This study examines English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ pragmatic input and output regarding agreements and disagreements. The investigation of the EFL input materials focuses on the Lighthouse series and examines six textbooks and their accompanying audio materials for years one to six (corresponding to grades 5-10) at German intermediate secondary school. The investigation of pragmatic output presents the results of a cross-sectional developmental study conducted at a German intermediate secondary school involving two year groups - year 8 and year 10 – consisting of twenty-eight and thirty-one EFL learners respectively. The output data were elicited with an illustrated discourse completion task. The results of the input investigation revealed that L2 learners working with the textbook and audio CDs over a six-year period would have encountered a nearly even number of agreements and disagreements by the end of their studies but that the distribution across the two material types differed from year to year and also for the two speech acts. While the output data showed no considerable differences in the groups’ use of agreement strategies, differences were observed with regard to their employment of disagreement strategies and negative pragmatic transfer from learners’ L1.

Written by an international team of experts, this groundbreaking book explores the benefits and challenges of developing pragmatic competence in English as a target language, inside and outside the classroom, and among young and adult learners of English. The chapters present a range of first language (L1) contexts, including China, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and Norway, to provide international perspectives on how different L1s present varying challenges for developing pragmatic awareness in English. The book outlines cutting-edge techniques for investigating spoken and written pragmatic competence, and offers both face-to-face and online practical teaching solutions. It also examines underexplored areas of second language (L2) pragmatics research, such as young learner groups, the effects of textbook materials, study abroad contexts, and technology-mediated instruction and assessment. Innovative and comprehensive, this volume is a unique contribution to the field of L2 pragmatics, and will be essential reading for researchers, course developers, language teachers, and students.

Learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) typically do not have enough opportunities to develop their pragmatic competence, as their language learning activities often rely on textbooks (Kim & Hall, 2002) which are inadequate sources of pragmatic input (Ren & Han, 2016; Vellenga, 2004). Therefore, when EFL students become international students in an English-speaking country, they are likely to face communication struggles. This study explores the use of self-access materials including self-paced instructional videos, tasks, and reflection activities about requests in spoken and email communication within the US academic setting. Analysis of twenty-one Indonesian EFL learners’ responses to the tasks, self-evaluation, and questionnaires showed more varied formulation of request strategies, a shift towards using more hearer-oriented strategies, and raised awareness of contextual details (e.g., degree of imposition, power relationship, social distance). Findings suggest that learners can benefit from learning the pragmatics of US academic settings with the aid of self-access language learning materials.

This chapter investigates the perceived adequacy of the discourse of gratitude. It reports on a study in which questionnaires were administered to native speakers of English with experience as university lecturers. These questionnaires explored the envisaged impact on the addressee of foreign language learners’ written speech acts of thanking, the relevance of given textual-strategic features to the communicative effectiveness of speech acts of thanking, and the texts’ linguistic and textual problem areas relatable to the writers’ L1 background. The English lecturers expressed their likely cognitive, emotional, and behavioural responses to the learners’ writing, and indicated that they attributed importance to, and held the writers responsible for, logic and coherence, consideration of the addressee’s circumstances, and reader-friendliness. They identified two types of inadequacies: inaccuracy (e.g., deviations from linguistic norms), and inappropriateness (e.g., incongruity between text and co(n)text). The argument is put forward that language learners could enhance their interactional skills by adopting an other-oriented communicative perspective on their discourse, considering the interlocutor’s interactional rights, expectations, and foreseeable reactions.

This chapter presents a cross-sectional study exploring the development of young Norwegian EFL learners’ appraisal of requestive behaviour in English and their metapragmatic awareness of the linguistic and contextual features influencing request production and interpretation. The participants were in the third, fifth, and seventh grade of primary school, aged approximately 9, 11, and 13. Through an Emoticon task performed in groups, the learners appraised a selection of requests they themselves had produced, and were subsequently invited to explain their choices. Direct requests were appraised increasingly more positively with age, while the opposite was the case with conventionally indirect ones. Hints proved the most challenging to appraise and discuss due to the discrepancies between their linguistic form and speaker intentions. Metapragmatic discussions revealed a more frequent focus on the linguistic features of requesting in all age groups, with the marker ‘please’ consistently emerging as the origin of positive appraisals. Although contextual features, such as the age of and familiarity with the interlocutor, place and communicative situation, were discussed less commonly on the whole, they appeared more often with older learners, resulting in more nuanced appraisals and suggesting a developing awareness of the interplay between linguistic and contextual features.

This quasi-experimental study tracks the efficacy of a planned explicit intervention with an EFL learner group in Mexico, using the under-researched speech act of refusals as the pragmatic target. Thirty university students were recruited to an Experimental (N=15) or Control group (N=15) to measure instructional effects of a ten-hour training programme which employed a pre-test, post-test design. Performance results were enhanced with semi-structured interviews to identify learners’ cognitive processes when producing refusals and their perceptions of the pragmatics training. The findings revealed the pragmatic instruction facilitated more elaborate refusals which showed increased sensitivity to sociopragmatic aspects. Both the frequency and variety of indirect strategies and adjuncts were markedly different to those produced by their non-instructed counterparts. This positive trend in the quantitative findings was also corroborated in the qualitative data. The interview data highlighted the instructed group’s cognitive processes when carrying out the pragmatic tasks and showed the learners’ planning and thought processes when performing refusals were different before and after receiving instruction.

There is an ever-growing consensus amongst EFL/ESL researchers that while L2 learners may improve their English language proficiency during a period of study abroad in the target language, they may not show concomitant development of pragmatic competence. This mixed-methods study aimed to examine this interlanguage issue by tracking asymmetrical email communication with academic staff. Using 170 authentic L2 emails in comparison to a reference corpus of 162 authentic L1 emails, we identified three distinct features of the Chinese learners’ L2 email requests to faculty: significant directness and limited choices of conventional indirectness, extensive external modification and relative limited internal modification, and heavy reliance on the request perspectives of ‘you’ and ‘I’. L2 email practices also remained largely unchanged during study abroad in England, suggesting a ten-month immersion in the L2 environment alone was insufficient to evidence developmental change. Learners found it challenging to implicitly acquire more complicated pragmatic structures such as internal modification, for instance. Participant interviews revealed learner agency played a key role in pragmatic learning and unlearning, the latter of which refers to the process by which learners actively dissociate from L2 norms when conflicts with the L1 systems arise, implying that L2 pragmatic development is fluid.

Over the last four decades, research in second language (L2) pragmatics has grown rapidly in its scope, quality, and amount of empirical investigations. This chapter surveys historical developments of L2 pragmatics research from the 1980s up to now. The chapter discusses a range of topics including definitions of pragmatic competence, models of pragmatic competence and development, and theoretical underpinnings of pragmatics learning. Specific topics such as instruction and assessment, longitudinal investigation into pragmatic development, and contexts of pragmatics learning (i.e., study abroad) are also discussed.  Research areas that emerged with the recent surge of globalisation and advancements in technology are presented with a discussion on how these new areas have advanced our investigation of pragmatics learning and development. The chapter concludes with directions for future research.

Written by an international team of experts, this groundbreaking book explores the benefits and challenges of developing pragmatic competence in English as a target language, inside and outside the classroom, and among young and adult learners of English. The chapters present a range of first language (L1) contexts, including China, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and Norway, to provide international perspectives on how different L1s present varying challenges for developing pragmatic awareness in English. The book outlines cutting-edge techniques for investigating spoken and written pragmatic competence, and offers both face-to-face and online practical teaching solutions. It also examines underexplored areas of second language (L2) pragmatics research, such as young learner groups, the effects of textbook materials, study abroad contexts, and technology-mediated instruction and assessment. Innovative and comprehensive, this volume is a unique contribution to the field of L2 pragmatics, and will be essential reading for researchers, course developers, language teachers, and students.