An understanding of sociocultural context is crucial in second language learning – yet developing this awareness often poses a real challenge to the typical language learner. This book is a practical language teachers’ guide that focuses on how to teach socially and culturally appropriate language for effective communication. Moving beyond a purely theoretical approach to pragmatics, the volume offers practical advice to teachers, with hands-on classroom tasks included in every chapter. Readers will be able to: · Identify possible causes of learner errors and choices in cross-cultural communication · Understand second language acquisition theories that support their classroom practices · Develop a pragmatics-focused instructional component, classroom-based assessments, and curricula · Help learners to become more strategic about their learning and performance of speech acts · Incorporate technology into their approach to teaching pragmatics This book aims to close the gap between what research in pragmatics has found and how language is generally taught today. It will be of interest to all language teachers, graduate students in language teaching and linguistics, teacher educators, and developers of materials for teaching language.

Pragmatics in Language Teaching examines the acquisition of language use in social contexts in second and foreign language classrooms. Included are 2 state-of-the-art survey chapters, and 11 chapters reporting the results of empirical research. The empirical studies cover three areas: incidental acquisition of pragmatics in instructed contexts, the effects of instruction in pragmatics, and the assessment of pragmatics ability. The studies address a number of areas in pragmatics, from speech acts and discourse markers to conversational routines and address terms, and represent a range of target languages and contexts in the United States, Asia, and Europe.

The book focuses on investigating pragmatic learning, teaching and testing in foreign language contexts. The volume brings together research that investigates these three areas in different formal language learning settings. The number and variety of languages involved both as the first language (e.g. English, Finnish, Iranian, Spanish, Japanese) as well as the target foreign language (e.g. English, French, German, Indonesian, Korean, Spanish) makes the volume specially attractive for language educators in different sociocultural foreign language contexts. Additionally, the different approaches adopted by the researchers participating in this volume, such as information processing, sociocultural, language socialization, computer-mediated or conversation analysis should be of interest to graduate students and researchers working in the area of second language acquisition.

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 volume presents a wide ranging overview of key theoretical and practical issues, empirical research and various analyses of pragmatic phenomena that will certainly be most useful and helpful to students and researchers in pragmatics and other linguistic disciplines and, of course, to L2 teachers. It is divided into five parts that include chapters addressing cognitive issues on L2 teaching, how and what to teach when dealing with specific speech acts, intercultural aspects of communication, the teaching of languages for academic and specific purposes and some other methodological issues on pragmatics teaching.

Pragmatic development is increasingly seen as the foundation stone of language acquisition more generally. From very early on, children demonstrate a strong desire to understand and be understood that motivates the acquisition of lexicon and grammar and enables ever more effective communication. In the 35 years since the first edited volume on the topic, a flourishing literature has reported on the broad set of skills that can be called pragmatic. This volume aims to bring that literature together in a digestible format. It provides a series of succinct review chapters on 19 key topics ranging from preverbal skills right up to irony and argumentative discourse. Each chapter equips the reader with an overview of current theories, key empirical findings and questions for new research. This valuable resource will be of interest to scholars of psychology, linguistics, speech therapy, and cognitive science.

This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective, taking into account their linguistic repertoire and using ecologically valid classroom writing tasks in a longitudinal study. It tackles the issue of task-based language teaching from a multilingual perspective by presenting a study which takes place in natural classroom contexts where real classroom tasks are used to explore the interaction between languages in multilinguals. The book combines a focus on multilingual language development and pragmatics and discusses the resources multilingual learners take to the classroom.

This edited collection addresses the link between second language pragmatics (including interlanguage and intercultural) research and English language education. The chapters use different contemporary research methods and theoretical frameworks such as conversation analysis, language-learners-as-ethnographers, discourse and interactional approaches and data in contexts (either in the region or overseas). The content explores and discusses the significance of learning and teaching of second language (L2) pragmatics in language education for learners who use English as a lingua franca for academic and intercultural communication purposes with native and non-native speakers of English, focusing on pragmatic actions, social behaviours, perceptions and awareness levels in three regions in East Asia – China, Japan and South Korea. It is an important contribution to the area of second language pragmatics in language education for East Asian learners. It recommends research-informed pedagogies for the learning and teaching of interlanguage or intercultural pragmatics in regions and places where similar cultural beliefs or practices are found. This is an essential read for researchers, language educators, classroom teachers, readers who are interested in second language pragmatics research and those interested in second language acquisition and English language education in the East Asian context.

This is the first edited collection focusing exclusively on how second language users interpret and engage with the processes of email writing. With chapters written by an international array of scholars, the present volume is dedicated to furthering the study of the growing field of L2 email pragmatics and addresses a range of interesting topics that have so far received comparatively scant attention. Utilising both elicited and naturally-occurring data, the research in this volume takes the reader from a consideration of learners' pragmatic development as reflected in email writing, and their perceptions of the email medium, to relational practices in various email functions and in a variety of academic contexts. As a whole, the contributions incorporate research with learners from a range of proficiency levels, language and cultural backgrounds, and employ varied research designs in order to examine different email speech acts. The book provides valuable new insights into the dynamic and complex interplay between cultural, interlanguage, pedagogical, and medium-specific factors shaping L2 email discourse, and it is undoubtedly an important reference and resource for researchers, graduate students and experienced language teachers.

This volume explores the elusive subject of English prosody—the stress, rhythm and intonation of the language—, and its relevance for English language teaching. Its sharp focus will be especially welcomed by teachers of English to non-native speakers, but also by scholars and researchers interested in Applied Linguistics. The book examines key issues in the development of prosody and delves into the role of intonation in the construction of meaning. The contributions tackle difficult areas of intonation for language learners, providing a theoretical analysis of each stumbling block as well as a practical explanation for teachers and teacher trainers. The numerous issues dealt with in the book include stress and rhythm; tone units and information structure; intonation and pragmatic meaning; tonicity and markedness, etc... The authors have deployed speech analysis software to illustrate their examples as well as to encourage readers to carry out their own computerized prosodic analyses.