La intersecció entre la pragmàtica i l'adquisició de segones llengües

This article provides a review of research in the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge by second language learners. It begins with a definition of pragmatics and second language acquisition that emphasizes the complex relationship between the acquisition of grammar and language use. After examining four possibilities of relationships between pragmatics and language development, the author reviews past and current research focusing on the following topics: the study of pragmatic development, the identification of speech acts, the influence of host and foreign environments, the role of the first and second languages, and speaker interaction

A real interlocutor in elicitation techniques: does it matter?

This study investigates whether adding a real interlocutor to elicitation techniques would result in requests that are different from those gathered through versions with a hypothetical interlocutor. For this purpose, a written method is chosen. One group of 40 students receive a written discourse completion task (DCT) with two situations that ask respondents to write emails on paper to an imaginary professor. This data is compared to earlier data collected from 27 students, where a group of students composed emails for the same situations and sent them electronically to their professor. Thus, while one group write emails to a hypothetical professor, the other group is provided with a real interlocutor. The data is analyzed for the inclusion of opening and closing moves, density, the level of directness and the choices of moves in the opening and closing sequences, as well as the choices of supportive moves. Results indicate significant differences in (the) level of directness, and the choices of moves in the opening and closing sequences. The other analyses do not show significant differences. The findings reveal that the addition of a real interlocutor does make a difference, albeit not a drastic one. The results have implications for the design of elicitation techniques that aim to simulate real life

The effect of corpus-based instruction on pragmatic routines

This study analyses the effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on the phraseology used by 223 English students at an Italian university. The students studied the genre of opinion survey reports through paper-based and hands-on exploration of a reference corpus. They then wrote their own report and a learner corpus of these texts was compiled. A contrastive interlanguage analysis approach (Granger, 2002) was adopted to compare the phraseology of key items in the learner corpus with that found in the reference corpus. Comparison is also made with a learner corpus of reports produced by a previous cohort of students who had not used the reference corpus. Students who had done DDL tasks used a wider range of genre-appropriate phraseology and produced a lower number of stock phrases than those who had not. The study also finds evidence that students use more phrases encountered in paper-based concordancing tasks than in hands-on tasks. Unlike in previous DDL studies, observations of the learning of a specific text-type through DDL in the present study are based on the comparison with both a control learner corpus and an expert corpus. The study also considers the use of DDL with a large class size

La intersecció entre la pragmàtica i l'adquisició de segones llengües

This article provides a review of research in the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge by second language learners. It begins with a definition of pragmatics and second language acquisition that emphasizes the complex relationship between the acquisition of grammar and language use. After examining four possibilities of relationships between pragmatics and language development, the author reviews past and current research focusing on the following topics: the study of pragmatic development, the identification of speech acts, the influence of host and foreign environments, the role of the first and second languages, and speaker interaction

"Thank you for a lovely day!" Contrastive thanking in textbooks for teaching English and Spanish as foreign languages

Thanking, as other speech acts such as apologizing or requesting,can be performed in numerous contexts and, for their analysis, many crucial variables must be taken into consideration (eg. social distance, gender, age,etc.), which often are difficult to control. Besides these variables, speech acts are carried out in different situations, taking into account the culture in which they are performed. For example, thanking might be performed after alighting a bus in the UK, the USA or Australia, but this might not necessarily happen in Spain. The aim of the study on which this paper is based, in to explore thanking contrastively in British English and in Peninsular Spanish from a pragmatic viewpoint,by looking at specific independent variables: the context and situation in which this speech act is performed, the relationship between the interlocutors who perform it, which includes social power and distance, and the reason for expressing gratitude. For the purpose of this investigation, a corpus of 128 textbooks (64 for each language) for the learning and teaching of Spanish and English as foreign languages was used. It is important to note that, although these corpora are built on prefabricated dialogues and these can be regarded as abstractions of reality, the communicative situations found in the textbooks are aimed at depicting exchanges and linguistic patterns representing what naturally occurs in real conversations in both cultures

The Acquisition of Tense–Aspect: Converging Evidence From Corpora and Telicity Ratings

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75534/1/j.1540-4781.2009.00895.x.pd

Measuring Syntactic Complexity in Spoken and Written Learner Language: Comparing the Incomparable?

Spoken and written language are two modes of language. When learners aim at higher skill levels, the expected outcome of successful second language learning is usually to become a fluent speaker and writer who can produce accurate and complex language in the target language. There is an axiomatic difference between speech and writing, but together they form the essential parts of learners’ L2 skills. The two modes have their own characteristics, and there are differences between native and nonnative language use. For instance, hesitations and pauses are not visible in the end result of the writing process, but they are characteristic of nonnative spoken language use. The present study is based on the analysis of L2 English spoken and written productions of 18 L1 Finnish learners with focus on syntactic complexity. As earlier spoken language segmentation units mostly come from fluency studies, we conducted an experiment with a new unit, the U-unit, and examined how using this unit as the basis of spoken language segmentation affects the results. According to the analysis, written language was more complex than spoken language. However, the difference in the level of complexity was greatest when the traditional units, T-units and AS-units, were used in segmenting the data. Using the U-unit revealed that spoken language may, in fact, be closer to written language in its syntactic complexity than earlier studies had suggested. Therefore, further research is needed to discover whether the differences in spoken and written learner language are primarily due to the nature of these modes or, rather, to the units and measures used in the analysis

The emotional weight of "I love you" in multilinguals' languages

The present paper considers the perceived emotional weight of the phrase I love you in multilinguals’ different languages. The sample consists of 1459 adult multilinguals speaking a total of 77 different first languages. They filled out an on-line questionnaire with open and closed questions linked to language behavior and emotions. Feedback on the open question related to perceived emotional weight of the phrase I love you in the multilinguals’ different languages was recoded in three categories: it being strongest in (1) the first language (L1), (2) the first language and a foreign language, and (3) a foreign language (LX). A majority of speakers felt I love you was strongest in their L1. Participants offered various explanations for their perception. Statistical analyses revealed that the perception of weight of the phrase I love you was associated with self-perceived language dominance, context of acquisition of the L2, age of onset of learning the L2, degree of socialization in the L2, nature of the network of interlocutors in the L2, and self-perceived oral proficiency in the L2

The importance of task variability in the design of learner corpora for SLA research

This cross-sectional study investigates task variability focusing on the use of Spanish past tense morphology in a spoken learner corpus. Sixty L2 learners of Spanish (English L1) from three different proficiency levels (20 per group) and fifteen native speakers completed three communicative tasks (a guided interview, a picture-based narrative, and a historical figures description) and an experimental task, all designed to investigate the acquisition of tense and aspect in L2 Spanish. Data were transcribed in CHAT, and analysed and coded using a specially created interactive coding program that works in combination with the CLAN program (MacWhinney 2000). Results demonstrate significant differences in the emergence and accurate use of past tense morphology across tasks. An additional analysis showed that the less controlled tasks encouraged few instances of more advanced features, suggesting that not all task types are equally successful at eliciting the range of tense-aspect morphological contrasts theoretically relevant for SLA research on tense and aspect.</jats:p