Second Language Learners’ Competence of and Beliefs About Pragmatic Comprehension: Insights From the Chinese EFL Context

It can be a great challenge for second language (L2) learners to comprehend meanings that are implied in utterances rather than the surface meaning of what was said. Moreover, L2 learners’ attitudes toward pragmatic learning are unknown. This mixed-methods study investigates L2 learners’ ability to comprehend conversational implicatures. It also explores their beliefs about and intentions to develop this ability using Ajzen’s theory of planned behavior (TPB). A total of 498 freshmen from a public university in China participated in the study. Data were collected using a web-based test, stimulated recall tasks and semi-structured interviews. Results show that the participants differed in recognizing the intended meanings. Complicated factors account for the variations. In addition to the types of implicature, learners’ beliefs about developing pragmatic comprehension also influence their learning intention, and subsequent performance. These beliefs include learners’ multi-layered, complex attitudes toward the outcomes of pragmatic learning, perceived self-efficacy beliefs regarding language proficiency and L2 cultural knowledge, actual behavioral control over opportunities and resources for pragmatic learning, and perceptions of less social pressure on pragmatic learning. The use of TPB may help language teachers and test designers to understand learners’ beliefs about L2 pragmatic learning in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Understanding the factors influencing learners’ intention will help design more effective teaching curricula that may integrate pragmatic instruction and testing in the future.

Pragmatic Competence and Willingness to Communicate Among L2 Learners of Chinese

Research in second language (L2) pragmatics has paid increasing attention to learners’ individual differences, but few studies have examined the relationship between learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in L2 and their pragmatic competence. To this end, this study investigates the association between WTC and pragmatic awareness and comprehension of Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners. A total of 80 CSL learners studying abroad in three universities in China participated in this study. Data were collected through a WTC questionnaire, a self-perceived communication competence (SPCC) questionnaire, a pragmatic awareness judgment task, and a multiple-choice test for pragmatic comprehension. Statistical analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between the learners’ pragmatic awareness and pragmatic comprehension on the one hand and their WTC and SPCC in L2 on the other. The findings indicated that SPCC correlated positively with the learners’ L2 pragmatic comprehension, but not with their L2 pragmatic awareness. No correlation was found between WTC and pragmatic awareness and comprehension. The results suggest that SPCC may contribute to learners’ L2 pragmatic comprehension; some implications for teaching and future research directions are also discussed.

The Effects of L2 Proficiency on Pragmatic Comprehension and Learner Strategies

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of the participants, six were selected from the two proficiency groups to perform verbal retrospections to probe their strategy use in the MDCT task. The quantitative results showed that the high-proficiency group performed significantly better than the low-proficiency group on speech acts, implicatures, and routines. In addition, the analyses of verbal reports identified eight major strategies the learners used while performing the task, including sociopragmatics, hearer’s response, relevance, keyword/key phrase, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information, intuition, and multiple strategies. The high-proficiency group showed a significant use of multiple strategies, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information and relevance. The low-proficiency group, on the other hand, indicated a significant use of intuition. Close examination further revealed that the high-proficiency group showed more flexibility in strategy use, thus leading to more accurate performance. Conversely, the low-proficiency group did not vary their strategy use, which normally led to incorrect responses on the task. Finally, the study closes by providing pedagogical implications for language teachers as to how strategy instruction can be implemented in L2 pragmatics classrooms.

Humorous and Non-Humorous Effects in Sitcoms: a Relevance-Theoretic Perspective

Humorous utterances can be divided into those which are created for their own sake (that is, to amuse others), dubbed autotelic humour, and those which communicate truthful and/or untruthful meanings germane to the ongoing conversation, dubbed speaker-meaning-telic humour (Dynel 2018). The present paper carries out a qualitative analysis of humorous units in sitcom discourse with a view to delineating a number of propositional meanings, which can be potentially derived by the TV recipients. Special attention is confined to one of the most powerful tools used to explain humour in various humorous manifestations, i.e. weak implicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1986 [1995]; Wilson and Sperber 2004). It is believed here that pragmatic COMPREHENSION mechanisms proposed within Relevance Theory and the notion of weakly communicated assumptions are two sides of the same coin since these account not only for the viewer’s recovery of a humorous interpretation but also of an array of non-humorous propositional meanings. Moreover, the participatory framework has been employed as an additional parameter to show the difference in the reception of a dialogue by fictional characters and the viewers.

M96. A NEW ASSESSMENT TOOL FOR FORMAL THOUGHT DISORDER IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: DOKUZ EYLUL THOUGHT DISORDER SCALE

Background Current scales of formal thought disorder (FTD) in schizophrenia have been shown to hold considerable inadequacies: 1. The concept of FTD is usually limited to positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia 2. There is no much consideration about pragmatic disturbances. 3. There are significant inconsistencies in measurements of posFTD and negFTD dimensions (eg, merely focusing on the positive dimension); 4. As to the comprehensive scales of posFTD and negFTD, administration or assessment is time-consuming for routine clinical use and they are not user friendly. Besides, some of the FTD scales include the utilization of materials such as pictures, figures, or extended structured interviews to be able to provide speech samples of the patient. Developing a new FTD assessment tool that can be practically applied in clinic might help clinicans in diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. The aim of our study was to develop a new scale for assessment of FTD and evaluate the reliability and validity of this scale. We named our new FTD scale as Dokuz Eylul Thought Disorder Scale (DETDS). The originality of this scale is based on the fact that it involves assessment of pragmatic comprehension as well as positive and negative FTD and it can be administered and scored practically in routine clinical examination. Methods This study included 130 patients with schizophrenia and 35 controls. For assessing the reliability of this new scale, internal consistency, test-retest and interrater reliability analyses were conducted. The validity of the scale was assessed with concurrent validity and factor analysis methods. Results In the study, Cronbach’s was 0.86. The new scale has a good test-retest (r=0.83) and interrater (ICC=0.985) reliability. The posFTD subscale of the new scale showed high correlation with the posFTD subscale of the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) (r=0.95, p<0.001) and negFTD subscale of our scale showed high correlation with the alogia subscale of the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) (r=0.95, p<0.001) and impoverishment of thought subscale of the Thought and Language Index (TLI) (r=0.66, p<0.001). The factor analysis revealed a 3-factor solution which explained 74.6% of the variance: 1. Positive Formal Thought Disorder, 2. Negative Formal Thought Disorder, 3. Pragmatic Comprehension Disorder. Discussion Our findings showed that DETDS is a reliable and valid scale which can be used in assessing FTD in patients with schizophrenia in routine clinical use. Unlike most scales of FTD that are available in the literature, but similar to SANS, SAPS, and PANSS, it is practical to use because it is based on clinical interview. Another strength of DETDS is that it intensifies the posFTD and negFTD dimensions and scores them hierarchically in terms of severity. The fact that the new scale covers pragmatic comprehension disorders also presents an innovation to the literature.

S116. PRAGMATIC COMPREHENSION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS

Background Individuals with schizophrenia (SCZ) frequently show a severe and widespread impairment in the communicative-pragmatic domain. They exhibit difficulties in the comprehension of a wide range of communicative- pragmatic expressions, such as indirect speech acts (ISA), irony, metaphors, proverb and idioms. Communicative disorders play an important role in the in the social impairment experienced by these patients, and they are frequently associated with functional and social outcome. However, results of previous studies showed large variation across different samples, communicative phenomena and type of pragmatic task investigated. As a result, the state of the evidence for communicative difficulties in SCZ is not completely clear. We performed a systematic review of previous literature assessing pragmatic comprehension in schizophrenia, and a meta-analysis of the evidence. The aim of the meta-analysis was to: 1) investigate differences in pragmatic comprehension between individuals with SCZ and HC 2) compare differences in pragmatic comprehension across different phenomena, i.e. irony, figurative language (FL, idioms, proverbs and metaphors), and ISA. Methods We used the “PRISMA Statement” guidelines for transparent reporting of a systematic review, and the study was preregistered on Prospero Register of Systematic Review. We performed a systematic literature search on the following database: PyschInfo, Pubmed and Google Scholar. 1 2020 Congress of the Schizophrenia International Research Society Selection of the studies was conducted according to the following inclusion criteria: (a) empirical study, (b) quantitative measures of pragmatic comprehension of participants with SCZ, (c) sample including at least two individuals with SCZ (d) inclusion of a comparison group. Finally, 37 studies were identified as eligible for inclusion, and among these 27 studies provided enough data to be included in the meta-analysis. We used mixed effects regression models for each relevant pragmatic phenomena, i.e. FL, irony and ISA, to calculate summary effect sizes (Cohen’s d). Results The results showed significant meta-analytic effects of schizophrenia in pragmatic comprehension of FL (22 studies, d: -1.74, 95% CIs: -2.49 -0.93, p < .001), irony (12 studies, d: -1.42, 95% CIs: -2.3 -0.5, p = .001,), and ISA (3 studies, d: -1.37, 95% CIs: -1.9 -0.8, p < .001). The standardized effect sizes were large, thus indicating that individual with SCZ have serious difficulties in the comprehension of the different communicative expressions compared to healthy individuals. The heterogeneity between studies was significant (FL: Q(32) =245.1, p < .0001, and ISA: Q(3) = 25.2, p < .0001). The rank correlation test indicated evidence for publication bias for figurative language (Kendall’s tau (K) = -0.35, p < 0.001), while was not significant for irony and ISA (Irony: K = -0.33, p = 0.13, ISA: K = -1.00, p = 0.08). Discussion Overall, we found that individuals with SCZ showed clear difficulties in the comprehension of different pragmatic expression, i.e. FL, irony and ISA, compared to healthy controls. This result is in line with previous studies indicating pragmatic impairment as a core deficit in schizophrenia. The effects were large for all the pragmatic phenomena, with figurative expressions showing the largest effect followed by irony and ISA. However, we reported the presence of publication bias for studies investigating figurative language expressions. Heterogeneity between studies was large and significant for all the three phenomena, thus suggesting a large variability across studies in the characteristic of the tasks used to investigate pragmatic ability, and in the characteristics of the experimental samples assessed.

The relative efficacy of input enhancement, input flooding, and output-based instructional approaches in the acquisition of L2 request modifiers

This study investigates the effects of input-based and output-based instructions on the acquisition of second language (L2) request modifiers. Four intact classes were randomly assigned to textual enhancement (TE), input flooding (IF), output-based instruction (OI), and control (CO) groups. The TE group watched some captioned videos on requests and read over the video transcripts with the target features typographically highlighted. The IF group watched twice more captioned videos and read over the video transcripts with no textual manipulation. The OI group watched videos with no captions and then engaged in dialogue reconstruction tasks. Results of the pragmatic comprehension and production pre-test and post-test revealed the overall effectiveness of the treatment. TE and OI groups performed rather similarly in the comprehension test. Concerning the production test, the OI group performed best, followed by TE, IF, and CO groups. The findings suggest employing input-based and output-based practices to promote learners’ L2 pragmatic knowledge.