This book merges theory and practical activities to show how research on speech acts can be implemented in EFL teaching.

Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies (Studies in Anthropological Linguistics).

This book investigates request strategies in Mandarin Chinese and Korean, and is one of the first attempts to address cross-cultural strategies employed in the speech act of requests in two non-Western languages. The data, drawn from role-plays and naturally recorded conversations, complement each other in terms of exhaustiveness and authenticity. This study explores the similarities and differences of the request patterns that emerged in the Chinese and Korean data, and the intricate relation between request strategies and social factors (such as power and distance). The findings raise questions about the influence of methodology on data, and the applicability of so called universals to East Asian languages. They also offer new insights into generally held ideas of directness and requesting behaviours in Chinese and Korean, and the problems of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication.This research is suggestive for the disciplines of cross-cultural pragmatics, cross-cultural communication, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis.

Pragmatic instruction has received momentous attention in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) over the last decades. In order to scrutinize the effectiveness of L2 instruction, meta-analyses are warranted; nonetheless, meta-analyses have been largely neglected, despite the fact that they provide a systematic explanation of the findings from the previous studies. Since meta-analysis is flourishing by leaps and bounds in each and every field, pragmatic studies are not the exception, and among miscellaneous constructs and units of analysis in pragmatics, the speech acts of request, apology, and refusal are investigated in this book. To bridge this gap, this book mainly presents the variables which can moderate the effectiveness of L2 instruction such as age, gender, proficiency, outcome measures, psycholinguistic features, research design, and treatment types. The first chapter of the book outlines the theoretical underpinnings of the study, accentuating the importance of conducting meta-analysis in this field of study. The second chapter elaborates on the empirical studies and a thorough review of the relevant research. The third chapter deals with the design of the study in which the inclusion and exclusion criteria, effect size calculation, coding of the variables, and reliability have been outlined while chapter four presents the obtained outcomes and results of the study. The last chapter describes the final remarks of the study, the limitations, implications, and the directions for future research in the field of pragmatics instruction.

Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters. Considering these concerns, the aim of this volume is two-fold: to deal with those theoretical approaches that inform the process of learning speech acts in particular contextual and cultural settings; and, secondly, to present a variety of methodological proposals, grounded on research-based ideas, for the teaching of the major speech acts in second/foreign language classrooms. This volume is a valuable theoretical and practical resource not only for researchers, teachers and students interested in speech act learning/teaching but also for textbook writers wishing to have an informed opinion on the pedagogical implications derived from research on speech act performance.

The purpose of this research is to analyse the pragmatic development of language groups at different proficiency levels and to investigate the relationship between interlanguage pragmatics and grammatical competence. For this study, 36 native Spanish speaking EFL learners at different proficiency levels were asked to respond in English to 24 different situations that called for the speech acts of request and apology. Results showed three important aspects. The first finding suggested that basic adult learners possess a pragmatic knowledge in their L1 that allows them to focus on the intended meaning and, in most cases, to assemble an utterance that conveys a pragmatic intention and satisfies the communicative demands of a social situation. The second finding revealed that there are two essential conditions to communicate a linguistic action: the knowledge of the relevant linguistic rules and the knowledge of how to use them appropriately and effectively in a specific context. The findings further suggested that advanced learners possess the grammatical knowledge to produce an illocutionary act, but they need to learn the specific L2 pragmatic conventions that enable them to know when to use these grammatical forms and under which circumstances.

The book aims to provide a bridge between two applied linguistics subfields, namely those of interlanguage pragmatics and third language acquisition. It examines the production and identification of request acts formulas on the part of bilingual learners of English in the Valencian Community (Spain). Previous to the empirical study itself, we present an overview of the theoretical background and the sociolinguistic context where the experiment was conducted.