Second Language Pragmatics and English Language Education in East Asia

Cynthia Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000225365
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Teoría y práctica de la educación

This edited collection addresses the link between second language pragmatics (including interlanguage and intercultural) research and English language education. The chapters use different contemporary research methods and theoretical frameworks such as conversation analysis, language-learners-as-ethnographers, discourse and interactional approaches and data in contexts (either in the region or overseas).

The content explores and discusses the significance of learning and teaching of second language (L2) pragmatics in language education for learners who use English as a lingua franca for academic and intercultural communication purposes with native and non-native speakers of English, focusing on pragmatic actions, social behaviours, perceptions and awareness levels in three regions in East Asia – China, Japan and South Korea. It is an important contribution to the area of second language pragmatics in language education for East Asian learners. It recommends research-informed pedagogies for the learning and teaching of interlanguage or intercultural pragmatics in regions and places where similar cultural beliefs or practices are found.

This is an essential read for researchers, language educators, classroom teachers, readers who are interested in second language pragmatics research and those interested in second language acquisition and English language education in the East Asian context.

1
Discourses of pragmatics studies

Interlanguage and English as a lingua franca in East Asian contexts

Keiko Tsuchiya

Introduction – a meeting point ¹

No theories emerge from a vacuum. The field of English as a lingua franca (ELF) developed at a meeting point of two flows: the theories of World Englishes (WE) and interlanguage (IL). English in a global context was recognised in the 1960s (McArthur, 1998), and since then, the controversy regarding ‘Standard English’ and ‘native speakers’ has been raised as seen in the debates between Prator (1968) and Kachru (1976). In the 1980s, the legitimacy of World Englishes were asserted in Quirk (1985) and Kachru (1985), proposing the model of Three Concentric Circles of World Englishes with inner, outer and expanding circles (ibid.). That is also the time when Widdowson (1982) raised the question whether the aim of language learners should be conformity to the norms of native English speakers (NESs). The Quirk and Kachru debate continued in the 1990s (Kachru, 1991; Quirk, 1990), and McArthur (1998) distinguished the terms native varieties and nativised English, the latter of which “occurs in territories where it was not originally present, but English has been present for some time, and may or may not be the primary language of the majority of people using it” (p. 10). The term was taken into a definition of WE, which are “indigenous, nativised [English] varieties that have developed around the world and that reflect the cultural and pragmatic norms of their speakers” (Kirkpatrick, 2007, p. 3).

The concept of IL, on the other hand, also formed at around the same time, in the 1970s. As clearly stated in Selinker (1972), in the theory of IL, learners’ mental process of second language acquisition is centralised from a psycholinguistic perspective, assuming that there are rigid and monolithic speech communities, and IL is regarded as “a learners’ attempted production of a TL [target language] norm” (ibid., p. 214). Derived from IL, interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) is defined in Kasper (1993, p. 3) as “the study of non-native speakers’ use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in one second language (L2)”. Kasper and her colleagues’ early studies compared speech act performance strategies in different ILs in the well-known Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka, Kasper, & House, 1989), assuming that there are discrepancies among pragmatic strategies in different ILs, which cause misunderstanding in communication. To describe such misunderstanding, Thomas (1983) introduced the concept of pragmatic failure as a breakdown in communication between people from different cultural backgrounds. On the basis of Leech’s concepts of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (Leech, 1983), pragmatic failure is divided into two types; (1) pragmalinguistic failure, which is related to grammar, and (2) sociopragmatic failure, which concerns discourse. Similarly, Kasper (1992) recognises pragmatic transfer from language learners’ first language to a second language, and distinguishes positive transfer from negative transfer. In her definition, positive transfer is not a problem since “pragmatic behaviours or other knowledge displays consistent use across L1 [first language], IL, and L2 [second language]” (Kasper, 1993, p. 10). However, negative transfer might cause “risk to communicative success” because of “the influence of L1 pragmatic competence on IL pragmatic knowledge that differs from the L2 target” (ibid.). Gass and Selinker (2008 [1994], pp. 94–95) also termed the two types of transfer in IL, including features in syntax, morphology and pragmatics, as “facilitation (positive transfer)” and “interference (negative transfer)”. They divided the latter into two types: “retroactive inhibition – where learning acts back on previously learned material, causing someone to forget (language loss), and proactive inhibition – where a series of responses already learned tends to appear in situations where a new set is required” (ibid., original emphases).

In the late 1990s, a shift in IL research from comparative investigations to developmental investigations was observed, as Kasper and Schmidt (1996) describe:

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, the great majority of studies in ILP has not been developmental. Rather, focus is given to the ways NNSs’ [non-native speakers] pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge differs from that of native speakers (NSs) and among learners with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. To date, ILP has thus been primarily a study of second language use rather than second language learning.

(Kasper & Schmidt, 1996, p. 150)

At that time, Bardovi-Harlig (1999) also criticised the comparative approach of ILP research, asserting that the question, “[h]ow does L2 pragmatic competence develop” (p. 707), should be addressed, drawing on the perspectives of second language acquisition and grammatical competence.

Following the discussions on WE and IL, the concept of English as a lingua franca (ELF) emerged in the late 1990s (cf. Firth, 1996), and is described as “any use of English among speakers of different first languages for whom English is the communicative medium of choice, and often the only option” (Seidlhofer, 2011, p. 7). In her early work, Jenkins listed the phonetic features of ELF and named them as the Lingua Franca Core (Jenkins, 2000). This caused a misunderstanding among some scholars who perceived ELF as a new term for a universal model of an international English variety, which is similar to McArthur’s notion of World Standard English (cf. Matsuda & Friedrich, 2012, p. 18). To clarify their stance, ELF researchers emphasise that ELF is not a model of English but a fluid and dynamic process and practice to co-construct intelligibility in interaction in a multilingual context (Cogo, 2012; Seidlhofer, 2009), offering a good body of empirical research into ELF practices, for instance, the findings from the projects of VOICE (the Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English) (2013) and the ELFA (English as a Lingua Franca in Academic Settings) Corpus (2008), to name a few. Thus, the positioning of ELF has been discussed in terms of the framework of WE in Seidlhofer (2009) and Hino (2009). The positioning of ELF in relation to IL, however, still remains unexplored, especially in non-European contexts, although Davies (1984) in the early discussion of IL touched upon this issue:

We have yet to realize the potential of such a construct, namely, that there are acceptable and usable levels of achievement in language learning which do not approximate native speaker outcomes.

(Davies, 1984, p. xii, my emphasis)

He foresaw the current situation in applied linguistics and English language teaching, stating that this notion – learners’ non-conformity to English of NSs (ENS) – would change “the concerns and the perception of applied linguistics” (ibid.), but the notion was not developed much until the late 1990s. In a South Asian context, Gupta (1992) examined pragmatic features of Singapore Colloquial English and recognised it as a Low Variety in comparison with Standard English as the H-form in the diglossic context (Ferguson, 1959), distinguishing the former from an IL. Her study was positioned at the border of IL and WE, but not in ELF, which was proposed just a few years after her study. For a better understanding of the current state of ELF and ILP, this chapter reviews articles of pragmatics research especially in East Asian contexts, e.g., Hong Kong, Malaysia and Japan, in order to describe how these two distinctive, but mutually influenced, concepts of IL and ELF have permeated pragmatics studies, affecting researchers’ interpretations of learners/users’ pragmatic use of language. The following section compares different interpretations and orientations observed in pragmatic studies and pedagogies in IL and ELF in terms of four contrastive themes:

1. Errors or communicative resources,
2. Speech act performance or languaging,
3. Language learners or language users, and
4. Teaching ‘English’ or raising awareness of ELF.

Different realities – interlanguage and English as a lingua franca

Errors or communicative resources?

How researchers treat learners’ non-conformity to pragmatic expressions of ENS differs between studies in ILP and ELF. In their review article of ILP, Kasper and Schmidt (1996) highlighted this issue:

What has barely been addressed in the literature is the issue of norms. The assumption underlying most studies is that NS norms are an adequate target for NNSs. If this were the case, any difference between NS and NNS pragmatic comprehension or production would have to be seen as potentially problematic, indicating a deficit in the NNSs’ pragmatic competence. But this assumption is questionable.

(Kasper & Schmidt, 1996, p. 156)

Although they were aware of the controversy of “total convergence to NS norms” and noted that the differences between NSs and NNSs’ pragmatic knowledge and strategies may be unproblematic, in most studies in ILP, “NNS subjects’ performance is usually measured against a native speaker norm” (ibid., p. 155). As the terms, such as pragmatic failure (Thomas, 1983), imply learners’ lack of knowledge and ability to produce pragmatic expressions of ENS, their expressions are considered as ‘errors’ in ILP research. The dichotomy between NSs and NNSs is prevalent in ILP, where the ultimate goal for language learners is taken to be achieving ‘native-like’ pragmatic competence and performance. Cook and Liddicoat (2002), for instance, used a questionnaire survey to investigate whether Chinese and Japanese learners of English were able to produce certain expressions to make direct and indirect requests. They found a co-relation between their proficiency in the ‘target language’ and the production of correct forms:

These studies [developmental studies in ILP] demonstrate that there are developmental features of ILP comprehension and that learners become more target-like in their interpretations as their language develops.

(Cook & Liddicoat, 2002, p. 20, my emphasis)

The premise o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of appendices
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Overview of the book
• List of contributors
• 1 Discourses of pragmatics studies: interlanguage and English as a lingua franca in East Asian context
• 2 ‘It’s like a game’: an investigation of facework in ELF academic disagreement
• 3 Elicitation of mutual understanding and achievement of coherence: allo-repetition in Japanese EFL speaking and chat-style writing interactions
• 4 Academic criticisms in Chinese advanced learners’ thesis writing: a metapragmatic perspective
• 5 Exploring intercultural dimensions of L2 pragmatics learning in a Japanese EFL context
• 6 Being an active listener in unacquainted English conversations in Korean, Chinese and Japanese intercultural settings: a case study for thinking about teaching speaking skills
• 7 The social organisation of the talking phase of an extensive reading book club
• 8 The process of constructing intercultural pragmatic knowledge in short-term language and culture immersion programmes: two case studies
• 9 Improving spatial and temporal attention through the use of spontaneous gestures in dyadic English as lingua franca interactions
• 10 General and explicit test prompts: some consequences for topic management in paired EFL discussion tests
• Index