Interlanguage Pragmatics Failure among Javanese Learners of Japanese

In the Japanese language, Keigo refers to the politeness in language that one must adhere to during interactions with native speakers. Japanese language students are obliged to pay attention to this principle and behave politely in spoken communication. In the Javanese language, the manner in which speech is delivered, undha usuk, comprises a variety of registers applied to different social contexts, such as krama (High or formal Javanese) and ngoko (Low or vernacular Javanese). Still, other politeness principles are to be taken into account. This study, driven by such a concern, was devoted to examining politeness violations in communications between 108 university students, most of whom were native Javanese speakers. The politeness principle was employed to unravel the issue. Data were collected by recording conversations between participants and native Japanese speakers. A follow-up interview with each subject was also conducted. The results revealed that most students failed to build intercultural communication in Japanese conversation, due to their lack of socio-pragmatic knowledge. Based on the interview results, in daily communication, the students rarely used the Javanese speech act level of krama, instead using basa ngoko or Indonesian. These findings emphasize the socio-pragmatic concept, and more precisely the politeness principles other than the Keigo style, to students. This should minimize the violation of politeness maxims in the Japanese language.

L1 Interference in Interlanguage Pragmatics A Study on Requesting in Russian L2 and Italian L2

Within the field of Second Language Acquisition, a growing interest has been devoted to interlanguage pragmatics, in particular how L2 speakers use the linguistic means by which a given language conveys politeness. Being the speech act of ‘request’ one of the most frequent and salient Face Threatening Acts, the current study investigates whether and to what extent L2 learners of Russian and Italian transfer their L1 pragmatic strategies into their L2 when required to perform a request. Qualitative and quantitative analysis has been conducted on data collected among (i) N=9 Russian L1 learners of Italian L2 via role plays and (ii) N=38 Italian L1 learners of Russian L2 via discourse completion tasks. In particular, we will compare L1 and L2 production of head acts, modification, and orientedness.

“If an astronaut were on the moon…”

The aim of this paper is two-fold: firstly, to provide an overview of the methods used to elicit metapragmatic data in research with young language learners through a systematic review; and secondly, to present three data collection techniques designed and used in two research projects conducted by the authors, and examine their affordances for eliciting metapragmatic data. The systematic review revealed that data elicitation techniques employed in metapragmatics research with children closely reflected those widely employed in research with (young) adults (Culpeper, Mackey & Taguchi, 2018). Against this backdrop, the paper presents three elicitation techniques, developed based on the literature on the methodological considerations for conducting research with children (e.g. O’Kane, 2008; Pinter, 2014; Punch, 2002a, 2002b): the Emoticon task, the Ranking circle, and Readers Theatre. After describing the techniques and presenting the metapragmatic discussions elicited through them, the paper calls for the inclusion of innovative, participant-friendly methods in interlanguage pragmatics research focusing on children’s metapragmatic awareness.

The impact of prep class education on effective English requestive e-mails written by students in Turkey

For the past years, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics have focused on native and non-native speech act descriptions, and only a small number of studies have investigated the preparatory class effect involved in speech act productions. To bridge the gap, this study aims to investigate the degree of directness and amount of lexical / phrasal internal and external modifications of requestive e-mails employed by 25 first grade students of English Language and Literature department with preparatory education and 25 first grade students of English Language and Literature department without preparatory education in their in a state university. It also aims to explore whether there is a difference between two groups according to the degree of imposition while making requests. The participants were given discourse completion tests in e-mail format including two different situations with low and high imposition levels and asked to write two requestive e-mails to their non-native professor. The e-mails were analyzed and classified based on Economidou-Kogetsidis’s (2011) framework which relies on Blum- Kulka et al. (1989) and Biesenbach-Lucas (2006, 2007). Based on the percentages and frequencies, the students with preparatory class education were compared to the students without preparatory class education, with respect to their usage of request strategies, lexical/phrasal internal modification and external modification. The results indicated that these two groups had both similarities and differences with respect to the degree of directness, the amount of internal and external modifications. Turkish ELL learners with and without prep class education employed more direct strategies in both situations. However, the group without prep class education employed more conventionally indirect strategies than the group with prep class education. None of the participants used non-conventionally indirect strategies. The group with prep class education used more internal modification than the group without prep class education. The most common internal modification was the consultative device in both groups. As for external modification, the group with prep class education utilized more supportive moves than the group without prep class education. Grounder was the most preferred supportive move by both groups. Keywords: Turkish ELL learners; requestive e-mails; academic e-mails; directness.

Second Language Pragmatics

The field of second language (L2) pragmatics surveys a range of research issues on how L2 learners learn to use a target language in context-appropriate manners. In the late 1970s, the field of interlanguage pragmatics emerged from cross-cultural pragmatic research. The field has now moved beyond comparisons of different pragmatic norms or simply describing language use. With nearly four decades of research, second language pragmatics has now become an independent field. Informed by different theories, the scope and definitions of L2 pragmatic competence have been expanded. An accumulative body of research illuminates underlying mechanisms and processes of L2 pragmatic development and what L2 pragmatic competence entails. In part, the increasing interest in interlanguage pragmatics reflects the notion that language competence entails the ability to use language in context, in addition to grammar. L2 pragmatics is also situated in a larger domain of language teaching, reflecting a call for more context-specific and more dynamic views of L2 communicative competence. In addition to formal aspects of language (e.g., grammar), L2 communicative competence entails the ability to engage in social interaction and perform speech acts in a contextually appropriate way. This article focuses on providing selective references, since the entire literature cannot be encapsulated in an article-length format. This article is organized around six topics: (1) Theoretical Approaches, (2) Analytical Objects of L2 Pragmatics, (3) Data Elicitation Methods, (4) Instructed L2 Pragmatics, (5) Assessing L2 Pragmatics, and (6) L2 Pragmatics in Diverse Social Interaction.

Interlanguage Pragmatics of Non-Institutional Criticism: A Study of Native and Non-Native Speakers of English

Criticism is inherently impolite and a face-threatening act generally leading to conflicts among interlocutors. It is equally challenging for both native and non-native speakers, and needs pre-planning before performing it. The current research examines the production of non-institutional criticism by Iraqi EFL university learners and American native speakers. More specifically, it explores to what extent Iraqi EFL learners and American native speakers vary in (i) performing criticism, (ii) mitigating criticism, and (iii) their pragmatic choices according to the contextual variables of power and distance. To collect data, a discourse-completion task was used to elicit written data from 20 Iraqi EFL learners and 20 American native speakers. Findings revealed that though both groups regularly used all strategy types, Iraqi EFL learners criticized differently from American speakers. When expressing criticism, Iraqi learners tended to be indirect whereas American speakers tended to be direct. In mitigating their criticism, Iraqi learners were significantly different from American speakers in their use of internal and external modifiers. Furthermore, both groups substantially varied their pragmatic choices according to context. The differences in their pragmatic performance could be attributed to a number of interplaying factors such as EFL learners’ limited linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, the context of learning and L1 pragmatic transfer. Finally, a number of conclusions and pedagogical implications are presented.

Politeness Strategy in Interlanguage Pragmatics of Complaints by International Students

The study aims to investigate the speech acts of international students in Universitas Muhammadiyah Surabaya in giving complaints. This study focuses on the complaint speech acts and the politeness strategy which are produced by International students who have different cultural background. This study used qualitative approach because it observed the complaints speech acts of International students in applying the politeness strategy. There were four participants consist of three males and one female. They came from Mexico, Thailand, East Timor and Togo. The data were taken by purposive sampling. The data contained the complaints which were delivered by the international students conducted through chatting on WhatsApp. Those were collected, categorized, analyzed and concluded. Finally, it is inferred that complaint speech acts which used by showing irritation or disapproval expression and blame. Thus, in politeness strategy, social distance (age and status) and cultural background induce the way of giving complaints. Bald on record politeness strategy is used in the culture which has directness term. Moreover, negative politeness is applied by the complainer who has culture in indirectness term. Bald on record politeness strategy has the chance for face threatening acts (FTA) in the other hand, negative politeness strategy can avoid the FTA.

VALIDITAS DAN RELIABILITAS TES MELENGKAPI WACANA PADA PENELITIAN PRAGMATIK BAHASA ANTARA (INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS)

This article is intended to provide insight to researchers who are still doubtful about the validity and reliability of one of the data collection methodologies, namely the method of discourse completion test in general pragmatic research and interlanguage pragmatics. The literature review was used in the preparation of this article to get the comprehensive picture of the completion discourse test. One of the results is that data collection methods using completion discourse test have advantages and disadvantages. One drawback is that the authenticity of the data and the limitations on the data quality obtained from an informant or respondent, even in certain studies, is judged to not be able to capture sufficiently good data. However, this method is a very good method to find stereotype data because researchers can obtain abundant data in sufficient quantities by this method. In addition, this completion discourse test is very effective in the language study in the cross-cultural domain. This method can be used to capture data in two or more languages with different cultural backgrounds as Blum-Kulka and Olshtain did (in 1984). The control of research variables by using the completion discourse test is considered better because one of the research variables in pragmatic studies is the context of conversation which is very dynamic so that there needs to be controlled. Controlling this research variable is expected to be able to make conclusions that are more conical answer for the research problem. Keywords: discourse completion test, interlanguage pragmatics, research variable control