglés con un nivel intermedio de español. Se han tenido en cuenta variables como el nivel de los estudiantes, su experiencia en el extranjero, cuántos años llevaban estudiando la lengua o su propia autopercepción del nivel que tienen. Las transcripciones de los 108 vídeos grabados se han clasificado de acuerdo con los tres actos de habla, los tres grupos, y las estrategias de acción y reacción de cada acto de habla que habían establecido investigaciones anteriores.
Los resultados muestran que los grupos difieren entre sí tanto en la interpretación de cada uno de estos actos de habla como en las estrategias utilizadas para producirlos y reaccionar a ellos, tanto verbal como gestualmente, demostrando así que la competencia pragmática no se ha adquirido al mismo nivel que la competencia gramatical en los estudiantes del grupo avanzado. Se ha podido observar, pues, transferencia negativa tanto en las estrategias utilizadas, como en la extensión y el número de los turnos producidos en los grupos de hablantes no nativos.
Como producto final, además de esta tesis, se ha creado un corpus multimodal al cual tanto investigadores como profesores y alumnos podrán acceder fácilmente a través de internet para poder trabajar con los vídeos y sus transcripciones, las cuales pueden ser descargadas fácilmente.

Palabras clave: corpus, corpus multimodal, pragmática, actos de habla, competencia pragmática, lenguaje no verbal, ELE, adquisición de segundas lenguas, adquisición de lenguas extranjeras, SLA, FLA, FTA, actos amenazantes para la imagen, pragmática intercultural, pragmática sociocognitiva, sociolingüística, rechazo, cumplido, disculpa.

The appropriate use of pragmatic markers – non-propositional well, you know, of course, etc. – is necessary for
successful business communication (which is, for the most part, cross-cultural communication), however,
pragmatic markers take a back seat in TEFL, TESL, and most notably, in TESP contexts. In our paper we will,
first of all, discuss the major issues related to the concept of communicative competence as well as the role of
PMs in shaping EFL and ESL speakers’ communicative competence. Next, some remarks will be made about the
possible sources of the difficulties that may hinder the acquisition and/or learning of PMs, finally, the results of a
case study will be presented, which aimed at mapping the functional spectrum of PMs as they are used in
selected General Business English textbooks.

Effective cross-cultural communication requires awareness and acquaintance of target language cultural and pragmatic aspects. Nevertheless, insufficient attention is paid to the enhancement of cultural and pragmatic awareness in foreign language classrooms. The present study aims at investigating the status of cultural and pragmatic aspects in EFL and the significance of enhancing the cultural and pragmatic competence on the EFL students’ language proficiency to first year Master LMD students of English as a Foreign language at the department of English in University of Saida. Hence, it is supposed in this study that EFL students’ awareness should be consciously raised about cultural and pragmatic competence in the English language since students most probably fail to realize the contradistinction by themselves without explicit teaching and that EFL teachers do not give an equivalent significance for enhancing both of linguistic competence and cultural and pragmatic competence and both of EFL teachers and EFL students do not seem to adopt both cultural and pragmatic aspects in language learning. To verify the validity of these assumptions, we have conducted the main investigation that is divided into an experimental study about Pragmatics in foreign language teaching to first year Master LMD students in order to find out whether they have an prior knowledge about pragmatics or not, and two kinds of questionnaire; the teachers’ questionnaire and the students’ questionnaire. The first one is composed of fifteen questions and distributed to twelve teachers at the department of English in University of Saida. The second questionnaire consists of fifteen questions and distributed to fifty one first year Master (LMD) English students at the same department during the academic year 2018. The results and the findings of the study revealed that teachers do not give significance to enhance EFL students’ cultural and pragmatic competence in language teaching and learning.
Keywords: Cross-cultural Communication, Target Language, Cultural and Pragmatic Aspects, Language Proficiency, Cultural and Pragmatic Competence

The theme of the research is represented by the pragmatic competence in the process of learning English as a foreign language, with a particularization on the EFL textbooks in Romania.My thesis starts from the goal of analyzing the importance of achieving pragmatic competence in order to become communicatively successful, especially in what regards oral interaction, and the means which facilitate the development of pragmatic competence provided by the Romanian EFL textbooks. The main reasons for tackling this problematics are: the necessity of developing communication abilities in foreign languages and the lack of coherence regarding the theoretical conceptualizations of language teaching/learning process. The second chapter of my paper is meant to define the skills required of a learner in order to achieve pragmatic competence. In order to attain that objective I analyze the provisions of the Common European Framework of Reference of Languages (CEFRL) Chapter 3 is envisioned as to draw an outline of the elements intended to help the learner acquire pragmatic competence as designed by the Romanian curriculum and the textbooks available.

The translator must have a sort of competencies to carry out his work, namely: linguistic competence, communicative competence, organizational competence, syntactic competence, textual competence, pragmatic competence, cultural or encyclopedic competence, ideological competence and methodological competence.

This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English majors (NEM). It then explores whether the assessments of three situational factors: assessments of social distance, power and rank of imposition, either alone or combined, has a statistically significant effect on the choice of requestive strategies by the two groups. In reference to some existing similar research, the paper argues that both groups under study seemed to exhibit inadequate sociopragmatic competence and pragmalinguistic knowledge. The study thus sheds some light on Interlanguage Pragmatics research on the Chinese EFL context. The paper finally offers some pedagogical implications in foreign language settings.

Speech acts are considered to be one of the principal components of pragmatic competence. The need for language learners to use speech act of request that involves a series of strategies was the significance of the study. The participants of the study were 60 Turkish EFL students (30 experimental / 30 control group) studying at the English Preparatory School of Munzur University, Tunceli, Turkey. The data were collected through Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT) and analysed based on the framework of Taguchi (2006) and the Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) conducted by Blum-Kulka et al. (1987) by using descriptive statistics. Findings of the current study revealed that even though both groups used most of the strategies proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) in the CCSARP Coding Manual, the distribution of the strategies differed across the two groups.
Keywords: Pragmatics, Pragmatic competence, Speech Acts, Speech Act of Request

Le mémoire vise à envisager l’entrée dans l’écrit d’un public adulte et hétérogène par le
biais de la production d’un document iconique. Dans le cadre de la formation linguistique
dispensée par l’association Frate formation conseil, ce dispositif a comme objectif la
création d’une affiche de prévention liée à l’égalité femmes/hommes.
La démarche choisie est celle de la recherche-action. La première partie consiste à
présenter terrain de la formation, la deuxième un approfondissement des notions clés
comme les besoins en contexte d’intégration linguistique, l’importance des écrits sociaux
en tant qu’objet de littératie et d’interaction et la composante pragmatique et
compositionnelle de l’affiche de prévention comme cadre d’une entrée dans l’écrit par les
genres du discours. Les modalités d’accès à la production d’un écrit iconique se réalisera
par le biais d’un travail collaboratif.

When engaging in verbal communication, we do not simply use language to dispense information, but also to perform a plethora of actions, some of which depend on conventionalised, recurrent linguistic structures. Additionally, we must be skilled enough to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. However, speakers' performance may deviate from certain habits and expectations concerning the way(s) of speaking or accomplishing actions, while various factors may hinder comprehension, which may give rise to misappraisals of their respective abilities and capacities as competent language users. This paper discusses whether such misappraisals may be subsumed by any of the already identified types of epistemic injustice and proposes a new label for them. It also describes the consequences of those misappraisals and approaches their origins from a cognitive perspective.

Chomsky’s generative paradigm has swept through and informed linguistic research and hence all linguistic subfields. The field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) has not been exempted from this ostensible invasion. Yet, research conducted within this new paradigm has focused only on exploring and teaching formal grammatical forms; other components of linguistic competence, namely Pragmatics, have been pushed to the edges. More recently (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper, 1992; Ishihara & Cohen, 2010 among others), however, a growing interest in the effects of culture and native language on the development of the learners’ L2 has brought into focus the fact that for non-native speakers/ L2 learners to achieve a fully-fledged competence in the target language, they have, of necessity, to consider the sociocultural and pragmatic aspects of the target language. For this reason, the present paper is couched within the area of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), the aim being to address the issue of the role of pragmatic competence in SLA in general and, more particularly, in a Moroccan EFL context. Conducted within the framework of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), this study, then, purports to investigate the issue of pragmatic transfer from L1 into the Interlanguage of Moroccan learners of English, particularly when these learners make requests in English. The two main hypotheses that the present paper attempts to defend are: (i) pragmatic transfer is observable in the English requests produced by Moroccan learners of English, both from a Pragmalinguistic and Sociopragmatic perspective; (ii) L2 pragmatic competence acquisition is still wanting among Moroccan advanced students. The participants involved in this study are Moroccan university learners of English (second year and third year) and native speakers of English whose production of the speech act of request is compared. Finally, this study will further attempt to explore whether or not formal education plays a role in pragmatic competence. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications.

Professionalism in communication is a matter of concern for speakers of all languages. Awareness about some features such as face-threatening property of refusal speech acts leads language users to apply some specific linguistic forms. Considering the significance of cultural and social variations in performing refusal speech acts and the importance of preserving "face", this study tried to find differences between native-Persian and English speakers. To collect the data, 60 native Persian and English speakers were asked to complete a two-phase questionnaire, a discourse completions test (DCT) and a self-report, including four different situations and Beebe's classification of refusals, was used. Great tendency toward using indirect forms between both Persian and English participants was taken as an indicator of noticeable consideration of face-preserving in refusals, although Persian speakers seemed more concerned about it. The differences between two groups of participants were inferred as cultural variations' reflection. Some implications for language teaching were discussed.

The present study investigated pragmatic transfer in the refusals of advanced Saudi learners of English as a foreign language (SEFL) in terms of the frequency and content of the emantic formulas, and whether their refusals correspond more to those of Saudi native speakers of Arabic (NSA) or native speakers of English (NSE). A total of 45 female subjects participated in the study and were divided into three groups: advanced SEFL as the target group (n = 15), NSA as a baseline data group (n = 15), and NSE as a baseline data group (n = 15). The study employed a mixed-method data collection approach consisting of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and semi-structured interviews. The collected data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively using the chi-square test and descriptive statistics. The results of the study revealed that pragmatic transfer was evident in the refusals of the SEFL group in both the frequency and content of semantic formulas. Moreover, the SEFL group’s realization of the speech act of refusal corresponded more to the NSA group than the NSE group. The analysis revealed that the SEFL group’s use of the direct refusal strategies, indirect refusal strategies, and adjuncts to refusals either resembled or approximated the NSA group’s use of the strategies to refuse all of the four stimulus types: requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. Both the SEFL and NSA groups used the direct refusal strategies in a similar pattern; they used the direct strategies significantly less with interlocutors of a lower and higher social status, and significantly more with interlocutors of an equal social status. Furthermore, the content of the semantic formulas used by the SEFL group corresponded more to the content of the semantic formulas used by the NSA group in terms of the degree of specificity and the choice of the type of specific excuses. The SEFL group significantly approximated the NSA group’s use of both specific and unspecific excuses; they used three categories of specific excuses in a similar frequency: family, health, and personal preferences or needs.

Many language teachers recognise the importance of integrating intercultural learning into language learning, but how this can be best achieved is not always apparent. This is particularly the case in foreign language learning contexts where teachers are working with a prescribed textbook and opportunities to use the language outside the classroom are limited. This book argues that teachers can work creatively with conventional resources and utilise classroom experiences in order to help learners interpret aspects of communication in insightful ways and develop awareness of the influence of cultural assumptions and values on language use. The book provides extensive analysis of a range of classroom interactions to demonstrate how teachers and learners can work together to construct opportunities for intercultural learning through reflection on pragmatics.

AWEJ Vol.2 No. 4 .December 2011 pp.171-193
Raising Pragmatic Awareness of Students through Classroom Activities
Dr. S.Devaki Reddy
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Abstract
English Language curricula pay adequate attention to teaching and testing linguistic competence but often fail to give equal emphasis to pragmatic competence. Students with a high level of proficiency in English do not necessarily have the required level of communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980; Wiemann & Backlund, 1980; Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei, 1998). They are often unaware of the significance of politeness in verbal communication and the manner in which the choice of words, phrases and structure of sentences conveys politeness. Children acquiring their first language usually learn to communicate politely by observing their parents or caretakers using the language. Speakers of English as a second language, however, may not have adequate opportunities to learn about politeness norms in the language. It would be useful, therefore, to draw students‟ attention to polite ways of communicating in English. The paper describes some activities that were used in an English course, at a tertiary-level institute in India, to make students aware of the manner in which language can convey politeness or the lack of it, in communication.
Key words: politeness, pragmatic competence, face, requests, mitigating strategies

According to Kasper (1992), L2 pragmatic knowledge affects all communicative acts. It can be described as the speaker’s ability both to adapt linguistic formulae to social contextual constraints and to understand the implications of indirect utterances. The Common European Framework of Reference for languages (CEFR) describes pragmatic competence as an integral component of communicative language competence. It relates to “the functional use of linguistic resources, production of language functions, speech acts, drawing on scenarios or scripts of interactional exchanges; it also concerns the mastery of discourse, cohesion and coherence, the identification of text types and forms, irony and parody” (CEFR, 2001, p. 13). The present article aims at providing some useful examples of tasks created on the basis of language digital resources, such as language corpora, online forums, and communities where learners can observe language used in digital communication in order both to attain pragmatic knowledge and enhance their language skills. The proposed tasks were implemented in the Italian courses at B1/B2 level organised by the Faculty of Applied Linguistics at the University of Warsaw in the years 2014-2015. Such tasks constituted additional activities within a conversational module focused on developing communicative competence in which pragmatic abilities and sociocultural knowledge play a crucial role.

In this article, in order to study the identity issues involved in the development of pragmatic competence, we focused on the discourse that Iranian expatriates bring on their experience of intercultural communication in France. Firstly, the link between politeness and identity in a “discourse community” was investigated and the role played by conventionalized expressions to show one’s belonging to a social or cultural group was examined. Furthermore, the Lx socialization process and the issues involved in the development of bilingual pragmatic competence were also investigated. Finally, we examined the emergence of identity in the discourse of Iranians through their positioning towards the target culture.

This paper proposes a prototypic assessment tool for intercultural communicative competence. Because traditional discourse completion tasks (DCTs) focus on illocutionary competence rather than sociolinguistic competence, a modified version of a DCT was created to target sociolinguistic competence. The modified DCT employs speech acts as prompts and asks respondents to write about a situation in which a given speech act would be appropriate. This new tool is named a reverse discourse completion task (R-DCT). The task was given to learners of Turkish as a second language. Data from 12 participants were analyzed for their provision of sociopragmatic factors such as power, distance and imposition and also with respect to whether the situation was relevant to a given speech act. Responses from the participants show that R-DCTs can be used to assess intercultural competence as they help reveal respondents' knowledge of sociolinguistic context in which a given speech act may be appropriate. By removing the need for comparison with native speaker data and the limitations that emerge from the lack of linguistic formula at respondents' disposal, R-DCT is a promising elicitation task to assess sociolinguistic competence, an integral part of Byram's (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence.

The current study set out to explore the effect of two instructional strategies; i.e. explicit and implicit teaching on developing Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) upper-intermediate level learners' pragmatic knowledge of the two speech acts of thanking and compliment. To fulfill this objective, 46 freshmen undergraduate students of Sharif University of Technology (SUT) who had taken General English classes were asked to participate in this study. After going through five steps, a Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) consisting of 12 items on the speech act of compliment and 11 items on the thanking speech act was developed. Participants in the study consisted of two groups of explicit and implicit. After the eight-session instruction, they were given the newly developed MDCT to explore any probable improvements on their pragmatic knowledge. The results proved superiority of the explicit teaching over the implicit teaching regarding the two speech acts. Also in order to explore the relationship between grammatical and pragmatic competence of both groups, the correlation between the two scores was calculated and the results suggested that the correlation is not affected by applying explicit or implicit teaching of thanking and compliment formulas. However in a linear regression which was run to predict learners' grammatical competence by their ability to perform speech act formulas, thanking proved itself as a better predictor of grammatical competence.

While aptitude has been seen to contribute to second language (L2) development, most studies have examined its contribution as a fixed trait, rather than viewing it as a dynamic, changing variable. There appears to have been little or no investigation of the role that aptitude plays in the development of L2 pragmatic ability. Therefore, this study sought to investigate the contribution of L2 learning aptitude as measured by Grigorenko et al.’s (2000) CANAL-FT (The Cognitive Ability for Novelty in Acquisition of Language as Applied to Foreign Language Test) to L2 speech-act knowledge among 121 Iranian upper-intermediate to advanced level EFL learners. In addition, a multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) comprising three common English speech acts (Derakhshan, 2014) was administered to the participants. A multiple regression analysis revealed that all five components of CANAL-FT were significant predictors of L2 speech-act knowledge. The aptitude for learning sentential inferences was the strongest predictor, followed by the ability to acquire the meanings of the whole passage. The other three components of aptitude, namely, comprehending the meanings of contextualized neologisms, acquiring the language rules, and learning the meanings of paired associates, were found to be moderate predictors of L2 speech act knowledge. These results appeared to underscore the benefits of obtaining aptitude data on learners as a means for better understanding the dynamics of L2 development in the area of pragmatics.

In the pedagogy of language education, the importance of teaching English pragmatic competence has received considerable attention lately. As an attempt to contribute to literature in this field, this study investigated the importance of teaching pragmatic competence in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. It explored the extent to which Saudi EFL teachers implement pragmatic competence features in their daily classroom practice. It also identified the difficulties they encounter during classrooms procedures and practices. In order to achieve the study objectives, a mixed

In an insightful article published in Nature human behavior on November 2020, the effectiveness of 46 "non-pharmaceutical interventions" (NPI) regarding Covid-19 pandemic have been compared 1. One of these 46 categories, the one which is ranked as the most effective measure, is named "small gatherings cancelation". In the discussion section of that article, the authors introduce a list of what they probably assume to be representative examples of this category, namely, "closures of shops", "closure of restaurants," "mandatory home-working", "gathering of 50 people or less" and so on. The name that the authors have given to this category could give rise to confusions and misunderstandings. We used corpus analysis to show that "small gathering" is commonly used to denote a planned or spontaneous "event", and consequently does not convey what the authors intend this term to cover as its most representative instances i.e., Simultaneous presence of people (crowd) in shops or offices. Furthermore, taking a topdown approach, we focused on the information which was provided in reference material like CDC and WHO documents. The analysis showed that "small gatherings" is encoded in those sources to denote "events" and "small gatherings cancelation" is used to denote cancelling preplanned events. In conclusion, neither unspecialized language nor official/institutional discourse uses "small gathering" the way that the authors of the aforementioned article use it i.e., to refer to simultaneous presence of people (crowd) in shops or offices. Therefore, when language users come across this phrase, if they do not read the entire article, the only semantic frame that is evoked in their mind would be that of a festive or social "event" rather than of crowded shops or offices; this misunderstanding is cognitively justified and consequently changing this terminology is recommended.

The study compares how three groups of learners at different educational levels
in CLIL, post-CLIL and EFL classes modify their requests which were elicited by
means of a written discourse completion task with two situations (different power
relations). Data analysis is based on earlier request taxonomies (Alcón-Soler
et al. 2005; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), but the study also introduces new pragmatic
features that appeared in the learners’ data. Qualitative and quantitative differences
point to a duality in how learners use softening and aggravating request
modifications, attributed to insufficient sociopragmatic knowledge. Among
other finer results, the study shows that CLIL, as an educational approach, does
not necessarily contribute to enhancing learners’ pragmatic competence if seen
through the lens of making requests.

Since there have been few pragmatic studies, especially at the local level, that have dealt with the adolescents, and since the language and culture are inseperable, this study examines pragamtically requestive speech acts realizations patterns between English native and non-native adolescents in Dubai, UAE and Ismailia, Egypt. It looks at how the speech acts' requesting strategies differ across different cultures in terms of the social distance, size of imposition and power. It also looks at the types of politeness strategies, which could increase or decrease the degree of the imposion on the hearer(s), employed by the two groups in terms of the aforementioned sociolinguistic variables. The subjects of this study were divided into two groups. the first group consists of 30 English native adolescents from UK, US and Canada while the second group consists of

This exploratory study discusses findings pertaining to university students" pragmatic and intercultural communicative competence in the context of Uzbekistan. It begins with a brief review of the research literature related to pragmatics, and its corollary pragmatic success, initially reviewing studies conducted in various contexts in the past several decades. This is followed by a brief overview of university teaching context in Uzbekistan, a methodology for data collection and criteria for participants" selection. The article concludes with a brief discussion of findings and recommendations for further research. In particular, it highlights the necessity for incorporating explicit instruction of formal email writing in a target language at the tertiary level.

La competencia pragmática en español L2: un caso de inmigrantes rusohablantes en inmersión lingüística continua Olga Ivanova En este artículo nos centramos en el problema de la adquisición de la competencia pragmática en español L2. Tomando como punto de referencia a cuatro hablantes nativas del ruso en inmersión lingüística continua, estudiamos el componente pragmático de su competencia comunicativa en español. El objetivo principal de esta investigación es analizar, a base de conversaciones grabadas, el dominio de meca-nismos pragmáticos en L2 que presentan las hablantes con un nivel de conocimiento del español muy alto. Dado que se detectan varios errores pragmáticos-tipo que las hablantes encuestadas cometen en la ordenación del discurso en español L2, con el presente estudio bus-camos ofrecer una interpretación ontológica de los mismos para ha-cer avanzar la didáctica del español a extranjeros.
Palabras claves: competencia pragmática, competencia conversacional, hablante no nativo, error pragmático, ruso lengua materna, español segunda lengua.

Pragmatic competence in L2 Spanish: a case of Russian-speaking immigrants in full immersion. In this paper we focus on the problem of acquisition of pragmatic competence in L2 Spanish. We take as reference four native speakers of Russian in full immersion and study the pragmatic component of their communicative competence in Spanish language. The main aim of this research is to offer an analysis based on recorded conversations and dealing with how speakers with advanced competence in Spanish prove their command of pragmatic tools in L2. Since more than one type of pragmatic failures are observed in the target speakers' discourse in L2 Spanish, this work looks for offering their ontological interpretation in order to contribute to the fi eld of Didactics of Spanish as a Foreign Language.

This study aims at comparing the pragmatic competence of Turkish EFL Learners to that of native speakers of English when performing the speech acts of refusals. The study was conducted with 26 Turkish EFL Learners, who were junior year ELT students at Trakya University, and 10 Native Speakers of English. To elicit data, Discourse Completion Task was implemented and obtained data was analyzed with content analysis technique. The frequencies of formulaic refusal expressions applied by Turkish EFL Learners were compared to the ones of native speakers' of English by means of qualitative methods. The qualitative data gathered from participants revealed that the quality of the refusal strategies uttered by Turkish EFL Learners differed significantly from those made by the native speakers of English. Besides, it is apparent that the quality of linguistic and socio-pragmatic knowledge of Turkish EFL Learners is not native-like as they do not prefer appropriate refusal strategies used by native speakers of English.

This paper studies the pragmatic competence of U.S. heritage learners of Spanish in an attempt to determine (a) the degree of pragmatic transfer from English to Spanish experienced by heritage learners when producing different types of requests in Spanish; and (b) how to best teach pragmatics to students of Spanish as a Heritage Language (SHL). Additionally, the study compared the differences and similarities between the development of the pragmatic competence in SHL students and in students of Spanish as a second language (L2). Oral and written discourse completion tasks were used to assess requests in Spanish HL/L2 pragmatics. The results indicate that the pragmatic interventions only helped the Spanish L2 group, and that the Spanish HL group was already aware of the pragmatic principles that regulate requests in Spanish. Furthermore, no cases of negative pragmatic transfer were found in the Spanish HL data, so the study concluded that there is no need to teach heritage students pragmatic norms.

English hedges are common in native speakers’ communication, without hedges speakers may be perceived as unnatural or too direct. It has been thought that teacher talk is a means which can facilitate EFL learners’ awareness and use of English hedges. The questionnaire was used to investigate teachers’ perceptions of hedges and the significance of hedging in classroom instruction for developing learners’ pragmatic competence. The findings of the current study show that teachers have positive perceptions of the facilitative roles and pragmatic functions of English hedges. They believe  the significance of hedging in classroom instruction; however, they think that it is difficult to develop students’ pragmatic competence via teacher talk because there is a lack of context in classroom for hedging and whether or not teachers hedge in instructional language depends on teaching content and students’ proficiency level.

Two very important components of the concept of Communicative Competence are sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences. Since the advent of the Communicative Approach a lot of attention has been paid to the design and development of relevant teaching materials. This is especially important since in most of the language learning situations textbooks serve as one of the very few sources, in some cases as the only source of the target language. This article investigates two of the textbooks, from prominent publishing houses, in order to determine to what degree they focus on both competences. The findings are then summarized, analyzed and discussed.

English hedges are common in native speakers’ communication, without hedges speakers may be perceived as unnatural or too direct. It has been thought that teacher talk is a means which can facilitate EFL learners’ awareness and use of English hedges. The questionnaire was used to investigate teachers’ perceptions of hedges and the significance of hedging in classroom instruction for developing learners’ pragmatic competence. The findings of the current study show that teachers have positive perceptions of the facilitative roles and pragmatic functions of English hedges. They believe  the significance of hedging in classroom instruction; however, they think that it is difficult to develop students’ pragmatic competence via teacher talk because there is a lack of context in classroom for hedging and whether or not teachers hedge in instructional language depends on teaching content and students’ proficiency level.  Article visualizations:

The  aim  of  the  current  preliminary  study  is  to  explore  the  speech  act  of  thanking  in  formal  communicative  contexts.  More specifically, it investigates the possible differences in the expression  of  thanking  by  native  and  non-native  speakers  of  Greek.  Participants  were  thirty-one  (N=31)  learners  of  Greek  as  a  Second  Language  (L2)  at  five  different  proficiency  levels  (from  A2  to  C2)  enrolled  in  a  summer  intensive  course  of  Greek  in  Athens,  Greece.  In  addition,  a  group  of  native  speakers  of  Greek  (N=30)  was  recruited  as  a  baseline.  Oral  data  were  elicited  through  a  series  of  open  role  plays which represented three formal communicative situations with different  social  parameters.  A  retrospective  verbal  protocol  was  also  used with the L2 learner group. The analyses focused on the type and the  amount  of  strategies  used  by  the  two  groups.  Results  showed  a  difference in the type and number of strategies that these two groups employed.  Findings  also  seem  to  indicate  that  social  setting  and  direction  of  imposition  were  crucial  factors  for  the  performance  of  thanking by both groups. L2 learners’ performance was also affected by their familiarity with each situation

Pragmatic competence is one of the main components of communicative ability in a second language. Recently, a great deal of research has been done regarding the acquisition and teaching of pragmatics of Italian as a foreign language. However, resources and teaching materials dealing with this aspect of the Italian language are still very scarce. This article describes the experiences in creating an Italian online language course, focusing on the tools available through the Moodle e-learning platform, selected to enhance the learning of this ability in language learners. Finally, the study indicates some future directions for the development of an effective language teaching online.

The present study sought to evaluate the pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Spanish in regard to compliment sequences and the impact that pragmatic lessons would have on these students. To this end, pre and post tests to assess pragmatic recognition in regard to Spanish compliments were designed by the researchers and completed by the participants before and after a series of pragmatic interventions. Control and experimental groups were established in order to evaluate other potential variables involved. Additionally, the same lessons were implemented in two beginner L2 Spanish groups (one control and one experimental) as to determine whether or not the lessons were more suited for this demographic of students. Preliminary data suggest that the heritage groups of students already have high pragmatic competence in regard to compliments and that lessons do not have an impact on this type of learner. On the other hand, the beginner L2 Spanish students greatly benefited from the interventions and experienced statistically significant growth in the experimental group. The effect size was also calculated and found that the interventions had little to no impact on the heritage experimental group and a very large impact on the L2 experimental group. The conclusions of the study suggest that it may not be necessary to teach pragmatic norms to heritage language learners. Design, lessons, pedagogical interventions, and recommendations for future study are included.

Pragmatic competence has become, especially in the last few decades, one of the issues that attracted attention in the field as an essential part of language competence. The realization that having a good command of linguistic knowledge in target language would not be enough to master the language has created the need to investigate the value and effect of pragmatic competence in language education. This review is intended to provide a brief overview of pragmatics and pragmatic competence, the pedagogic significance of pragmatic competence highlighting the relevant theoretical components of pragmatics. For the purposes of this review, relevant literature covering definitions of pragmatics and pragmatic competence and research carried out on pragmatic competence is presented.

This study aims to investigate how Turkish Teacher Trainees of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) interpret implied meanings, which is an integral but lesser-studied component of pragmatic competence. The conduct of the study began with the development of an online multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) through two piloting phases. Next, the test was given to a group of 144 1 st year teacher trainees and a group of 127 native speakers of English, who served as the comparison group to provide interpretation norms as the benchmark. The results revealed a significant difference between the native speakers and teacher trainees in favor of the former in terms of both accuracy and speed at the interpretation of implied meanings in English. In consideration of the fact that teacher training is critical for inevitably influencing how instructional practices are used in the future, the study identified an improvable aspect in the pragmatic skills of prospective EFL teachers, which...

This collection argues for the need to promote intercultural understanding as a clear goal for teaching and learning pragmatics in second and foreign language education.

The volume sees the learning of pragmatics as a challenging yet enriching process whereby the individual expands their capacity for understanding how meaning making processes influence social relationships and how assumptions about social relationships shape the interpretation and use of language in context. This locates pragmatics within a humanistically oriented conception of learning where success is defined relative to the enrichment of human understanding and appreciation of difference. The book argues that intercultural understanding is not an “add on” to language learning but central to the learner’s ability to understand and construct meaning with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Chapters analyse teachers’ and learners’ ways of making sense of pragmatics, how their assumptions about social relationships impact their perceptions of language use, and how reflection on pragmatic judgments opens up possibilities for developing intercultural understanding.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars in intercultural communication, language education, and applied linguistics.

This study aims to investigate how Turkish Teacher Trainees of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) interpret implied meanings, which is an integral but lesser-studied component of pragmatic competence. The conduct of the study began with the development of an online multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) through two piloting phases. Next, the test was given to a group of 144 1 st year teacher trainees and a group of 127 native speakers of English, who served as the comparison group to provide interpretation norms as the benchmark. The results revealed a significant difference between the native speakers and teacher trainees in favor of the former in terms of both accuracy and speed at the interpretation of implied meanings in English. In consideration of the fact that teacher training is critical for inevitably influencing how instructional practices are used in the future, the study identified an improvable aspect in the pragmatic skills of prospective EFL teachers, which could pave way for informed instructional solutions for both EFL teacher trainees and learners.