Teaching Pragmatics in the Classroom: Instruction of Mitigation in Spanish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hispania. Abstract:Using pedagogical intervention and a pre/posttest, and delayed posttest design, this study examines the effects of explicit instruction on the use of lexical and syntactic mitigators in refusal interactions among intermediate learners of Spanish as a Foreign Language. This quasi-experimental design included two intact classes assigned to two different groups: experimental and control. For both groups, pragmatic development was observed over the course of one semester. Baseline data (LI English, LI Spanish) were also collected. Learners participated in four role-play refusal situations with two native speakers of Spanish, one for formal and one for informal situations. The experimental group was exposed to metapragmatic information featuring explicit teaching on lexical and syntactic mitigators, followed by communicative practice. Results from the posttest (a week after treatment) showed that the pragmatic ability of learners in the experimental group, but not the control group, changed significantly. One change observed was the emergence of different and a higher fre quency of both lexical and syntactic mitigators on both posttests, while the control group mostly employed lexical mitigators. Another change noted among the experimental group was the retention of most mitigating devices one month after instruction.

Mitigation and Pragmatic Empathy

“…This unit of pragmatic knowledge could be built into the teaching content and made available to the leaner by explicit instruction. Explicit instruction has been found to be an effective approach to pragmatics teaching (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008). Ifantidou (2014, p. 154) postulates a causal link on which "Explicit instruction engages participants in voluntary explicit learning, which may result in the acquisition of explicit knowledge."…”

Developing Pragmatic Competence in an Instructed Setting: The Effectiveness of Pedagogical Intervention in Greek EFL Learners’ Request Production

“…A number of research studies from the field of interlanguage pragmatics (e.g., Alcón, 2005;Felix-Brasdefer, 2008a, 2008bSáfont-Jordà, 2003;Salazar, 2003;Takahashi, 2001;Takimoto, 2006) and within the methodological framework of conversation analysis (e.g., Huth, 2006;Wang & Rendle-Short, 2013) have found that explicit pragmatic instruction can have positive effects on adult learners' pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic choices and on teaching culturespecific information. Some of these studies have documented the ways in which the pragmatic performance of L2 learners who do not receive instruction in pragmatics-or receive implicit pedagogical intervention-differs significantly from native speakers' production or from those learners who receive explicit pragmatic instruction.…”

Second language learners’ divergence from target language pragmatic norms

“…Several researchers suggest that L2 pragmatics not only can be taught in the L2/FL classroom but, more importantly, that explicit approaches that involve direct metapragmatic information on target pragmatic features must be implemented in classrooms (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001;Félix-Brasdefer, 2008;Kasper, 1997Kasper, , 2001Kasper & Rose, 2002). Supporting this, Taguchi (2011) states that "early studies produced in the 1990s showed that most aspects of pragmatics are indeed amenable to instruction, meaning that instruction is better than noninstruction for pragmatic development" (p. 291).…”