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.

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.

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.