Abstract
This anthology explores digital tools used to examine pragmatic competence in second language learning. The editors present findings applicable for both improving classroom instruction and furthering pragmatics research. Five chapters (2–6) cover technology in research, while four more (7–10) cover technology for teaching pragmatic competence. There are also three ‘meta’ chapters: an introduction by the editors, an ending commentary on the chapters by Daniel Cohen and a follow-up on future applications in the discipline.
Pragmatics here is largely taken to mean the acquisition of speech acts. Accordingly, topics include requesting in Chinese; apologizing in Spanish; conversation-closing strategies in Spanish; giving and responding to compliments, thanking, requesting and refusing in Japanese; and requesting, apologizing and refusing in English. Some non-speech act issues also appear: first- and second-person pronoun use in English as a Second Language (ESL) academic writing, mastery of genre-specific English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing patterns and response times for English learners processing implicatures. The goal, in short, is to provide better opportunities for students to acquire competence in second language (L2) interactions, enabling a larger, more flexible range of socially appropriate participation.
Editors Naoko Taguchi and Julie Sykes first outline the book’s nine content chapters, noting the growing general interest in L2 pragmatic competence, learners’ increased opportunities to experience digitally mediated language and digital media use by researchers to collect data and by teachers to deliver language instruction. The digital tools highlighted include social networking sites, multi-user virtual environments, collaborative games on mobile devices, blogs, learner corpora, online assessment tools and text analysis software.
Three chapters consider computer-based assessment. Taguchi (Chapter 2) examines response times as indicating comprehension of conversational implicature among L2 English learners. Using computer-based listening tests, she calculates accuracy and speed of implicature comprehension. Shuai Li (Chapter 3) measures how much practice is needed to increase accuracy and speed of recognition and production in request-making in L2 Chinese. Li tracks pragmatic listening judgments and oral discourse completion tasks over time, finding differences in what’s needed to improve each. Carsten Roever (Chapter 9) examines the overall strengths and weaknesses of computer-based testing (CBT) of L2 pragmatics, illustrating with a web-based test of ESL pragmalinguistics taken by 335 students from four countries. He traces the historical tradeoff of assessments as being either practical or reliable, as well as the potential of CBT to increase authenticity and construct range.
Chapters 4, 5 and 7 focus on Spanish used outside the classroom. Sykes (Chapter 4) examines production and perceptions of apologies by 25 learners using interactions from the synthetic immersive environment (SIE) Croquelandia, a multi-user virtual space for the practice of Spanish. While this chapter rather awkwardly repeats a number of its motivating issues, the findings are insightful. Sykes tracks the effects of using an SIE on learners’ ability to produce Spanish apologies and whether users report changes in their abilities to perform apologies afterwards. Adrienne Gonzales (Chapter 5) presents a case study examining one student’s online conversations captured through the social networking-language learning site Livemocha. Gonzales highlights conversational closings with different interlocutors, observing whether the learner showed growth over time in signaling rapport management. Christopher Holden and Sykes (Chapter 7) contrast ways of assessing feedback on pragmatic performance produced via Mentira [‘falsehood’], a place-based murder mystery game played on mobile devices. They collected gameplay data from 68 intermediate-level college students, examining contextually influenced choices for framing agreement, refusals, requests and apologies.
Three chapters focus on pragmatic competence in written discourse. Yumi Takamiya and Noriko Ishihara (Chapter 8) present an ethnographic case study of a learner of Japanese, analyzing blog entries to both peers and native speakers, which reflected on speech acts discussed in class. The data ‘demonstrated her struggle as she noticed, understood, and acquired the speech act sequences of refusals in Japanese at different points in the instruction’ (p. 197). Examining changes in author self-positioning, Alfredo Urzúa (Chapter 6) tracks first- and second-person subject pronouns in a corpus of 383 university essays by English language learners, while Helen Zhao and David Kaufer (Chapter 10) use the software DocuScope to tag and visualize the writing of 101 Chinese students learning EFL, tracking control of grammatical and lexical items and their functions in different text genres.
Overall, the volume proffers multiple valuable pathways for investigating digital media and L2 pragmatics. Some chapters expand on work of Sykes (2008) and Sykes and Reinhardt (2012), which laid the groundwork for deploying digital games in L2 pedagogical studies. Others respond to Roever (2009), who called for increased information on assessing pragmatic competence. As it is still early days, several chapters note the limited results they have found so far, for example, ‘the learners’ use of the target pragmalinguistic forms improved slightly; however, the only notable improvement was the shift from the use of speaker-oriented strategies to the use of hearer-oriented strategies’ (p. 86), testing ‘did not extend construct coverage though it did improve authenticity’ (p. 215) and ‘advantages of the use of computers are logistical and psychometric, and … have not much contributed to expanding the construct … under investigation’ (p. 231). It is clear, however, that as the field continues to sort out ‘how technology can best be leveraged as a solution to existing barriers to pragmatic research and pedagogy’ (p. 11), these authors are leading the way by systematically pushing boundaries to discover the most effective applications of new media to mastering felicitous second language discourse.