The book explores both productive and receptive pragmatic competences of Chinese learners of English at a study abroad and an at home contexts over one year, to shed light on their pragmatic development. Additionally, it longitudinally investigates the cognitive processes of advanced L2 learners engaged in pragmatics during their study abroad.

Gila Schauer's study of interlanguage pragmatic development in English is situated in the context of studying abroad. It is the first book-length study of a common occurrence worldwide, but one that has not received the focus it deserves. Schauer examines the interlanguage pragmatic development of German learners of English at a British University over the course of a year. The focus is not only on the learners' productive pragmatic development, but also on their pragmatic awareness, which is compared with their grammatical awareness. The analysis undertaken is both qualitative and quantitative, and the book draws some important conclusions relevant to the whole field of interlanguage pragmatics. It will be engaging reading for researchers and postgraduate studies in applied linguistics, especially those working on interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, multilingualism and second language acquisition.

This study reports on an investigation designed to, in some way, meet the need for acquistition research in L2 pragmatics - in particular in the form of longitudinal studies - and also to meet the need for research into the acquisition of L2 pragmatic competence in German. Specifically, it concerns a longitudinal study in which the development of the L2 pragmatic competence of a group of 32 Irish learners of German is investigated over ten months spent studying in the target speech community, Germany. The study is anchored in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, and the approach taken is speech-act based - interest focusing on productions of requests, offers and refusals of offers. The study also draws on research from discourse analysis in the investigation of offer-refusal of offer exchanges. The objective of this study was to record any developments - whether towards or away form the L2 norm - in the L2 pragmatic competence of the current group of learners over time spent in the target community.

This book explores second language pragmatic development with a specific focus on two areas: classroom-based pragmatic instruction in the study abroad context, and using technology for developing and assessing pragmatic competence. Teaching Pragmatics and Instructed Second Language Learning directly compares the effects of technology platforms and traditional paper-based tasks within the second language environment for developing pragmatic competence. These analyses are based on empirical research of how undergraduate Chinese learners of English receive explicit instruction in classrooms using different training materials. The book makes an original and innovative contribution to collecting oral speech act data in the form of computer-animated production tasks (CAPT) designed to enhance learner engagement and performance. Using this tool, it explores the beneficial role of technology in teaching and learning, offering practitioners and researchers practical ways to maximise second language pragmatic development in the classroom.

The present volume, edited by Patricia Salazar-Campillo and Victòria Codina-Espurz, is a timely contribution to the field of interlanguage pragmatics. The nine chapters presented here expand the scope of research to date by including different contexts (i.e., formal instruction, stay-abroad, and online) and age groups which have received less attention (for example, young learners and adolescents). Whereas the speech act of requesting is the one that has been most explored in the field of interlanguage pragmatics, as attested by several chapters in the present volume, disagreements and directives are also tackled. This book embraces research addressing both elicited and naturally-occurring data in studies which deal with pragmatic use, development, and awareness.

The study abroad (SA) context is often assumed to foster pragmatic development in a second language (L2), yet previous scholarship confirms that pragmatic norms are culturally-shaped and often remain imperceptible to uninstructed SA students (Bataller, 2010; Cohen & Shively, 2007; Shively, 2010). Because pragmatics is not traditionally taught in language classrooms (Bardovi-Harlig, 2013), SA students are left to their own devices when interacting in the host community and performing face-threatening speech acts in their L2 such as requests and refusals, among others. Considering the importance of pragmatics for successful communication along with the predominance of short-term SA programs, it is crucial to support and accelerate students’ pragmatic development during immersion, especially beginners with limited linguistic and cultural knowledge. This study explores the affordances of explicitly teaching pragmatics to 12 students who studied beginning L2 Spanish in Spain for 10 weeks. A task-based instructional treatment (Long, 2015) was designed to raise students’ awareness of appropriate linguistic and cultural norms related to various speech acts, or meaningful “tasks” such as asking for directions and ordering a meal. Instruction was complemented with computer-mediated practice and weekly language exchanges with native speakers to further scaffold student learning. Following instruction, students carried out these tasks in the community and audio-recorded their interactions. To measure students’ development, data were collected through a pre/post Discourse Completion Test (DCT), pre-task audio-recordings conducted before instruction, naturalistic audio-recordings of task completion following instruction, self-reflections of task completion, interviews, and surveys. To corroborate the effectiveness of the instructional treatment, further pre/post DCT data were collected from two comparison groups of students studying beginning L2 Spanish, one abroad in Madrid and another at home in California. Analyses of the data confirmed the positive impact the instructional treatment had on students’ pragmatic development. The treatment group not only demonstrated statistically significant gains in pragmatic competence on the pre/post DCT measure, but they were also highly successful in applying their knowledge while completing the real-world tasks in the host community, as evidenced by comparisons of their pre-task and task completion recordings. Similarly, the students’ reflections of their own task completion showed increased awareness of the pragmatic features that were introduced in the instructional treatment, which likely explains why they demonstrated high retention of their pragmatic competence one full year after the program, as measured by a delayed post-DCT completed by eight of the 12 students. Moreover, the students who received the instructional treatment showed significantly higher gains in pragmatic competence when compared to the students in both comparison groups (abroad and at home) who did not receive the instruction. These results confirm the effectiveness of the task-based instructional model in accelerating beginning L2 students’ pragmatic competence while studying abroad. The findings from this study have the potential to not only inform the instructional design of study abroad programs, but also provide directors, teachers, and students with insights on how to maximize the study abroad experience. These findings could potentially change how and when pragmatics is taught both at home and abroad.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language. The book has three sections. The first section offers a general overview and historical sketch of the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. The overview chapter is followed by eight empirical findings, each dealing with phenomena that are significant in Japanese pragmatics. They target selected features of Japanese pragmatics and investigate the learners' use of them as an indicator of their pragmatic competence. The target pragmatic features are wide-ranging, among them honorifics, speech style, sentence final particles, speech acts of various types, and indirect expressions. Each study explicitly prompts the connection between pragmalinguistics (linguistic forms available to perform language functions) and sociopragmatics (norms that determine appropriate use of the forms) in Japanese. By documenting the understanding and use of them among learners of Japanese spanning multiple levels and time durations, this book offers insight about the nature and development of pragmatic competence, as well as implications for the learning and teaching of Japanese pragmatics. The last section presents a critical reflection on the eight empirical papers and prompts a discussion of the practice of Japanese pragmatics research.

This publication constitutes essential reading for academics, teachers and language policy makers wanting to understand, plan, and implement an educational language program involving learner mobility. The book provides data and analyses from a long-term program of research on study abroad (the SALA Project), which looked into the short and long-term effects of instructional and mobility contexts on language and cultural development from two perspectives: the participants' language acquisition development over 2,5 years, and the practitioners' perspective in relation to the design and implementation of a mobility program. The book is innovative in the longitudinal data it offers, the light it sheds on (i) an array of language skills, both productive and receptive, oral and written, tapping into phonology, lexis, grammar and discourse, (ii) the role of individual differences (including attitudes, motivation, beliefs, and intercultural awareness), and (iii) the insights on the effects of length of stay. In sum, this book represents a welcome addition to previous research on the outcomes of mobility policies to promote L2 learners' linguistic development and the individual and educational conditions that appear to facilitate success in study abroad programs.

This mixed-methods study examines the effect of study abroad on the development of pragmatic competence by Thai learners of English. Drawing on Brown and Levinson's (1987) politeness theory as a theoretical framework, this study focuses on the production of speech acts of request. Data were collected using an enhanced discourse completion test (EDCT), a bio-data questionnaire, and semi-structured interviews. The four study groups used in this study include two groups of Thai learners of English: one with study abroad experience and another without. Two additional groups were used to represent the learners' native language (L1), Thai, and target language (L2), English. Request data were coded based on the coding system developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). Quantitative methods were employed to analyze six aspects of requests: request perspectives, request strategies, internal modifications, request structures, alerters, and supportive moves. Follow-up questionnaires included in the EDCT and semi-structured interviews provided insights into the participants' perceptions regarding their request production and L2 development. The results reveal linguistic and cultural differences between the learners' L1 and L2 communities. Although, in general, the linguistic features analyzed in the requests of both learner groups tended to conform more closely to L2 norms than to the norms of their L1, the study abroad group showed greater development toward L2 norms in terms of the variety and frequencies of various linguistic features, suggesting a positive effect of study abroad. Data controlling for the social variables of social distance and relative power revealed only minimal differences between the two learner groups, suggesting study abroad did not impact the learners' sensitivity to these variables. Interview data showed that study abroad learners generally held a very positive view of the impact of study abroad on their pragmatic development, citing confidence gains resulting from the greater number of real-world interactions as a catalyst for this development. These findings support previous research that has demonstrated a positive effect of study abroad on L2 learners' pragmatic competence. Moreover, from these findings come implications for instruction of L2 pragmatic skills as well as recommendations for future research.

Examining the overseas experience of language learners in diverse contexts through a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, studies in this volume look at the acquisition of language use, socialization processes, learner motivation, identity and learning strategies. In this way, the volume offers a privileged window into learner experiences abroad while addressing current concerns central to second language acquisition.