As a field of inquiry, interlanguage pragmatics reflects the growing interest in recent years in understanding the social and pragmatic aspects of second language acquisition. Interlanguage Pragmatics offers an up-to-date synthesis of current research in the field, documenting from diverse perspectives the development, comprehension, and production of pragmatic knowledge in a second language. The book consists of three sections. The first concerns cognitive approaches to interlanguage pragmatic development; the second, interlanguage speech act realization of a variety of speech acts; and the third, discoursal perspectives on interlanguage. Each section is prefaced by an introduction by the editors which provides relevant theoretical and methodological background. The editors' general introduction offers a critical overview of the issues currently debated. This book is the first to exclusively address the pragmatic dimension in second language acquistion, presenting a state-of-the-art view of the field and outlining directions for future research.

Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics provides readers with a much-needed insight into the development of pragmatic competence, an area of research long neglected in interlanguage pragmatics. The longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests, offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments. The analysis focuses on developments in these learners’ knowledge of discourse structure, pragmatic routines and internal modification. Findings present valuable information pertaining to the process of acquisition of pragmatic competence. They also point to the favourable but imperfect nature of the study abroad context for the development of pragmatic competence. A comprehensive discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, an in-depth analysis and an extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, German as a foreign language and study abroad research.

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.

Proposes a new empirical model to analyse how humans can express social cognition at different levels of complexity.

This volume offers the first book-length treatment of second and foreign language learners' acquisition of pragmatics. It provides an up-to-date account of research findings and covers such central topics as the theoretical and empirical approaches to L2 pragmatic development, the relationship of pragmatic and grammatical development, the role of different learning contexts, the effect of instruction, and individual differences. Comprehensive discussion of developmental interlanguage pragmatics, presenting an up-to-date account of research findings Key source for researchers and graduate students working in applied linguistics, second language studies, pragmatics, discourse, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics

Technology-informed approaches to L2 research and teaching have prompted great interest by both researchers and practitioners alike. This book highlights the relationship between digitally-meditated technologies and second language pragmatics by presenting exemplary applications of technology for both research and pedagogy. Part I presents technology-informed research practices that range from measuring response times when processing conversational implicature to studies examining systematic pragmatic learning via online activities and multiuser virtual environments, as well as analyzing features of pragmatic language use in social networking and longitudinal learner corpora. Part II surveys a variety of technology-assisted tools for teaching pragmatics, including: place-based mobile games, blogging, web-based testing, and automated text analysis software. The volume will be of interest for those interested in technological tools to expand the scope of traditional methods of data collection, analysis, and teaching and critically examining how technology can best be leveraged as a solution to existing barriers to pragmatics research and instruction.

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.