can pragmatic competence be taught

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NFLRC NetWork#6

CAN PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE BE TAUGHT?

Gabriele Kasper

University of Hawai`i

Please cite as...

1997 Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center

'Can Pragmatic Competence Be Taught?' The simple answer to the question as formulated

is "no". Competence, whether linguistic or pragmatic, is not teachable. Competence is a

type of knowledge that learners possess, develop, acquire, use or lose. The challenge for

foreign or second language teaching is whether we can arrange learning opportunities in

such a way that they benefit the development of pragmatic competence in L2. This, then, is

the issue I will address in this paper.

The pragmatic component in models of communicative competence

There are many definitions of pragmatics around. One I find particularly useful has been

proposed by David Crystal. According to him, "Pragmatics is the study of language from the

point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in

using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other

participants in the act of communication" (Crystal1985, p. 240). In other words, pragmatics

is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. Communicative action

includes not only speech acts - such as requesting, greeting, and so on - but also participation

in conversation, engaging in different types of discourse, and sustaining interaction in

complex speech events. Following Leech(1983), I will focus on pragmatics as interpersonal

rhetoric - the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social actors who do not just need

to get things done but attend to their interpersonal relationships with other participants at the

same time.

Leech(1983) and his colleague Jenny Thomas(1983) proposed to subdivide pragmatics into a

pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic component.Pragmalinguisticsrefers to the resources

for conveying communicative acts and relational or interpersonal meanings. Such resources

include pragmatic strategies like directness and indirectness, routines, and a large range of

linguistic forms which can intensify or soften communicative acts. For one example, comparethese two versions of apology - the terse 'I'm sorry' and the Wildean 'I'm absolutely

devastated. Can you possibly forgive me?' In both versions, the speaker apologizes, but she

indexes a very different attitude and social relationship in each of the apologies (e.g., Fraser,

1980; House & Kasper, 1981; Brown & Levinson, 1987; Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper,

1989).

Sociopragmaticswas described by Leech(1983, p. 10) as 'the sociological interface of

pragmatics', referring to the social perceptions underlying participants' interpretation and

performance of communicative action. Speech communities differ in their assessment of

speaker's and hearer's social distance and social power, their rights and obligations, and the

degree of imposition involved in particular communicative acts (Takahashi & Beebe, 1993;

Can Pragmatic Competence be Taught? http://www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/networks/NW06/

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requesting, users of any language studied thus far distinguish different levels of directness;

direct, as in 'feed the cat', conventionally indirect, as in 'can/could/wouldyou feed the cat?',

and indirect, as in 'the cat's complaining.' Furthermore, language users know that requests

can be softened or intensified in various ways, as in 'I was wondering if you would terribly

mindfeeding the cat', and that requests can be externally modified through various supportive

moves, for instance justifications, as in 'I have to go to a conference', or imposition

minimizers, as in 'She only needs food once a day'. Studies document that these strategies ofrequesting are available to ESL or EFL learners who are NS of such diverse languages as

Chinese (Johnston, Kasper, & Ross, 1994), Danish (Frch & Kasper, 1989), German (House

& Kasper, 1987), Hebrew (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1986), Japanese (Takahashi & DuFon,

1989), Malay (Piirainen-Marsh, 1995), and Spanish (Rintell & Mitchell, 1989). In their early

learning stages, learners may not be able to use such strategies because they have not yet

acquired the necessary linguistic means, but when their linguistic knowledge permits it,

learners will use the main strategies for requesting without instruction.

Learners may also get very specific pragmalinguistic knowledge for free if there is a

corresponding form-function mapping between L1 and L2, and the forms can be used in

corresponding L2 contexts with corresponding effects. For instance, the English modal past asin the modal verbs couldor wouldhas formal, functional and distributional equivalents in

other Germanic languages such as Danish and German - the Danish modal past kunne/ville

and the German subjunctive knntestand wrdest. And sure enough, Danish and German

learners of English transfer ability questions from L1 Danish (kunne/ville du lne mig dine

noter) and L1 German (knntest/ wrdest Du mir Deine Aufzeichnungen leihen) to L2

English (could/would you lend me your notes) (House & Kasper, 1987; Frch & Kasper,

1989), and they do this without the benefit of instruction.

Positive transfer can also facilitate learners' task in acquiring sociopragmatic knowledge.

When distributions of participants' rights and obligations, their relative social power and thedemands on their resources are equivalent in their original and target community, learners

may only need to make small adjustments in their social categorizations (Mir, 1995).

Unfortunately, learners do not always make use of their free ride. It is well known from

educational psychology that students do not always transfer available knowledge and

strategies to new tasks. This is also true for some aspects of learners' universal or L1-based

pragmatic knowledge. L2 recipients often tend towards literal interpretation, taking

utterances at face value rather than inferring what is meant from what is said and underusing

context information. Learners frequently underuse politeness marking in L2 even though they

regularly mark their utterances for politeness in L1 (Kasper, 1981). Although highly context-

sensitive in selecting pragmatic strategies in their own language, learners mayunderdifferentiate such context variables as social distance and social power in L2

(Fukushima, 1990; Tanaka, 1988).

So, the good news is that there is a lot of pragmatic information that adult learners possess,

and the bad news is that they don't always use what they know. There is thus a clear role for

pedagogic intervention here, not with the purpose of providing learners with new information

but to make them aware of what they know already and encourage them to use their universal

or transferable L1 pragmatic knowledge in L2 contexts.

The most compelling evidence that instruction in pragmatics is necessarycomes from

learners whose L2 proficiency is advanced and whose unsuccessful pragmatic performance is


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not likely to be the result of cultural resistance or disidentification strategies (Kasper, 1995,

for discussion). In a study of a large sample of advanced ESL learners, Bouton(1988)

examined how well these students understood different types of indirect responses, or

implicature, as in the following dialog:

Sue: How was your dinner last night?

Anne: Well, the food was nicely presented.

Bouton found that in 27% of the cases, implicatures were understood differently by nativespeakers (NS) and NNS. A re-test of 30 students after 4 1/2 years demonstrated that their

comprehension now showed a success rate of over 90%. But some implicature types resisted

improvement through exposure alone. These included the Pope question (as inIs the Pope

Catholic?) and indirect criticism as in the Sue & Anne dialogue. Students' comprehension of

implicature may thus profit from instruction, and as we will see shortly, this has indeed

proved to be the case.

Turning to production, candidates for pedagogic intervention can be sorted in four groups: (1)

choice of communicative acts, (2) the strategies by which an act is realized, (3) its content, and

(4) its linguistic form. Drawing on her and Beverly Hartford's data from academic advising

sessions (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford 1990, 1993), Bardovi-Harlig(1996) noted that NNSstudents tended to leave suggestions about their coursework to their advisor and then react to

them. Consequently, the NNS performed more rejections of advisor suggestions than the NS

students, who were more initiative in making suggestions and thereby avoided rejections.

Both NS and NNS regularly offered explanations when they rejected their advisor's course

suggestion, but the NS would also suggest alternatives ('how about I take x course instead'),

something the NNS never did. For their rejections, the NNS sometimes used inappropriate

content, such as claiming the course suggested by their advisor was either too easy or too

difficult, or even evaluating their advisor's course as 'uninteresting'. Finally, even at the end of

the observation period, the NNS had not learnt how to mitigate their suggestions and

rejections appropriately. By using mitigating forms such as 'I was thinking' or 'I have an idea...I dont' know how it would work out, but...', the NS would cast their suggestions in tentative

terms. By contrast, the NNS tended to formulate their suggestions much more assertively, as

in 'I will take language testing' or 'I've just decided on taking the language structure' (all

examples from Bardovi-Harlig, 1996, 22f.).

Two things need to be emphasized in assessing the implications of Bouton's and Bardovi-

Harlig and Hartford's studies. First, the participating advanced students were ESL learners,

yet the target environment either did not provide students with the input they needed, or they

did not notice it. Secondly, the recorded differences in NS and NNS pragmatic comprehension

and production may lead to serious miscommunication and compromise the NNS's goals.

Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford(1990) found that when students' contributions werepragmatically inappropriate, they were less successful in obtaining their advisor's consent for

taking the courses they preferred.

A further aspect of students' pragmatic competence is their awareness of what is and is not

appropriate in given contexts. Bardovi-Harlig and Drnyei(1997) reported that Hungarian

and Italian EFL learners recognized grammatically incorrect but pragmatically appropriate

utterances more readily than pragmatically inappropriate but grammatically correct

utterances, and this was true for learners of all proficiency levels. This finding strongly

suggests that without a pragmatic focus, foreign language teaching raises students'

metalinguisticawareness, but it does not contribute much to develop their metapragmaticconsciousness in L2.


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Can L2 pragmatics be taught?

As we have seen, then, without some form of instruction, many aspects of pragmatic

competence do not develop sufficiently. We therefore need to know what pragmatic aspects

canbe taught and which instructional approaches may be most effective. Table 1 summarizes

the data-based research on pragmatic instruction.

Table 1: Studies examining the effect of pragmatic instruction

study teaching goal proficiency languages research goal design

assessment/

procedure/instrument

House &

Kasper1981

discourse

markers &

strategies

advancedL1 German FL

Englishexplicit vs

implicit

pre-test/

post-testcontrol group

L2 baseline

roleplay

Wildner-

Bassett 1984,

1986

pragmatic

routines

intermediateL1 German FL

English

eclectic vs

suggesto-pedia

pre-test/post-test

control group

roleplay

Billmyer1990 complimenthigh

intermediate

L1 Japanese

SL English+/-instruction

pre-test/post-test

control groupL2 baseline

elicited

conversation

Olshtain &

Cohen1990apology advanced

L1 Hebrew FL

Englishteachability

pre-test/

post-test L2baseline

discourse

completionquestion.

Wildner-

Bassett1994

pragmaticroutines &

strategies

beginningL1 English SL

German

teachability tobeginning FL

students

pre-test/

post-test

question-

naires roleplay

Bouton1994 implicature advancedL1 mixed SL

English+/-instruction

pre-test/post-test

control group

multiplechoice

question

Kubota1995 implicature intermediateL1 Japanese

FL English

deductive vs

inductive vszero

pre-test/

post-test/

delayedpost-test

control group

multiple

choice &

sentencecombining

question

House1996pragmatic

fluencyadvanced

L1 German FLEnglish

explicit vsimplicit

pre-test/


roleplay

Morrow1996complaint &

refusalintermediate

L1 mixed SL

English

teachability/

explicit

pre-test/

post-test/delayed

post-test L2baseline

roleplay

holistic ratings

Tateyama et

al.1997

pragmatic

routinesbeginning

L1 English FL

Japanese

explicit vs

implicit

pre-test/


multi-method

All of the 10 studies report on classroom-basedresearch on pragmatics. I excluded studies

conducted in a lab type situation because I wanted to make sure that the chosen approaches

are ecologically valid in actual L2 classrooms.

As you can see from the second column to the left, the teaching goals in these studies extend


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over a large range of pragmatic features and abilities. Some studies examine the discourse

markers and strategies by which conversationalists get in and out of conversations, introduce,

sustain, and change topics, organize turn-taking and keep the conversation going by listener

activities such as backchanneling. Many of these conversational activities are implemented by

pragmatic routines which regularly occur in spoken discourse, yet foreign language learners

may have little exposure to them. A number of discourse markers and strategies are illustrated

in the following conversational sequence.

A telephone conversation(Sacks, 1995, vol. II, p. 201f; transcript slightly modified)

A: Hello.

B: Vera?

A: Ye:s.

B: Well you know, I had a little difficulty getting you. (1.0)FirstI got the wrong number, and

thenI got Operator, [A: Well.]Anduhm (1.0) I wonder why.

A: Well, I wonder too. It uh just rung now about uh three ti//mes.

B: Yeah, wellOperator got it for me.

A:She did.

B: Uh huh. So //uhA: Well.

B: When I- after I got her twice, why she [A: telephoned] tried it for me. Isn't that funny?

A: Well it certainly is.

B: Must be some little cross of lines someplace hh

A: Guess so.

B: Uh huh,uh, am I taking you away from yer dinner?

A: No::. No, I haven't even started tuh get it yet.

B: Oh, you have//n't.

A: hhheh heh

B: WellI- I never am certain, I didn't know whether I'd be m too early or too late // or ri-A: No::. No, well I guessuh with us uhm there isn't any - [B: Yeah.] p'ticular time.

Another group of studies explores whether students benefit from instruction in specific speech

acts. So far, speech acts examined are compliments, apologies, complaints, and refusals. There

is a research literature on all of these speech acts, documenting how they are performed by

native speakers of English in different social contexts. Based on this literature, students were

taught the strategies and linguistic forms by which the speech acts are realized and how these

strategies are used in different contexts. As one example, consider the realization strategies

(or 'speech act set') for apologies (adapted from Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989):

Apologetic formula:I'm sorry, I apologize, I'm afraidAssuming Responsibility:I haven't read your paper yet.

Account:I had to prepare my TESOL plenary.

Offer of Repair:But I'll get it done by Wednesday.

Appeaser:Believe me, you're not the only one.

Promise of forbearance:I'll do better after TESOL.

Intensifier:I'm terribly sorry, I really tried to squeeze it in.

Bringing together the ability to carry out speech acts and manage ongoing conversation,

House(1996) examined instructional effects on what she calls pragmatic fluency - the extend

to which students' conversational contributions are relevant, polite, and overall effective. And

finally, while most studies focus on aspects of production, two studies examined pragmatic


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comprehension: in Bouton(1994), students were taught different types of implicatures, as in

the Sue & Anne dialogue quoted earlier, and Kubota(1995) replicated Bouton's study in an

EFL context.

Whereas most of these pragmatic features were taught to intermediate or advanced learners,

participants in Wildner-Bassett(1994) and Tateyama et al.(1997) were beginning learners.

These two studies thus address the important question of whether pragmatics is teachable tobeginners or whether there needs to be some threshold of linguistic L2 competence first.

Wildner-Bassett's (1994) and Tateyama et al.'s studies are also the only ones in which the

target language is not English - in Wildner-Bassett's study, the L2 is German, in Tateyama et

al., it is Japanese. Note that in some studies, the target language is aforeignlanguage whereas

in others, it is a secondlanguage. This has consequences for the learning outcomes, as I will

show a bit later.

The studies differed in their research goals. Olshtain and Cohen(1990), Wildner-Bassett

(1994) and Morrow(1996) explored whether the features under investigation were teachable

at all. These studies did not employ control groups but compared students' test performancebefore and after instruction to that of NS of the target language, referred to as 'L2 baseline' in

the 'design' column in Table 1. Billmyer(1990) and Bouton(1994) examined whether students

who received instruction in complimenting and implicature did better than controls who did

not. Yet another group explored the effectiveness of specific teaching approaches. In these

studies, two or more student groups received different types of instruction. House and Kasper

(1981), House(1996), and Tateyama et al.(1997) compared explicit with implicit approaches.

Explicit teaching involved description, explanation, and discussion of the pragmatic feature in

addition to input and practice, whereas implicit teaching included input and practice without

the metapragmatic component. Wildner-Bassett (1984, 1986) compared an eclectic approach

with a modified version of suggestopedia, and Kubota(1995) compared an inductive

approach, where students had to figure out in groups how implicatures in English work, to a

teacher-directed deductive approach and zero instruction in implicature. Information about

the designs and assessment procedures and instruments is provided in the two rightmost

columns in Table 1, but I'm not going to comment on those. Instead, let's proceed to the

findings of the studies.

First of all, the studies that examined whether the selected pragmatic features were teachable

found this indeed to be the case, and comparisons of instructed students with uninstructed

controls reported an advantage for the instructed learners. Secondly, the studies comparing

the relative effect of explicit and implicit instruction found that students' pragmatic abilities

improved regardless of the adopted approach, but the explicitly taught students did betterthan the implicit groups. Thirdly, with respect to other teaching approaches, Wildner-Bassett

(1984, 1986) found that both the eclectively taught students and the suggestopedic group

improved their use of conversational routines considerably, however the eclectic group

outperformed the suggestopedic group. Kubota(1995) reported an advantage for students

receiving either deductive or inductive instruction over the uninstructed group, with a

superior effect for the inductive approach, this initial difference had evaporated by the time a

delayed post-test was administered.

Wildner-Bassett(1994) and Tateyama et al.(1997) demonstrated that pragmatic routines

are teachable to beginning foreign language learners. This finding is important in terms of

curriculum and syllabus design because it dispels the myth that pragmatics can only be taught


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after students have developed a solid foundation in L2 grammar and vocabulary. As we know

from uninstructed first and second language acquisition research, most language development

is function-driven - i.e., the need to understand and express messages propels the learning of

linguistic form. Just as in uninstructed acquisition, students can start out by learning

pragmatic routines which they cannot yet analyze but which help them cope with recurrent,

standardized communicative events right from the beginning.

There is little evidence for aspects of L2 pragmatics that resist development through teaching,

but the few documented cases are instructive. One such study is Kubota's replication of

Bouton's (1994) research on the teaching of implicature. Kubota's Japanese EFL learners were

able to understand the exact implicatures that were repeated from the training materials but

were unable to generalize inferencing strategies to new instances of implicature. However,

these students' English proficiency was much less advanced than that of the learners in

Bouton's studies, and with more time, occasion for practice, and increased L2 input, the

students' success rate might have improved.

The other study that suggests limitations to teachability in L2 pragmatics is House's (1996)

investigation on improving the pragmatic fluency of advanced German EFL students. All butone feature of pragmatic fluency gained from consciousness raising and conversational

practice; the resistent aspect was to provide appropriate rejoinders, or second pair parts, to an

interlocutor's preceding contribution, as in this exchange:

NS: Oh I tell you what we go shopping together and buy all the things [we need]

NNS: [Of course] of course

NS: Okay then and you try and call Anja and ask her if she knows somebody who owns a grill

NNS: Yes of course(House, 1996, p. 242)

More appropriate acceptances of the NS' suggestions would have been 'ok/good idea/let's do

it that way then' or the like. Why would inappropriate rejoinders persist in these advancedlearners' discourse despite instruction? A plausible explanation is Bialystok's (e.g., 1993)

notion of control of processing: fluent and appropriate conversational responses require high

degrees of processing control in utterance comprehension and production, and such complex

skills may be very hard to develop through the few occasions for practice that foreign language

classroom learning provides.

But despite those few limitations, the research supports the view that pragmatic ability can

indeed be systematically developed through planful classroom activities. In order to address

the next question -

How can language instruction help develop pragmatic competence?

- we need to consider for a moment what opportunities for pragmatic learning are offered by

traditional forms of language teaching.

L2 classrooms as impoverished learning environments

It is a well-documented fact that in teacher-fronted teaching, the person doing most of the

talking is the teacher (e.g., Chaudron, 1988, for various analyses of teacher talk). This is to the

detriment of students' speaking opportunities, but it could be argued that through the sheer

quantity of teacher talk, students are provided with the input they need for pragmatic

development. However, studies show that compared to conversation outside instructional


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settings, teacher-fronted classroom discourse displays

a more narrow range of speech acts (Long, Adams, McLean, & Castaos, 1976)

a lack of politeness marking (Lrscher & Schulze, 1988)

shorter and less complex openings and closings (Lrscher, 1986; Kasper, 1989)

monopolization of discourse organization and management by the teacher (Lrscher,

1986; Ellis, 1990), and consequently,a limited range of discourse markers (Kasper, 1989).

The reason for such differences is not that classroom discourse is 'artificial'. Classroom

discourse is just as authentic as any other kind of discourse. Rather, classroom interaction is

an institutional activity in which participants' roles are asymmetrically distributed (Nunan,

1989), and the social relationships in this unequal power encounter are reflected and

re-affirmed at the level of discourse. Teacher's and students' rights and obligations, and the

activities associated with them, are epitomized in the basic interactional pattern of traditional

teacher-fronted teaching - the (in)famouspedagogical exchangeof elicitation (by the teacher)

- response(by a student) -feedback(by the teacher) (cf. discussion in Chaudron, 1988, p. 37).

The classic scenario is consistent with a knowledge-transmission model of teaching, accordingto which the teacher imparts new information to students, helps them process such

information and controls whether the new information has become part of students'

knowledge. Such functions can be implemented through a very limited range of

communicative acts.

If we map the communicative actions in classic language classroom discourse against the

pragmatic competence that nonnative speakers need to communicate in the world outside, it

becomes immediately obvious that the language classroom in its classical format does not

offer students what they need - not in terms of teacher's input, nor in terms of students'

productive language use. In a comparison of teacher-fronted teaching and small group work,

Long et al.(1976) demonstrated over 20 years ago that student participation increases

dramatically in student-centered activities. Importantly, student-centered activities do more

than just extend students' speaking time: they also give them opportunities to practice

conversational management, perform a larger range of communicative acts, and interact with

other participants in completing a task.

But despite its unique structure, even teacher-fronted classroom discourse offers some

opportunities for pragmatic learning. One important learning resource is classroom

management, because in this activity language does not function as an object for analysis and

practice but as a means for communication. If classroom management is performed in the

students' L1, they miss a valuable opportunity for experiencing the L2 as a genuine means ofcommunication. In a recent call for a role of students' native language in ESL teaching,

Auerbach(1993) proposed that classroom management is one of the activities that could be

carried out in students' L1 rather than the L2. Auerbach argues that using minority students'

native language for classroom management is one way of validating the students'

ethnolinguistic identity in an ESL classroom. In my view, Auerbach's call against English Only

classrooms in ESL settings for immigrant minorities is valid and necessary, but I want to

caution against extending it to EFL situations or any other foreign language classrooms, for

that matter. For students of English in Continental Europe or Asia, or students of Japanese

and French in the US, the FL classroom may be the only regular opportunity for using the FL

for communication. These opportunities should not be curtailed, and certainly not when it

comes to routinized activities such as classroom management discourse. In a recent study of


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his learning of Japanese as a Foreign Language, Cohen(1997) reports:

"Classroom talk was focused primarily on completing a series of planned

transactions, such as making introductions, buying stamps or postcards at a post

office, buying clothes in a department store, telling the doctor about our illness,

and the like. There was little non-transactional social conversation in class, other

than asides in English. In addition, spoken language tended to be focused onstructures that we were to learn (...). Toward the end of the second month, we

would start the class off with teacher-directed questions and answers, usually

inquiring about what we had done the previous day or weekend, or what we

intended to do - usually with the purpose of practicing some structure or other."

Because little genuinly communicative interchange was conducted in Japanese, students had

not much exposure to authentic input in this classroom.

From the studies reviewed earlier and from other theory and research of SL learning, we can

distill a number of activities that are useful for pragmatic development. Such activities can be

classified into two main types: activities aiming at raising students' pragmatic awareness, andactivities offering opportunities for communicativepractice.

Awareness-raising

Through awareness-raising activities, students acquire sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic

information - for instance, what function complimenting has in mainstream American culture,

what appropriate topics for complimenting are, and by what linguistic formulae compliments

are given and received. Students can observe particular pragmatic features in various sources

of oral or written 'data', ranging from native speaker 'classroom guests' (Bardovi-Harlig, et

al., 1991) to videos of authentic interaction, feature films (Rose, 1997), and other fictional and

non-fictional written and audiovisual sources.

Observation tasks

Especially in a second language context, students can be given a variety of observation

assignments outside the classroom. Such observation tasks can focus on sociopragmatic or

pragmalinguistic features.

A sociopragmatictask could be to observe under what conditions native speakers of American

English express gratitude - when, for what kinds of goods or services, and to whom (cf.

Eisenstein & Bodman, 1993). Depending on the student population and available time, such

observations may be open or structured. Open observations leave it to the students to detect

what the important context factors may be. For structured observations, students are providedwith an observation sheet which specifies the categories to look out for - for instance,

speaker's and hearer's status and familiarity, the cost of the good or service to the giver, and

the degree to which the giver is obliged to provide the good or service. A useful model for such

an observation sheet is the one proposed by Rose(1994) for requests.

Apragmalinguistictask focuses on the strategies and linguistic means by which thanking is

accomplished - what formulae are used, and what additional means of expressing appreciation

are employed, such as expressing pleasure about the giver's thoughtfulness or the received

gift, asking questions about it, and so forth. Finally, by examining in which contexts the

various ways of expressing gratitude are used, sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic aspectsare combined. By focusing students' attention on relevant features of the input, such


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observation tasks help students make connections between linguistic forms, pragmatic

functions, their occurrence in different social contexts, and their cultural meanings. Students

are thus guided to noticethe information they need in order to develop their pragmatic

competence in L2 (Schmidt, 1993). The observations made outside the classroom will be

reported back to class, compared with those of other students, and perhaps commented and

explained by the teacher. These discussion can take on any kind of small group of whole class

format.

Whether gathered through out-of-class observation or brought into the classroom through

audiovisual media, authentic native speaker input is indispensible for pragmatic learning. This

is not because students should imitate native speakers' action patterns but in order to build

their own pragmatic knowledge on the right kind of input. Comparisons of textbook dialogues

and authentic discourse show that there is often a mismatch between the two. For instance,

Bardovi-Harlig, et al.(1991) examined conversational closings in 20 textbooks for American

English and found that few of them represented closing phases accurately. Myers-Scotton and

Bernstein(1988) discovered similar discrepancies between the representation of many other

conversational features in authentic discourse and textbook dialogues. The reason for such

inaccurate textbook representations is that native speakers are only partially aware of theirpragmatic competence (the same is true of their language competence generally). As Wolfson

(1989) noted, most of native speakers' pragmatic knowledge is tacit, or implicit knowledge: it

underlies their communicative action, but they cannot describe it. Even the most proficient

conversationalist has little conscious awareness about turn-taking procedures and politeness

marking. Miscommunication or pragmatic failure is often vaguely diagnosed as 'impolite'

behavior on the part of the other person, whereas the specific source of the irritation remains

unclear. Because native speaker intuition is a notoriously unreliable source of information

about the communicative practices of their own community, it is vital that teaching materials

on L2 pragmatics are research-based (Myers-Scotton & Bernstein, 1988; Wolfson, 1989;

Olshtain & Cohen, 1991; Bardovi-Harlig, et al., 1991).

Authentic L2 input is essential for pragmatic learning, but it does not secure successful

pragmatic development. When students' observe L2 communicative practices, their minds

don't simply record what they hear and see like a videocamera does. Students' experiences are

interpretive rather than just registering. Cognitive psychology (e.g., Sanford & Garrod, 1981)

as well as radical constructivism (e.g., von Glaserfeld, 1995) emphasize the importance of

prior knowledge for comprehension and learning. In our attempt to understand the practices

of an unfamiliar community, we tend to view such practices through the lenses of our own

customs. We tend to classify experiences into 'familiar' and thus not requiring further

reflection or analysis, and 'unfamiliar', i.e., peculiar, enigmatic, inviting explanation, and

attracting evaluation. Mller(1981) referred to this interpretive strategy as culturalisomorphism. As a strategy for the acquisition of everyday knowledge, cultural isomorphism is

a combination of assimilation and spot-the-difference. L2 practices are subjected to the same

social evaluations as the apparently equivalent L1 practices. The resulting perspective is that

of a tourist who sorts experiences in the visited country into 'just like home' and 'strange'. As

Elbeshausen and Wagner(1985) comment, "Tourism is not educational but it dramatically

increases our repertoire of anecdotes" (p. 49), and this is because through the assimilative and

contrastive strategy of isomorphism, stereotypical evaluations of L2 practices emerge.

Language teaching therefore has the important task to help students situate L2

communicative practices in their sociocultural context and appreciate their meanings and

functions within the L2 community. The research literature on cross-cultural pragmaticsdocuments the rich intracultural variation of communicative action patterns and thus offers


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NS pragmatics or divergence from NS practices is shaped by learners' views of themselves,

their social position in the target community and in different contexts within the wider L2

environment, and by their experience with NS in various encounters.

Thirdly, members of the target community may perceive NNS's total convergence to L2

pragmatics as intrusive and inconsistent with the NNS's role as outsider to the L2 community,

whereas they may appreciate some measure of divergence as a disclaimer to membership.Giles, Coupland, and Coupland(1991) documented that in many ethnolinguistic contact

situations, successful communication is a matter of optimalrather than total convergence.

Optimal convergence is a dynamic, negotiable construct that defies hard-and-fast definition. It

refers to pragmatic and sociolinguistic choices which are consistent with participants'

subjectivities and social claims, and recognizes that such claims may be in conflict between

participants.

Fourthly, as Peirce(1995) noted, language classrooms provide an ideal arena for exploring the

relationship between learners' subjectivity and L2 use. Classrooms afford second language

learners the opportunity to reflect on their communicative encounters and to experiment with

different pragmatic options. For foreign language learners, the classroom may be the onlyavailable environment where they can try out what using the L2 feels like, and how more or

less comfortable they are with different aspects of L2 pragmatics. The sheltered environment

of the L2 classroom will thus prepare and support learners to communicate effectively in L2.

But more than that, by encouraging students to explore and reflect their experiences,

observations, and interpretations of L2 communicative practices and their own stances

towards them, L2 teaching will expand its role from that of language instruction to that of

language education.

Go to References.


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