Does language learners benefit from classroom interaction?

Cinquenes Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la FCHS (Any 1999-2000

La enseñanza de fórmulas de disculpa a un nivel discursivo: ¿se mantienen los efectos de la instrucción a largo plazo?

This study explores the effects of teaching apologies at a discourse level on a group of Spanish learners of English as a foreign language both in the short and in the long-term. It adopts a one-group pre-, postand delayed post-test design to particularly examine the effectiveness of a pedagogical model on learners’ appropriate use of apology formulas not only after immediately receiving instruction, but also five months later. An interactive discourse completion test was used to analyse learners’ performance when apologising in different contrasting scenarios. Results show that the types of apology formulas produced by learners in the pretest differ significantly from those produced in the post-test, as well as in the delayed post-test. After receiving instruction, learners produced more elaborated apologetic responses attending to the sociopragmatic aspects involved in the different situations, a performance that was maintained over time. These results seem to demonstrate the positive benefits of instruction to foster learners’ pragmatic knowledge in terms of both frequency and variety of apology formulas not only in the short-term but also in the long-term.Este estudio explora el efecto de enseñar disculpas a un nivel discursivo a un grupo de estudiantes españoles que aprenden inglés como lengua extranjera tanto a corto como a largo plazo. Adopta pues un diseño de un grupo, pre- post- y post-test a largo plazo para examinar en concreto la eficacia de incorporar un modelo de enseñanza en el uso apropiado de fórmulas de disculpa no solo inmediatamente después de recibir la instrucción, sino también cinco meses más tarde. Se utilizó un test interactivo para completar el discurso y analizar el comportamiento de los estudiantes cuando pedían disculpas en diferentes situaciones. Los resultados indican que los tipos de fórmulas de disculpa que utilizan los estudiantes en el pre-test difieren significativamente de las utilizadas tanto en el post-test como en test distribuido a largo plazo. Después de recibir instrucción, los estudiantes usaron respuestas de disculpa más elaboradas prestando atención a los aspectos sociopragmáticos de cada situación, un comportamiento que se mantuvo a largo plazo. Estos resultados parecen demostrar los beneficios positivos de la enseñanza para fomentar el conocimiento pragmático de los estudiantes tanto en la frecuencia como en la variedad de fórmulas de disculpa no solo a corto sino también a largo plazo

Paralelismos y diferencias temáticas entre la obra del joven Goethe y su época clásica

Segones Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la FCHS (Any 1996-1997

Teaching the pragmatics of English as an international language: A focus on pragmatic markers

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the majority of whom are non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. While such reality is widely acknowledged, few attempts have been made to teach pragmatic competence in EIL. Addressing this concern, the present study investigates the effects that a pedagogical intervention on EIL pragmatics has on the oral use of pragmatic markers (PMs): a key tool for successful communication in the current increasingly multicultural and multilingual society. Seventy-three Spanish EFL students were divided into an instructional (n = 34) and a control group (n = 39). The instructional group received 4 interventional sessions that included (1) awareness of the legitimacy of EIL, (2) meta-pragmatic awareness of pragmatic behavior across the world, (3) task-supported instruction on PMs, and (4) strategy-based instruction. Pragmatic competence was assessed by students’ use of PMs in oral academic presentations. The results revealed that the instructional group had more significant changes in the frequency and variety of PMs used than the control one, as they widened the repertoire of PMs uttered in their academic presentations. These findings project the future of pragmatic instruction in EIL and provide directions for reorienting the EIL curriculum towards the integration of L2 pragmatics

Research methodologies in pragmatics : eliciting refusals to requests

The speech act of refusing, as a dispreferred response, is complex to perform and it usually involves indirect strategies as well as mitigating devices to avoid risking the initiator’s positive face. The appropriate choice of refusal strategies may depend on sociopragmatic issues such as the social status of the requester relative to the refuser (low, equal, high), social distance between the interactants (stranger, acquaintance, intimate) and the setting. Therefore, learners may require a certain level of pragmatic competence to perform this speech act in an appropriate way. On that account, the aim of the present paper is the elaboration of three different types of instruments (i.e. oral role-plays, written discourse completion tasks and awareness tests) on learners’ production and comprehension of refusals to requestive situations in a foreign language context. These three instruments may serve as both data collection instruments for researchers as well as pedagogical teaching materials for instructors. The paper is organised as follows. First, it reviews the data collection instruments employed in interlanguage pragmatics by particularly specifying the characteristics of oral and written production data, as well as awareness collection data. Then, it explains how the three particular instruments were elaborated. Finally, concluding remarks and pedagogical implications are suggested concerning the use of the proposed instruments in the English as a foreign language learning setting.El acto de habla de los rechazos es un tipo de respuesta no deseada, cuya complejidad implica el uso de estrategias indirectas así como de mitigación para evitar que se ofenda la persona que ha iniciado la interacción. La elección apropiada de estas estrategias puede depender de aspectos sociopragmáticos como el estatus social del que realiza la petición en relación con la persona que realiza el rechazo (bajo, igual, alto), la distancia social entre los que interactúan (desconocidos, conocidos, íntimos) y el contexto comunicativo. Así pues, para que los aprendices de una lengua puedan realizar este acto de habla de manera apropiada, es fundamental que dispongan de un determinado nivel de competencia pragmática en dicha lengua. Teniendo en cuenta este aspecto, la finalidad de este artículo es la elaboración de tres tipos diferentes de instrumentos (i.e. actividades de role-play, tareas escritas de completar conversaciones y tests de activación de la consciencia pragmática) para la producción y comprensión del acto de habla de los rechazos a las peticiones formuladas. El valor de dichos instrumentos reside en su doble aplicación, bien sea para investigadores que desean recoger datos de aprendices o para profesores que los puedan utilizar como materiales pedagógicos. El artículo presenta las siguientes secciones. En primer lugar, se ofrece una revisión teórica de los instrumentos de recogida de datos más utilizados en el campo de la pragmática del interlanguaje especificando las características de aquellos que recogen producción oral y escrita, así como los que activan la consciencia pragmática. En segundo lugar, se explica cómo se han elaborado los tres instrumentos de recogida de datos sobre el acto de habla de los rechazos y finalmente,se sugieren implicaciones pedagógicas relacionadas con el uso de estos instrumentos en contextos de aprendizaje del inglés como lengua extranjera

The Interactive Effects of Pragmatic-Eliciting Tasks and Pragmatic Instruction

The effects of data-gathering methods on pragmatic data have been well documented, yet an inquiry into the interactive effects of assessment tasks with pragmatic instruction has received scant attention. This study investigated the interaction between two assessment tasks (e-mail and phone) and two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit). Forty-nine Spanish learners of English engaged in these two tasks as pre- and posttests. The explicit group received 12 hours of metapragmatic information on head acts and hedges in suggestions while the implicit group was the recipient of recast and input enhancement activities. The results showed that postinstructional improvement of the explicit condition was significantly more than that of the implicit condition in the phone task, although improvements of these two conditions were on par in the e-mail task. This task-induced variability might have been caused by an interaction between the feature of the two types of knowledge (i.e., monitoring capability) and an access to the knowledge bases (i.e., the role of attention to appropriateness and accuracy) in the two task

Learning how to mitigate requests throught an explicit pragmatics-based method

It is widely agreed that the goal of language teaching is to develop learners’ communicative competence (Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor, 2006). Consequently, instructional practices should focus not just on the knowledge of the grammatical and lexical system of that target language, but also on the “secret rules” underlying it (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001). These “secret rules” are related to one of the essential components of the construct of communicative competence, that is the pragmatic competence. Scholars in the research field of interlanguage pragmatics have reported the benefits of adopting an explicit teaching approach on developing pragmatics (Kasper and Roever, 2005) and, therefore, have highlighted the necessity to design new instructional approaches to explicitly teach learners a variety of pragmatic features (Rose, 2005). Thus, the objective of this paper is to contribute to this line of research by presenting a pragmatics-based explicit method designed to develop learners’ pragmatic ability in the appropriate use of request mitigating devicesEs comúnmente aceptado que el objetivo de enseñanza de lenguas es el desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa (Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor, 2006). Por lo tanto, la práctica docente debe centrarse no sólo en la enseñanza del sistema lingüístico y gramatical de la lengua objeto de estudio, sino también en sus “reglas secretas” (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001). Estas reglas están relacionas con uno de los componentes esenciales del constructo de competencia comunicativa, es decir, el componente pragmático. Investigadores en el campo de la pragmática del interlenguaje han mostrado los beneficios de adoptar métodos de enseñanza explícitos en el desarrollo de la pragmática (Kasper and Roever, 2005) y por lo tanto, han enfatizado la necesidad de diseñar nuevas formas de instrucción explícitas en la enseñanza de diferentes aspectos de la pragmática (Rose, 2005). Así pues, el objetivo del presente trabajo es contribuir a esta línea de investigación mediante la elaboración de un método de enseñanza explícito que permita desarrollar la habilidad pragmática de los aprendices en el uso apropiado de elementos de mitigación en peticione

The Role of Politeness in Apology Sequences: How to Maintain Harmony between Speakers

The goal of the present paper is to provide a discourse-based teaching approach for the integration of the speech act of apologies from a communicative perspective. In so doing, special attention is paid to how sociocultural norms affect language use. The rationale behind the selection of this speech act is based on the fact that the realisation of this pragmatic aspect might be complex for learners of English as a Second/Foreign Language (SL/FL) not only when selecting appropriate utterances, but also in assessing what an offense involves and its severity (Bergman and Kasper, 1993). Taking these aspects into account, this paper provides first a review of politeness theory, then, a description of the speech act under investigation is presented, and finally, pedagogical implications regarding the integration of apologies in the second/foreign language classroom are suggested.El objetivo de este trabajo es presentar un enfoque instructivo desde una perspectiva discursiva para la integración del acto de habla de la disculpa desde una perspectiva comunicativa. De este modo, se da especial atención a cómo las normas socioculturales afectan al uso del lenguaje. Se ha seleccionado este acto de habla puesto que su realización podría ser compleja para los estudiantes de inglés como segunda lengua/lengua extranjera (SL/LE) no sólo en la selección de estrategias apropiadas, sino también en cuanto a la evaluación de lo que una ofensa implica y cuál es su severidad (Bergman y Kasper, 1993). Teniendo en cuenta los aspectos mencionados, este trabajo presenta en primer lugar una revisión de la teoría de la cortesía, en segundo lugar, una descripción del acto de habla objeto de estudio, y finalmente se proponen sugerencias pedagógicas respecto a la integración de disculpas en el aula de segundas lenguas/lenguas extranjeras

Requests in films and in efl textbooks: a comparison

Research in the field of interlanguage pragmatics has shown that foreign language learners’ grammatical and pragmatic competences do not always match, this can perhaps be due to a lack of appropriate pragmatic presentation in current EFL textbooks. Hence, there seems to be a necessity of bringing authentic discourse into the classroom. One of the possibilities could be using films as input to develop classroom tasks. In this paper we analyse and compare the type, strategy and frequency of requests in both textbooks and films, in order to realise whether they provide an adequate treatment of this pragmatic issue. Results show an insufficient, unreal, decontextualised, and pragmatically inappropriate use of requesting strategies in the EFL textbooks analysed. We therefore propose using scenes from films as an authentic and motivating type of material which provides instances of real use of language and presents different requests in contextualised situations.Comunidad Valenciana GV-00-147-0