UCL IoE Centre for Applied Linguistics Research Seminar Series

Learning pragmatics in second and foreign language contexts

Júlia Barón Parés

Universitat Internacional de Catalunya / Universitat de Barcelona

Wed 9 January, 5:30-6:30 pm, Jeffery Hall, 20 Bedford Way

Learning a second or foreign language has always been a very common practice in our societies, and we cannot deny that the globalized world we live in is leading to even more multilingual and multicultural exchanges. So, what competences do we need to develop to be able to interact in such exchanges? What we need is to be not only linguistically competent, but also pragmatically competent. As Bardovi-Harlig (2013: 68) claims, pragmatics is concerned with the ‘how-to-say-what-to-whom-when’, which means that when communicating with others, we need to know the linguistic strategies to produce speech acts (pragmalinguistics), as well as to know how to realize speech acts in different situations and contexts (sociopragmatics). The field within Second Language Acquisition that has explored how non-native speakers acquire and develop the L2 pragmatics is Interlanguage Pragmatics. This talk will first make a review of how ILP has developed from the first studies which examined the use and production of L2 pragmatics, to the studies which aimed at identifying developmental stages in L2 pragmatic acquisition. The talk will also deal with what studies in ILP have shown regarding teaching pragmatics in both L2 and foreign language contexts. Finally, some gaps in the field will also be addressed, such as how to teach pragmatics, how to test pragmatics successfully, and the re-conceptualization of pragmatics in English as a Lingua Franca.

 

 

 

ALL WELCOME!