Abstract
This volume addresses a great variety of communicative settings in which pragmatics plays a crucial role in understanding communicative dynamics. It makes an important contribution to the field of applied pragmatics, shedding light on the application of pragmatic aspects of communication in foreign language-learning contexts.
The volume is arranged into an introduction and four major parts, each focused on pragmatic issues in specific settings. Part 1 (Chapters 1–3) explores pragmatics in interpreting settings. Emanuele Brambilla problematizes professional behaviors in interpreting political speeches through the analysis of two examples from the Corpus of Television Interpreting (CorIT) and proposes a pragma-argumentative approach to interpreting training. Federico Farini investigates the impact of the mediator’s interpreting actions on the participants’ expression of emotion in interpreter-mediated health communication, highlighting the need for an empirically based method in training interpreting in medical settings that takes into account the participants’ emotional dimension. Eugenia Dal Fovo probes into interpreters’ pragmatic competence within the TV environment, presenting a three-phase training course for talk show interpreters.
Part 2 (Chapters 4–6) approaches the pragmatics of communication in scholarly contexts, focusing particularly on academic lectures, book reviews and email requests. Antonio Compagnone combines critical genre analysis, discourse analysis and the methods of corpus linguistics to compare and contrast the use of selected linguo-discursive categories in web-mediated technology, entertainment and design (TED) talks and university lectures, making salient the additional communicative purposes of TED speakers. In the same vein, Daniela Cesiri adopts a mixed-method approach with the framework of appraisal theory to probe into archaeologists’ management of positive and negative evaluation in a corpus of 112 book reviews. Apart from offering interesting insights into the need to provide students with as many disciplinary perspectives as possible, the findings of this chapter also help in teaching academic English in general. Phoenix Lam, after demonstrating the pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features in email requests produced by faculty and students in a Hong Kong university, outlines a data-driven pedagogical approach to raising students’ sociopragmatic awareness in academic email writing.
Part 3 (Chapters 7 and 8) focuses on the application of film dialogue in the development of foreign language learners’ pragmatic awareness and conversational skills. Silvia Bruti provides a multimodal analysis of the complimenting and insulting speech acts in three film clips, suggesting that film clips and film language could be used as multimodal resources to teach pragmatic features of conversation in foreign language classrooms. Chiara Zamborlin explains the application of pragmatic knowledge in a course on intercultural communication. Specifically, she investigates how pragmatic concepts help Japanese university students understand and enjoy humor in Italian movies.
Part 4 (Chapters 9 and 10) concerns pragmatics in foreign language classrooms. Sofía Martín-Laguna, by examining secondary school English learners’ knowledge of textual pragmatic markers in three languages, provides evidence for the relationship between learners’ languages and their ‘pragmatic multicompetence’, revealing the necessity of considering learners’ language background when teaching pragmatics in a multilingual classroom setting. Thorsten Schröter shares some ideas as to how pragmatics can be taught in a constructive manner for advanced foreign language learners. Specifically, he reports on the rationale and structure of the course Social and Regional Variation for advanced students of English in Sweden. As the stated purpose of the volume lies in investigating ‘the role played by linguistic resources and discursive strategies in contexts where participants pursue specific interactional/transactional goals’ (p. 1), this final chapter does not seem to fit the purpose as it is a course plan rather than an investigating study.
This volume is well worth reading for three reasons. First, the contributors relate their analyses of real-life communication to foreign language pedagogy, highlighting an explicit, dynamic and data-informed approach to teaching pragmatics in foreign language-learning contexts. This is the most fascinating part of the contributions. Although it has long been acknowledged that pragmatic knowledge should be taught to foreign language learners (e.g. Rose and Kasper, 2001), most often it is pragmatic elements such as speech acts and implicatures that are taught to students in an isolated and static way. In this volume, however, the contributors pay careful attention to the pragmatic dynamics of communication, probing into the process of manipulating, negotiating and constructing participants’ emotions, relations and identities in and through discourse, thus offering valuable insights into foreign language pedagogy.
Second, the data examined in this volume cover multiple genres, and keep pace with the times by including real-life communicative events in a range of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic settings, including political speeches, healthcare services, TV interpreting, film dialogues, TED talks, academic email writing, student–teacher communication and the multilingual classroom, suggesting that – when doing pragmatic analysis – more newly emerging genres could be taken into consideration to enrich pragmatic- and discourse-informed research. In addition, the use of authentic communicative data to teach pragmatics is considered a more effective approach in foreign language pedagogy.
Third, the contributions in this volume serve as models of successful integration of various research methods, making the findings convincing and insightful. For example, Compagnone (Chapter 4) successfully integrates corpus linguistic methods into critical genre analysis and discourse analysis when examining the evaluation strategies used by archaeologists, Bruti (Chapter 7) examines film dialogues by combining linguistic analysis and nonverbal analysis, and Martín-Laguna (Chapter 9) obtains additional qualitative data from learners’ diaries and teachers’ interviews to triangulate data obtained from quantitative measures in order to explore students’ use of textual pragmatic markers in a multilingual classroom.
Thus, this volume deserves a wide readership of both researchers and foreign language pedagogical practitioners.