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NFLRC NetWork #6
'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.
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Blum-Kulka & House, 1989; Olshtain, 1989). The values of context factors are negotiable; they
can change through the dynamics of conversational interaction, as captured in Fraser's (1990)
notion of the 'conversational contract' and in Myers-Scotton's Markedness Model (1993).
Pragmatic ability in a second or foreign language is part of a nonnative speakers (NNS)
communicative competence and therefore has to be located in a model of communicative
ability (Savignon, (1991, for overview). In Bachman's model (1990, p. 87ff), 'language
competence' is subdivided into two components, 'organizational competence' and 'pragmatic
competence'. Organizational competence comprises knowledge of linguistic units and the
rules of joining them together at the levels of sentence ('grammatical competence') and
discourse ('textual competence'). Pragmatic competence subdivides into 'illocutionary
competence' and 'sociolinguistic competence'. 'Illocutionary competence' can be glossed as
'knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out'. The term 'communicative action'
is often more accurate than the more familiar term 'speech act' because communicative action
is neutral between the spoken and written mode, and the term acknowledges the fact that
communicative action can also be implemented by silence or non-verbally. 'Sociolinguistic
competence' comprises the ability to use language appropriately according to context. It thus
includes the ability to select communicative acts and appropriate strategies to implement
them depending on the current status of the 'conversational contract' (Fraser, 1990).
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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/would you 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
mind feeding 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 of
requesting 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 as
in the modal verbs could or would has formal, functional and distributional equivalents in
other Germanic languages such as Danish and German - the Danish modal past kunne/ville
and the German subjunctive knntest and 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 the
demands 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 contextsensitive in selecting pragmatic strategies in their own language, learners may
underdifferentiate 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 necessary comes 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 native
speakers (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 in Is 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 NNS
students 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 BardoviHarlig 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 were
pragmatically 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'
metalinguistic awareness, but it does not contribute much to develop their metapragmatic
consciousness in L2.
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languages
research goal
design
assessment/
procedure/
instrument
discourse
markers &
strategies
advanced
L1 German FL
English
explicit vs
implicit
pre-test/
post-test
control group
L2 baseline
roleplay
pragmatic
routines
intermediate
pre-test/
post-test
control group
roleplay
Billmyer 1990
compliment
high
intermediate
L1 Japanese
SL English
+/-instruction
pre-test/
post-test
control group
L2 baseline
elicited
conversation
Olshtain &
Cohen 1990
apology
advanced
L1 Hebrew FL
English
teachability
pre-test/
post-test L2
baseline
discourse
completion
question.
WildnerBassett 1994
pragmatic
routines &
strategies
beginning
L1 English SL
German
teachability to
beginning FL
students
pre-test/
post-test
questionnaires roleplay
Bouton 1994
implicature
advanced
L1 mixed SL
English
+/-instruction
pre-test/
post-test
control group
multiple
choice
question
pre-test/
post-test/
delayed
post-test
control group
multiple
choice &
sentence
combining
question
study
teaching goal
House &
Kasper 1981
WildnerBassett 1984,
1986
L1 German FL
eclectic vs
English
suggesto-pedia
Kubota 1995
implicature
intermediate
L1 Japanese
FL English
deductive vs
inductive vs
zero
House 1996
pragmatic
fluency
advanced
L1 German FL
English
explicit vs
implicit
pre-test/
post-test
control group
roleplay
roleplay
holistic ratings
multi-method
Morrow 1996
complaint &
refusal
intermediate
L1 mixed SL
English
teachability/
explicit
pre-test/
post-test/
delayed
post-test L2
baseline
Tateyama et
al. 1997
pragmatic
routines
beginning
L1 English FL
Japanese
explicit vs
implicit
pre-test/
post-test
control group
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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) First I got the wrong number, and
then I got Operator, [A: Well.] And uhm (1.0) I wonder why.
A: Well, I wonder too. It uh just rung now about uh three ti//mes.
B: Yeah, well Operator got it for me.
A: She did.
B: Uh huh. So //uh
A: 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: Well I- I never am certain, I didn't know whether I'd be m too early or too late // or riA: No::. No, well I guess uh 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 afraid
Assuming 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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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 but
one 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 advanced
learners' 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 -
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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 notice the 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 their
pragmatic 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 cultural
isomorphism. 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 pragmatics
documents the rich intracultural variation of communicative action patterns and thus offers
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compelling counter-evidence against unhelpful and often mutual stereotypes. For example, a
stereotype held by some Japanese learners of English is that Americans have a very direct
style of communication (Tanaka, 1988; Robinson, 1992); however, research on requests
(Blum-Kulka & House, 1989; Blum-Kulka, 1991) and refusals (Beebe, Takahashi, & UlissWeltz,, 1990; Beebe & Cummings, 1996) provides evidence to the contrary.
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