A collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts.

The present volume is a collection of papers on Contrastive Pragmatics, involving research on interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives with a focus on second language acquisition contexts. The subdiscipline of pragmatics is seen from a multilingual and multicultural perspective thus contributing to an emerging field of study, i.e. intercultural pragmatics which can be made fruitful to second language teaching/learning and contrastive analysis. The book is an important contribution to general linguistics, pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, second language acquisition, as well as minority issues in multilingual settings.

We have recently seen a broadening of pragmatics to new areas and to the study of more than one language. This is illustrated by the present volume on Contrastive Pragmatics which brings together a number of articles originally presented at the 10th International Pragmatics Conference in Göteborg in 2007. The contributions deal with pragmatic phenomena such as speech acts, discourse markers and modality in different language pairs using theoretical approaches such as politeness theory, Conversation Analysis, Appraisal Theory, grammaticalization and cultural textology. Also discourse practices and genres may differ across cultures as illustrated by the study of TV news shows in different countries. Contrastive pragmatics also includes the comparative study of pragmatic phenomena from a foreign language perspective, a new area with implications for language teaching and intercultural communication. The contributions to this volume were originally published in Languages in Contrast 9:1 (2009).

Email has become a ubiquitous medium of communication. It is used amongst people from the same speech community, but also between people from different language and cultural backgrounds. When people communicate, they tend to follow rules of speaking in their native language, termed by scholars as pragmatic transfer, which may cause misunderstandings and lead to cross-cultural communication breakdown. This book examines pragmatic transfer by Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels when writing email requests and refusals. To meet the need for developmental research in L2 pragmatics, it also explores whether pragmatic transfer increases or decreases as language proficiency improves. This book will appeal to researchers and students in interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics, second language acquisition, English as a second/foreign language, and intercultural communication.

This volume examines the second language pragmatic development of international learners of English inside and outside the classroom.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of a wide range of developmental and clinical issues in pragmatics. Principally, the contributions to this volume deal with pragmatic competence in a native language, in a second or foreign language, and in a selection of language disorders. The topics which are covered explore questions of production and comprehension on the utterance and discourse level. Topics addressed concern the acquisition and learning, teaching and testing, assessment and treatment of various aspects of pragmatic ability, knowledge and use. These include, for example, the acquisition and development of speech acts, implicatures, irony, story-telling and interactional competence. Phenomena such as pragmatic awareness and pragmatic transfer are also addressed. The disorders considered include clinical conditions pertaining to children and to adults. Specifically, these are, among others, autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.

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.

Interest in learning Chinese as an additional language has soared worldwide over the last ten years. Yet little is known about the learning process, and much less about what pedagogical strategies might facilitate or, otherwise, hinder it. This book thus aims to further understanding of the acquisition of Chinese as a foreign or second language. It brings together six independent studies which explore aspects of learning Chinese as an additional language across the domains of morphosyntax, pragmatics, cognitive capacity, interactional learning, and instructed learning via a variety of conceptual frameworks and methodological strategies. These studies, as well as the suggestions for future research, will be of great interest to second language acquisition researchers, graduate students and second language teachers of Chinese, as well as to curriculum developers and materials writers.

Nearly half a century has passed since Hymes proposed the concept of communicative competence to describe the knowledge and skills required for the appropriate use of language in a social context. During these decades, a number of scholars have applied and refined this concept. In language education, communicative competence has been identified as a major objective of learning. This book will inform readers about communicative competence as a highly complex construct encompassing an array of sub-competencies such as linguistic skills and proficiencies, knowledge of socio-cultural and socio-pragmatic codes, and the ability to engage in textual and conversational discourse. Findings from research in related disciplines have pointed to the significance of factors that can contribute to the attainment of communicative competence. Various teaching practices and relevant Information and Communication Technology (ICT) tools will be also introduced and discussed to achieve communicative competence as a complex ability. It is a timely contribution to current research on key areas in the teaching, learning and acquisition of second/foreign languages.

Methods in Pragmatics provides a systematic overview of the different types of data, the different methods of data collection and data analysis used in pragmatic research. It offers authoritative and comprehensive surveys of the entire breadth of methods and methodologies. Part 1 covers introspectional, philosophical and cognitive pragmatics. Part 2 is devoted to experimental pragmatics, including discourse completion and dialogue construction tasks, role-plays and other production and comprehension tasks. Part 3 reviews observational pragmatics including ethnographic and discourse analytic methods, and part 4, finally, is devoted to corpus pragmatics including accounts of corpus compilation, annotation and data retrieval specific to pragmatic research. Each contribution provides a state-of-the-art account of the precise workings of one particular method, its applications in the relevant research literature as well as a critical assessment of its strengths and weaknesses and the type of pragmatic research questions for which it is most suitable.