L2 learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990. In an attempt to better understand how this developmental stage arises, this study explores the extent to which instructed L2 learners of English are aware of differences in learners' and target-language production in grammar, which addresses the accuracy of utterances, and pragmatics, which addresses the appropriateness of utterances given specific situations, speakers, and content. We used a videotape with 20 scenarios to test 543 learners and their teachers (N = 53) in two countries (Hungary and the U.S.) as well as a secondary sample of 112 EFL speakers in Italy. The results show that whereas EFL learners and their teachers consistently identified and ranked grammatical errors as more serious than pragmatic errors, ESL learners and their teachers showed the opposite pattern, ranking pragmatic errors as more serious than grammatical errors. We discuss the possible causes of this pattern and its implications for teaching.T his study explores the extent to which instructed L2 learners of English are aware of differences in learners' and target-language production in grammar and pragmatics. Grammar relates to the accuracy of structure, including morphology and syntax, whereas pragmatics addresses language use and is concerned with the appropriateness of utterances given specific situations, speakers, and content. (See Levinson,

No abstract

This article presents the results of a study investigating the acquisition of the simple past tense, identifies areas of difficulty, and presents an acquisitionally based approach to instruction for the problematic areas. The study, a cross‐sectional investigation of 182 adult learners of English as a second language at six levels of proficiency, showed that the acquisition of the past tense in English is not a unitary phenomenon, but that it proceeds in stages. These stages are determined by the meaning of verbs as they relate to the expression of action and time, what we will term lexical aspect. These findings show that the acquisition of tense by classroom language learners follows the same sequences of development (with instruction) that have been observed in the acquisition of adult learners and in children without instruction. In early stages, learners often do not use the past tense where it is preferred by native speakers, indicating an undergeneralization of the meaning of the past in the learner grammar. We present an approach to instruction aimed at increasing the use of the past to balance contextualized examples through the use of authentic text and focused noticing exercises to encourage the learners toward a more targetlike association of form and meaning.

G. Kasper and R. Schmidt (1996) have argued that the field of investigation known as interlanguage pragmatics has been essentially modelled on cross‐cultural pragmatics. Taking Kasper and Schmidt's argument one step further, this article shows how interlanguage itself has been ignored in research on interlanguage pragmatics. Research has not established that pragmatic competence is independent of grammatical competence. Although grammatical competence may not be a sufficient condition for pragmatic development, it may be a necessary condition. I outline a research agenda in which the study of interlanguage becomes more central to the study of interlanguage pragmatics.

This study investigates the source of second language (L2) learners' low use of conventional expressions-one part of pragmalinguistic competence-by investigating the relationship between recognition and production of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Two tasks-an aural recognition task and an oral production task-were completed by 122 learners of English as a second language with mixed-language backgrounds and 49 native speakers of English divided among peers and teachers. The aural recognition task presented 60 expressions to which participants responded with one of three levels of self-assessed familiarity, operationalized as an estimate of how often they hear a given expression (I often/sometimes/never hear this). The computer-delivered production task included 32 scenarios to which participants responded orally. Results show that recognition of conventional expressions is a necessary condition for production but not sufficient. Lower use of conventional expressions by learners may have multiple sources: lack of familiarity with some expressions; overuse of familiar expressions, which subsequently reduces the opportunity to use more targetlike expressions; level of development; and sociopragmatic knowledge.