Research has shown that being multilingual is a valuable asset for learning pragmatics.By adopting a multilingual turn perspective, this study investigates patterns of pragmatic development in the multilingual classroom setting of the Valencian Community in Spain, where English, Catalan and Spanish coexist. Participants were 313 learners of English and 15 teachers. Each learner wrote three argumentative essays over one academic year in three languages: English, Catalan and Spanish. A mixed method approach was followed to examine learning trajectories of two types of discourse-pragmatic markers: textual and interpersonal markers. Quantitative results revealed significant gains in the production of textual discourse-pragmatic markers in English, while interpersonal discourse-pragmatic markers followed an irregular pattern.Findings also revealed variations in discourse-pragmatic marker learning trajectories in English, Catalan and Spanish: learning trajectories in the minority language (Catalan) and the L3 (English) were more fluctuating and the patterns interacted with each other, which contrasted with the linear development found in the majority language (Spanish).Qualitative findings are discussed to illustrate how factors such as learners' pragmatic awareness, teachers' practices and the sociolinguistic context of the study may interact in the process of pragmatic learning in the multilingual classroom.2

This study explores to what extent multilingual learners' production of metadiscourse markers (MMs) may be related in three languages present in their school curriculum, and how instructional input influences their choices and production of accurate forms. Twenty-two secondary school students wrote opinion essays in English, Catalan, and Spanish. MM use was analysed following Hyland's (2000) classification. Our results showed that the same categories of MMs were used in the three languages, although there was more variety in Catalan and Spanish. Moreover, learners mostly relied on the forms present in the input, and 90% of these forms were accurately used in the three languages.

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In the Valencian Community in Spain, the coexistence of Spanish and Catalan as co-official languages and English as a foreign language, which is learned as a third language (L3), shapes a unique multilingual setting. This study examined the extent to which multilingual learners’ use of two interpersonal pragmatic markers (PMs), i.e., hedges (e.g., I believe) and attitude markers (e.g., fortunately), is related across languages and whether the relationship changes over time. Participants were 313 Spanish-Catalan bilingual high school learners of L3 English. They wrote three opinion essays over one academic year in the three languages of instruction: Spanish, Catalan, and English. Quantitative results revealed a trend towards stronger correlations over time in both PMs. At Time 3, correlations were statistically significant for all language pairs in hedges and for two language pairs in attitude markers (Spanish and Catalan, Spanish and English). Qualitative analyses of the learners’ essays lend support to these results and show transfer at the phrase and discourse-level.

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