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DOCUMENT RESUME FL 024 180 ED 400 700 Bouton, Lawrence F., Ed. AUTHOR Pragmatics and Language Learning. Monograph Series TITLE Volume 7. Illinois Univ., Urbana. Div. of English as an INSTITUTION International Language. PUB DATE 96 219p.; For individual papers, see FL 024 181-191. NOTE AVAILABLE FROM Pragmatics and Language Learning, English as an International Language, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 3070 Foreign Languages Building, 707 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801 ($12). PUB TYPE Collected Works General (020) EDRS PRICE MFOI/PC09 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Chinese; College Faculty; College Students; Communication Apprehension; Contrastive Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; English (Second Language); *Intercultural Communication; Interpersonal Communication; *Language Patterns; Language Research; Linguistic Theory; Metacognition; Metaphors; North American English; *Pragmatics; Russian; Second Language Instruction; Second Language Learning; *Second Languages; Sociocultural Patterns; Special Education; Teacher Student Relationship; *Writing (Composition); Written Language IDENTIFIERS Requests ABSTRACT Papers on aa?ects of pragmatics include: "Pragmatics and Language Learning" (Lawrence F. Bouton); "Pragmatics and Language Teaching: Bringing Pragmatics and Pedagogy Together" (Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig); "Cross-Cultural Communication and Interlanguage Pragmatics: American vs. European Requests" (Jasone Cenoz, Jose F. Valencia); "'At Your Earliest Convenience:' A Study. of Written Student Requests to Faculty" (Beverly S. Hartford, Bardovi-Harlig); "Cross-Cultural Differences in American and Russian General Conventions of Communication" (Yuliya B. Kartalova); "Foregrounding the Role of Common Ground in Language Learning" (Sara W. Smith, Andreas H. Jucker); "The Pragmatics of Uncertainty" (Noriko Tanaka); "Sociocultural Dimensions on Voice in Non-Native Language Writing" (Linda A. Harklau, Sandra R. Schecter); "Metadiscourse and Text Pragmatics: How Students Write After Learning about Metadiscourse" (Margaret S. Steffensen, Xiaoguang Cheng); "Underproduction Does Not Necessarily Mean Avoidance: Investigation of Underproduction Using Chinese ESL Learners" (Jiang Li); and "Contextual Thinking about Teaching: Special Educators' Metaphorical Representations of Practical Knowledge" (Mark P. Mostert). 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NEM PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE .0 AND DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED By TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) , .2 PY A BEST Learning Pragmatics and Language Monograph Series PURPOSE AND SCOPE from those consists of papers selected each year Pragmatics and Language Learning English as an International sponsored by the Division of presented at the annual conference Illinois at Urbana- Institute at the University of Language and the Intensive English interaction of conference each year is on we Champaign. The general theme of this with the teaching and/or and conversation analysis) pragmatics (including) discourse analysis formal or informal (especially English) in either learning of a second or foreign language following related topics: be focused on any of the surroundings. Individuals papers may by understanding of what we mean the contribution of pragmatics to our 1. communicative competence English discourse research into specific facts of 2. contrastive pragmatics 3. found in the language classroom analysis of the discourse patterns 4. for is to serve as a forum and this monograph series The purpose of both the conference interaction encourage the language learning process and to research into the pragmatics of the increase in a common effort to and in language pedagogy of scholars involved in pragmatics achieved in the language classroom. the level of communicative competence INFORMATION SUBSCRIPTION be in the spring. Copies can is published once each year Pragmatics and Language Learning by writing to: obtained at a cost of $12.00 each Editors Pragmatics and Language Learning English as an International Language University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 3070 Foreign Languages Building 707 South Mathews Avenue Urbana, Illinois 61801 U.S.A. Pragmatics and Language Learning Volume 7 1996 Editor Lawrence F. Bouton Published by Division of English as an International Language Intensive English Institute University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Copyright 1996 Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series Volume 7 1996 CONTENTS i Introduction Pragmatics and Language Learning Lawrence F. Bouton 1 Pragmatics and Language Teaching: Bringing Pragmatics and Pedagogy Together 21 Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig Cross-cultural Communication and Interlanguage Pragmatics: American vs. European Requests 41 Jasone Cenoz and Jose F. Valencia "At Your Earliest Convenience:" A Study of Written Student Requests to Faculty 55 Beverly S. Hartford and Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig Cross-cultural Differences in American and Russian General Conventions of Communication 71 Yuliya B. Kartalova Foregrounding the Role of Common Ground in Language Learning 97 Sara W. Smith and Andreas H. _fucker The Pragmatics of Uncertainty 119 Noriko Tanaka Sociocultural Dimensions of Voice in Non-native Language Writing 141 Linda A. Harklau and Sandra R. Schecter Metadiscourse and Text Pragmatics: How Students Write after Learning about Metadiscourse 153 Margaret S. Steffensen and Xiaoguang Cheng Underproduction Does Not Necessarily Mean Avoidance: Investigation of Underproduction Using Chinese ESL Learners 171 Jiang Li Contextual Thinking about Teaching: Special Educators' Metaphorical Representations of Practical Knowledge 189 Mark P. Mostert INTRODUCTION The papers in this volume have been divided into four groups which might be subtitled 1) pragmatics and language teaching, 2) pragmatic aspects of human interaction, 3) the analysis of written discourse, and 4) pragmatics and second language learning. The first of these, Bouton's Pragmatics and Language Learning, attempts to demonstrate three general ways in which pragmatics is crucial to any attempt to assist students in their learning of a language. Bouton's first example is based on the assumption that what pragmatics has to offer to language pedagogy is no better than the research from which it is derived. He also assumes that cross-cultural research into the pragmatics of a student's native and target languages is essential to our perception of what our students must learn as they work to increase their communicative competence. These two assumptions point to the importance of rigorous cross-cultural research as one contribution that pragmatics can make to language pedagogy. Yet significant doubts have been raised in the past few years of the validity of much of the cross-cultural research in recent years because of the weakness of the devices designed to assure that the subjects from the different cultures perceive the situations to which they must respond in the same way. With this in mind, one of the most important things that pragmatics can contribute to language pedagogy today is the development of research techniques that will provide results on which teachers can rely with confidence as they develop materials and teach their classes. And so the first example of what pragmatics can give to language pedagogy involves one person's rigorously worked out strategies for guaranteeing that the situations used in cross-cultural research are, in fact, perceived in the same way by subjects from both cultures. For his second illustration of the bond between pragmatics and language teaching, he briefly describes his own work with implicatures. Beginning with the need to identify different types of implicatures that proved difficult to nonnative speakers of English (NNS), he moved from there to an investigation of how rapidly those NNS learned to interpret different types of implicatures effectively under the normal situation in which they receive no instruction focused directly on helping them develop the skills they need to do so. Finally, he compares the progress made by those NNS with that of others who did receive formal instruction designed to make them aware of implicatures, to help them realize that they have implicatures in their own languages, too, and to give them some practice at developing and using them in English. The result was somewhat mixed, but did show beyond a doubt that some types of implicatures that are quite hard to learn to use without explicit instruction are quite easy to learn with it. Then, in closing, Bouton offers one example of how much difference there can be between the treatment of a speech act in an otherwise excellent ESL text and in the literature describing that speech act from data based on the analysis of actual conversation. This difference, he concludes, suggests the need for both pragmatics researchers and language educators to become more aware of the need for them to work together if language pedagogy is to derive the considerable benefits that real cooperation between the two fields would provide. Bardovi-Harlig, in Pragmatics and Language Teaching: Bringing Pragmatics and Pedagogy Together, develops a theme similar to that of Bouton, but in more detail and with a focus more directly on the language classroom. She argues that interlanguage is, in effect, a needs assessment establishing the importance of pragmatics to the process of language teaching. "Learners show significant differences from native speakers in the execution of ii Introduction certain speech acts and in conversational functions such as greetings and leave taldngs," she argues. "[Even] a learner of high grammatical proficiency will not necessarily show concomitant pragmatic competence." From this basic premise, Bardovi-Harlig goes on to divide the problems that often plague even advanced NNS into four sets and provides an example of each: problems with knowing what speech acts are appropriate to what contexts; problems with finding the right form in which to express a speech act; problems in selecting a semantic formula appropriate to a particular speech act; and, finally, problems in giving the semantic formula the type of content that it should have. After providing examples of each of these pitfalls facing the NNS, the author turns to the importance of different types of pragmatic input to the learning process. In discussing the contribution of ESL texts to this input, she notes one in which the author provides the learner with several alternative ways of carrying out a speech act, but provides absolutely no information about the types of situation to which each of those variants is appropriate why speakers might be constrained to choose one form over another because of who their interlocutors were, how much of an imposition a request was, etc. Throughout her paper, the author draws on her own experience and on the literature to provide excellent examples of what needs to be done, what has been done well, and what still needs doing. And, she concludes, "There is clearly a meaningful task for everyone interested in working on pragmatics, whether your specialty is second language acquisition, materials development, innovations in language teaching, methods, classroom oriented research; whether you are a researcher, teacher educator, or language teacher; whether the language you teach is English, Italian, Japanese or Kiswahili." Taken together, these first two papers make an extremely strong case for what has been over the years the central theme of the series of conferences on pragmatics and language learning from which the papers in this monograph series are the need, in Bardovi-Harlig's words "[to] bring pragmatics and pedagogy annually selected together, together." The second group of papers are those focusing on different facets of interaction. Starting things off is a paper by Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, At Your Earliest Convenience: A Study of Written Student Requests to Faculty. This paper is unusual in two way. First, the speech act that it investigates appears in written form; and second, it provides evidence of the positive or negative impact of the different forms in which the speech act was couched. It also notes that NNS were less successful in getting what they were asking for and links that lack of success to the form and substance that they chose to use in making the request. Nicely supported by authentic data, this paper is an excellent example of the type of effective research that is so necessary to the effectiveness of communication oriented language teaching. In her Cross-cultural communication and interlanguage pragmatics: American vs. European requests4.)\, Cenoz first provides us with an excellent review of the literature relevant to speech acts and then reports on her study of Americans and Europeans using the DCT as they attempt to learn English and Spanish. With regard to the English of European NNS, while the author finds that certain features of that language approximate that of British English, others seem to be "typically associated with nonnative requesting behavior." And, she argues, given the widespread use of English by Europeans, for many of whom English is a second, third or fourth language, "nonnative European English could be regarded as a Introduction iii deviation rather than a mistake." This same issue seems to come up with Spanish, since the extent to which the Spanish speakers use indirectness when speaking Spanish seems to run counter to results for Argentinean Spanish speakers. Because of these variations in both the English and the Spanish of some of the speakers in this study, the author argues that there is a need to rethink the issue as to what type of pragmatic competence should be the norm for speakers in various geographical or national contexts. And finally, when the author compares the requests by learners of Spanish and of English, she notes several differences, including those related to their relative directness of expression and their use of down graders. Kartalova's Cross-cultural differences in American and Russian general conventions of communication takes a broader perspective as it focuses on a wide variety of similarities and differences in cultural background that lead to success or failure in interactions between Russians and Americans. Her approach is "to explore how aspects of culture and its institutions are encoded symbolic meanings of 16 cultural themes. Her subjects were Russian and American university exchange students who had lived in the other country. "The findings show that there are indeed marked differences in the symbolic meanings of all six themes." Because of the confusion and misunderstanding these differences caused in the visitors to the other country in each case, the author argues that there is a need for raising the consciousness of individuals planning to live or interact with people from other cultures, "to combine linguistic instruction with explicit discussion of cultural assumptions, values and etiquette norms of the target language culture as compared to the learner's own cultural and individual assumptions and views." The idea is not entirely new, but it is couched in different terms and supported by plentiful evidence that simply has not been available in the literature up to now. Given the fact that it is also persuasively written, it is highly interesting and well worth reading. In an especially nice paper, The pragmatics of uncertainty, Tanaka starts with the early and somewhat primitive understanding of speech acts by Austin and Searle, moves on through a description of the growth of the concept in the work of Gordon and Lakoff, Levinson, and Leech, before arriving at Thomas's introduction of the claim that a speech act can be ambivalent. And finally, she demonstrates that that concept, too, must be extended, showing that there are two different types of ambivalence ambivalence-strategic and "to explore different cases of ambivalence-genuine. Tanaka's style of argument is ambivalence and to consider what factors make them different." Having described and illustrated these subtypes of ambivalence, Tanaka goes on to show how they can cause confusion if the perception as to which type of ambivalence is involved in a particular utterance is not the same in the mind of the speaker and that of the listener. Situations like this, Tanaka refers to as mismatches. They are especially likely, she says, if the interlocutors are from different cultures with different world views. However, having noted the possibility that ambivalence can become an obstacle to communication, especially to cross cultural communication, Tanaka professes optimism about the chances of people from different cultures learning to interact effectively and sees even the mismatches as positive, educational experiences. But her paper does leave one wondering whether explicit instruction designed to make subjects aware of the presence of ambiguity and how it can be differently used in dissimilar cultures might ease the burden of the language learner in this aspect of language learning as Bouton, Bardovi-Harlig, Smith and Jucker, Steffensen and Cheng, and others iv Introduction have argued elsewhere in this volume, though in relation to other facets of the learner's pragmatic competence. The title of Smith and Jucker's paper, Foregrounding the role of common ground in language learning says it all. Using examples gathered from the literature involving studies of first and second language acquisition, the authors demonstrate that the need for common ground between participants in normal conversation extends into the language learning situation as well. Much of normal conversation, they say, consists not only of conveying information or expressing social relations; it also has as a central function the establishment by each speaker of a model of the other participant's world view as it is relevant to the particular conversation. And they show quite clearly that this type of negotiation does go on in the classroom and that, at the same time, it involves knowledge and skills that language learners do not always command. These must be taught in the same classroom in which they may have to be used. This fact, the authors argue, "supports the strategy of gradually and systematically moving from contextualized to decontextualized language, both in conversing and in writing." Furthermore, they contend that the strategies and assumptions that individuals must learn to use in the negotiation that is conversation should be dealt with "that students should and can learn to think about what assumptions we carry explicitly about each other and the role these assumptions play in our use of language." With the paper by Steffensen and Cheng, we turn to the final set, those reporting research that focuses more clearly on what goes on in the classroom. Again, the authors offer us study in which an experimental group was taught specific pragmatics principles and given an opportunity to put those concepts to use in actual communication. The paper, entitled Metadiscourse and text pragmatics: How students revise after learning about metadiscourse, indicates that both the experimental group and the control group were composition classes, with the former being taught explicitly about metadiscourse markers, which can be used "to indicate how the text is structured, to explain difficult words..., and to record the rhetorical acts we are performing." The control group, on the other hand, "was taught using the dominant strategy in university composition courses, the process method." The discussion in this paper both of the specific metadiscourse markers taught and the results achieved is detailed and persuasive. In essence, they note that although the papers serving as a posttest for both the experimental group and the control group were rated by people totally unfamiliar with the nature of the study, the evaluation of the experimental group papers averaged almost a full grade higher than those of the control group. More specifically, the students in the experimental group made much better use of the discourse forms themselves and, at the same time, "they began to critique their own and other's essays at a much higher level." The second paper of this last set, Li's Underproduction does not necessarily mean avoidance: Investigation of underproduction using Chinese ESL learners, "examines a widely avoidance behavior," first proposed by Schacter and based accepted theory in L2 learning on a study of the use of relative clauses by Chinese and Japanese English language learners. After describing Schacter's argument and providing the type of data on which he based his conclusion, Li reconsiders that evidence and the assumptions on which Schacter's analysis was based. She then compares Chinese relative clauses with those from English, finding several striking differences including instances in which English uses a relative clause where Introduction Chinese does not, those in which English can reduce a relative clause to verbal or prepositional phrases, and the fact that relative clauses of any sort appear much less frequently in Chinese than in English. Basing her first main argument on the assumption that Chinese would transfer the mode of their expression from Chinese into English, Li argues that a major reason Chinese use fewer relative clauses in English than one would expect is that they would tend to use the same structures in English as in Chinese in so far as possible. Since there are many uses of relative clauses in English that are expressed by other structures in Chinese, Li finds it quite natural that Chinese using English would employ fewer relative and more of the structures that they would have used clauses than native speakers would if speaking or writing Chinese. Li's second point focuses on the fact that the strategy of avoidance is deliberate. She argues that failing to use relative clauses in English because one transfers the practices of one's native Chinese when using the second language should be considered subconscious underproduction and not deliberate. Underproduction of this sort, she argues, is not avoidance. To support this argument, subjects were asked to translate sentences from Chinese to English and then, where a relative clause would have been expected but was not used, the subject was asked if he/she had considered using a relative clause but avoided doing so. Only those subjects who said yes in response to that question was assumed to have followed a deliberate strategy of avoidance as defined by Schacter in that situation. The final paper in this volume is Contextual thinking about teaching: special educators' metaphorical representations of practical knowledge by Mostert. Having found that there are relatively few studies of "what special education teachers know and how they acquire their practical knowledge," Mostert sets out to apply some of the methods used to study regular classroom teacher to focus in on the former group. The method he chooses is the examination of the metaphors that the teachers use to describe what they do. He then performs a careful analysis of the meaning of the metaphors based on the contexts in which they appear. 10