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Pragmatics in language teaching

Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose

Introduction

By such milestones as the appearance of the Threshold Level for

English (Van Ek, 1975) and Wilkins’s Notional Syllabus (1976), com-

municative language teaching (CLT) has been with us for nearly three

decades. A strong theoretical impetus for the development of CLT came

from the social sciences and humanities outside language pedagogy.

Different notions of communicative competence, proposed by Hymes

from the perspective of linguistic anthropology (1971) and by

Habermas (1984) from the vantage point of social philosophy, served

as guiding constructs for the design of communicative competence as

the overall goal of language teaching and assessment. An influential

and comprehensive review of communicative competence and related

notions was offered by Canale and Swain (1980), who also proposed a

widely cited framework of communicative competence for language

instruction and testing. While pragmatics does not figure as a term

among their three components of communicative competence (gram-

matical, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence), pragmatic ability is

included under “sociolinguistic competence,” called “rules of use.”

Canale (1983) expanded the earlier version of the framework by

adding discourse competence as a fourth component. A decade after

the original framework had been published, Bachman (1990, pp. 87ff.)

suggested a model of communicative ability that not only includes

pragmatic competence as one of the two main components of “lan-

guage competence,” parallel to “organizational competence,” but sub-

sumes “sociolinguistic competence” and “illocutionary competence”

under pragmatic competence. The prominence of pragmatic ability has

been maintained in a revision of this model by Bachman and Palmer

(1996, pp. 66ff.).

1

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2Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose

Defining pragmatics

What exactly is the communicative ability that has gained such attention

in second language pedagogy? Pragmatics has been defined in

various ways, reflecting authors’ theoretical orientation and audience.

A definition that appeals to us, not least for its usefulness for second

language pedagogy, has been offered by Crystal (1997, p. 301), who

proposes that pragmatics is “the study of language from the point of

view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they

encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their

use of language has on other participants in the act of communication.”

In other words, pragmatics is defined as the study of communicative

action in its sociocultural context. Communicative action includes not

only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, compliment-

ing, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse

and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity.

Following Leech (1983), this book will focus on pragmatics as interper-

sonal rhetoric – the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social

actors who do not just need to get things done but must attend to their

interpersonal relationships with other participants at the same time.

As a means of mapping out the relevant territory for the study of how

people accomplish their goals and attend to interpersonal relationships

while using language, Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983) divided prag-

matics into two components: pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics.

Pragmalinguisticsrefers to the resources for conveying communicative

acts and relational or interpersonal meanings. Such resources include

pragmatic strategies such as directness and indirectness, routines, and a

large range of linguistic forms which can intensify or soften communica-

tive acts. For one example, compare these two versions of an apology: the

terseSorryversus the Wildean I’m absolutely devastated – could you pos-

sibly find it in your heart to forgive me?In both versions, the speaker

chooses from among the available pragmalinguistic resources of

English which serve the function of apologizing (which would also

include other items, such as It was my faultorI won’t let it happen

again), but she indexes a very different attitude and social relationship

in each of the apologies (e.g., Fraser, 1981; House & Kasper, 1981a;

Brown & Levinson, 1987; Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989), which

is where sociopragmatics comes into the picture. Sociopragmaticshas

been described by Leech (1983, p. 10) as “the sociological interface of

pragmatics,” referring to the social perceptions underlying participants’

interpretation and performance of communicative action. Speech com-

munities differ in their assessment of speakers’ and hearers’ social dis-

tance and social power, their rights and obligations, and the degree of

imposition involved in particular communicative acts (Blum-Kulka &

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Pragmatics in language teaching3

House, 1989; Olshtain, 1989; Takahashi & Beebe, 1993; Kasper &

Rose, 1999, for review). The values of context factors are negotiable;

they are subject to change through the dynamics of conversational

interaction, as captured in Fraser’s (1990) notion of the “conversational

contract” and in Myers-Scotton’s Markedness Model (1993). As

Thomas (1983) points out, although pragmalinguistics is, in a sense, akin

to grammar in that it consists of linguistic forms and their respective

functions, sociopragmatics is very much about proper social behavior,

making it a far more thorny issue to deal with in the classroom – it is one

thing to teach people what functions bits of language serve, but it

is entirely different to teach people how to behave “properly.” Here

learners must be made aware of the consequences of making pragmatic

choices,but the choice to act a certain way should be theirs alone

(Siegal, 1994, 1996).

Pragmatics in language teaching

In many second and foreign language teaching contexts, curricula and

materials developed in recent years include strong pragmatic compo-

nents or even adopt a pragmatic approach as their organizing principle.

A number of proposals for instruction in different aspects of pragmatic

competence are now based on empirical studies of native speaker (NS)

discourse, on both NS and interlanguage material, or on the classic set of

comparable interlanguage, L1 and L2 data. Examples of target-based

teaching proposals for L2 English are Holmes and Brown (1987) on

complimenting, Myers-Scotton and Bernsten (1988) on conversational

structure and management, and Bardovi-Harlig, Hartford, Mahan-

Taylor, Morgan, and Reynolds (1991) on conversational closings.

Proposals based on NS and interlanguage data include the “pedagogic

interactional grammar” by Edmondson and House (1981), comprising

a large number of speech acts and discourse functions, and Rose’s

(1994b) recommendation for consciousness-raising activities on

requesting. Bouton (1994a) suggests an instructional strategy for

improving learners’ comprehension of indirect questions, thus far a

notable exception in that the proposed instruction is informed by a lon-

gitudinal study of learners’ implicature comprehension. But with the

exception of his study, the research-based recommendations for

instruction in pragmatics have not been examined in action, that is,

how they are implemented in classrooms and how effective they are for

students’ learning of the targeted pragmatic feature.

There is now a large and fast-growing literature on interlanguage prag-

matics, that is, learners’ use and acquisition of L2 pragmatic ability

(Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993; Kasper & Rose, 1999; Rose, 2000;

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4Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose

Bardovi-Harlig, this volume). Participants in these studies are often

foreign language learners, who may have little access to target-language

input and even less opportunity for productive L2 use outside the class-

room. Second language learners participating in interlanguage prag-

matics research often also receive formal instruction. And yet, most of

the interlanguage pragmatics research informs about learners’ prag-

matic ability at a particular point in time without relating it systemati-

cally to their learning experience in language classrooms. To date, only

one early full-length book publication has addressed the relationship

between classroom language learning and pragmatic development in a

second language (Wildner-Bassett, 1986). In order to investigate how

the learning of L2 pragmatics – both the learning processes and the

outcomes – is shaped by instructional context and activities, three

major questions require examination: what opportunities for develop-

ing L2 pragmatic ability are offered in language classrooms; whether

pragmatic ability develops in a classroom setting without instruction in

pragmatics; and what effects various approaches to instruction have on

pragmatic development. The first and third questions clearly call for

classroom research – the resources, processes, and limitations of class-

room learning can be explored only through data-based studies in

classroom settings. As a new kid on the block, classroom-based inter-

language pragmatics research can profit from the vast literature on edu-

cational research generally and second language classroom research

specifically (e.g., Chaudron, 1988; Allwright & Bailey, 1991). A review

of research on opportunities for pragmatic learning in L2 classrooms

that do notoffer any form for direct teaching in pragmatics reveals

both limitations, especially of teacher-fronted teaching, and potentials

for pragmatic development over time (Kasper, this volume). Data-based

studies on classroom-based learning of L2 pragmatics are the focus of

Part II of this book.

Answers to the second question – whether pragmatic ability devel-

ops without pedagogical intervention – can be gleaned from the prag-

matics and interlanguage pragmatics literature. Adult learners get a

considerable amount of L2 pragmatic knowledge for free. This is

because some pragmatic knowledge is universal (e.g., Blum-Kulka,

1991; Ochs, 1996), and other aspects may be successfully transferred

from the learners’ L1. Current theory and research suggest a number of

universal features in discourse and pragmatics. Conversational organi-

zation through turn taking and sequencing of contributions is a uni-

versal property of spoken interactive discourse, much as cultural and

contextual implementations may vary. Basic orientations to the effec-

tiveness and social cohesiveness of communicative action, such as the

Cooperative Principle (Grice, 1975) and politeness (Brown &

Levinson, 1987), regulate communicative action and interaction

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throughout communities, even though what counts as cooperative and

polite and how these principles are implemented in context varies

across cultures. Speakers and listeners have the ability to convey prag-

matic intent indirectly and infer indirectly conveyed meaning by utiliz-

ing cues in the utterance, context information, and various knowledge

sources (Gumperz, 1996). The main categories of communicative acts –

in Searle’s (1976) influential classification, representatives, directives,

commissives, expressives, and declarations – are available in any com-

munity, as are (according to current evidence) such individual commu-

nicative acts as greetings, leave-takings, requests, offers, suggestions,

invitations, refusals, apologies, complaints, or expressions of gratitude.

Universal pragmatic knowledge includes the expectation that recurrent

speech situations are managed by means of conversational routines

(Coulmas, 1981a; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992) rather than by newly

created utterances. It subsumes an implicit understanding that strate-

gies of communicative actions vary according to context (Blum-Kulka,

1991), specifically, along with such factors as social power, social and

psychological distance, and the degree of imposition involved in a

communicative act, as established in politeness theory (Brown &

Levinson,1987; Brown & Gilman, 1989). The major realization strate-

gies identified for some communicative acts have been found stable

across ethnolinguistically distant speech communities. For instance, the

speech act set for apologies comprises as its major semantic formulas an

explicit apology, an explanation, and an admission or denial of respon-

sibility; minor, more context-dependent strategies include an offer of

repair, a promise of forbearance, and an expression of concern for the

hearer, all of which can be intensified or mitigated. These strategies

have been found to be used in English, French, German, and Hebrew

(Olshtain, 1989), Thai (Bergman & Kasper, 1993), and Japanese

(Barnlund & Yoshioka, 1990; Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper, & Ross,

1996). For requests, the major strategies differ according to their level of

directness – direct, conventionally indirect, and indirect – together with

external and internal modification, and are available to NSs and ESL or

EFL learners with such diverse native languages as Chinese (Johnston,

Kasper, & Ross, 1998; Rose, 2000), Danish (Færch & Kasper, 1989;

Trosborg, 1995), German (House & Kasper, 1987), Hebrew (Blum-

Kulka & Olshtain, 1986), Japanese (Hill, 1997), Malay (Piirainen-

Marsh, 1995), and Spanish (Rintell & Mitchell, 1989) and to learners

of such target languages as German (House & Kasper, 1987),

Indonesian (Hassall, 1997), and Norwegian (Svanes, 1992). In their

early learning stages, learners may not be able to use such strategies

because they have not yet acquired the necessary linguistic means, but

when their linguistic knowledge permits it, learners will use the main

strategies for requesting without instruction.

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6Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose

Learners may also get very specific pragmalinguistic knowledge for

free if there is a corresponding form-function mapping between L1 and

L2, and the forms can be used in corresponding L2 contexts with cor-

responding effects. For instance, the English modal past as in the modal

verbscouldorwouldhas formal, functional, and distributional equiv-

alents in other Germanic languages such as Danish and German – the

Danish modal past kunne/villeand the German subjunctive könntest

andwü, sure enough, Danish and German learners of

English transfer ability questions from L1 Danish (“Kunne/ville du låne

mig dine noter?”

)

and L1 German (“Könntest/würdest Du mir Deine

Aufzeichnungen leihen?”

)

to L2 English (“Could/would you lend me

your notes?”) (House & Kasper, 1987; Færch & Kasper, 1989), and

they do this without the benefit of instruction. Positive transfer can also

facilitate learners’ task in acquiring sociopragmatic knowledge. When

distributions of participants’ rights and obligations, their relative social

power, and the demands on their resources are equivalent in their orig-

inal and target community, learners may need to make only small

adjustments in their social categorizations (Mir, 1995).

Unfortunately, learners do not always capitalize on the knowledge

they already have. It is well known from educational psychology that

students do not always transfer available knowledge and strategies to

new tasks. This is also true for some aspects of learners’ universal or

L1-based pragmatic knowledge. L2 learners often tend toward literal

interpretation, taking utterances at face value (rather than inferring

what is meant from what is said) and underusing context information

(Carrell, 1979, 1981). Learners frequently underuse politeness marking

in L2 even though they regularly mark their utterances for politeness in

L1 (Kasper, 1981). Although highly context-sensitive in selecting prag-

matic strategies in their own language, learners may underdifferentiate

such context variables as social distance and social power in L2 (Tanaka,

1988; Fukushima, 1990). On the one hand, then, adult learners bring a

rich pragmatic knowledge base to the task of acquiring the pragmatics of

a second or foreign language – so rich that, in Bialystok’s (1993) view,

their task (unlike that of L1-acquiring children) is predominantly one of

achieving control of processing over already available pragmatic knowl-

edge, for instance, selecting contextually appropriate linguistic forms to

express pragmatic intent. Although we believe that this may be an under-

estimation of the complexity of L2 pragmatic learning – especially when

positive pragmatic transfer is no option – Bialystok’s position under-

scores the significant role that existing pragmatic knowledge plays in L2

learning and suggests that language instruction purposefully build on it.

On the other hand, learners do not always use what they know. There is

thus a clear role for pedagogical intervention, not with the purpose of

providing learners with new information but to make them aware of

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what they know already and encourage them to use their universal or

transferable L1 pragmatic knowledge in L2 contexts.

At the same time, ethnolinguistic variation is obviously abundant in

pragmatics, confronting learners with new learning tasks. Specific con-

text factors may be regularly attended to in some, but not all, communi-

ties. For instance, in comparable contexts, urgency was found to influ-

ence the request strategies of German but not of Japanese speakers

(Morosawa, 1990). As predicted by politeness theory (Brown &

Levinson, 1987; Brown & Gilman, 1989), power relationships, social

and psychological distance, and degree of imposition constrain commu-

nicative action universally, but actors’ assessment of the weight and val-

ues of these universal context factors varies substantively from context to

context as well as across speech communities (Blum-Kulka & House,

1989). For instance, in a series of studies, Beebe and Takahashi estab-

lished that social status influenced the performance of face-threatening

acts by NSs of Japanese and NSs of American English, but the impact of

status on actors’ choice of speech act strategies was stronger in the case

of the Japanese than the American participants (e.g., Takahashi &

Beebe, 1993). Furthermore, certain communicative acts are known in

some communities but not in others. For example, in the category of

declarations, acts tied to a particular institutional context derive their

function from the institution and will not be available outside it. Thus,

sustaining and overruling objections presupposes an adversarial legal

system and rising to order a type of formal meeting arranged by par-

liamentary procedures. Performing communicative acts appropriately

often involves norms specific to a particular cultural and institutional

context, such as supporting a refusal of an adviser’s suggestion with

appropriate reasons and status-congruent mitigation in the course of

an academic advising session (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990).

Pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic conventions are tied to the gram-

matical and lexical structures of particular languages. Thus, ability

questions (e.g., “Can you return the videos?”) do not seem to be con-

ventionalized as request in Polish (Wierzbicka, 1985), while exclama-

tory questions (e.g., “What is this beauty!”) are conventionalized as

complimenting strategy in Egyptian Arabic but not in different varieties

of English (see Miles, 1994, for review).

Although learners thus have to learn some new ethnolinguistically

specific conventions when acquiring L2 pragmatics, much of the vari-

ability in the way that communicative acts are performed lies less in the

absolute availability of a pragmatic strategy than in the degree to

which a strategy is conventionalized in a speech community. For

instance, Freed (1994) identified sixteen functions of questions in infor-

mal native English conversation, but for such illocutions as warning,

disagreeing, refusing, or criticizing (Sakamoto & Naotsuka, 1982;

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8Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose

Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a, 1989b; Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford, 1990),

information questions appear to be more highly conventionalized in

Japanese or Indonesian than in English. Crosscultural differences in

conventionalization can further be illustrated by pragmatic strategies

such as rejecting (rather than accepting or qualifying) compliments

(Wolfson, 1989a), complimenting as a request strategy (Holmes &

Brown, 1987), complaining through an intermediary (Steinberg Du,

1995), prefacing corrections to a lower-status person by positive remarks

(Takahashi & Beebe, 1993), offering a statement of philosophy in

refusals (Beebe, Takahashi, & Uliss-Weltz, 1990), explicitly apologizing,

explaining and offering repair in apologies (Olshtain & Cohen, 1983;

Barnlund & Yoshioka, 1990; Bergman & Kasper, 1993), and selecting

different directness levels in requesting (Blum-Kulka & House, 1989;

House & Kasper, 1987). In addition to these crosscultural differences,

the indexical meaning of speech acts and strategies varies inter- and

intraculturally. Whether indirectness is perceived as more or less polite

than directness, or whether volubility indexes more or less power,

depends on cultural preferences and the context of use (Blum-Kulka,

1987; Tannen, 1993b). In the area of conversational management,

active listening – signaling attention and alignment through response

tokens – is an interactional practice in many communities, but the

structural patterning, response tokens, and their epistemic and inter-

personal meanings vary crossculturally (e.g., White, 1989; Ohta, this

volume). As Bardovi-Harlig (this volume) demonstrates, many aspects

of L2 pragmatics are not acquired without the benefit of instruction, or

they are learned more slowly. There is thus a strong indication that

instructional intervention may be facilitative to, or even necessary for,

the acquisition of L2 pragmatic ability.

How can pragmatics be taught?

The apparent necessity – or, at least, usefulness – of instruction for

pragmatic development brings us back to our third question: what are

the effects of various approaches to instruction in pragmatics? Given

the wide range of instructional contexts, there is not likely to be one

approach which is to be preferred over all others in every context. Yet

an intriguing issue to examine is whether despite such variation, poten-

tially universal principles of instruction in pragmatics may be identi-

fied, in analogy with principles proposed for grammar teaching (e.g.,

Robinson, in press). At the same time, particular strategies of instruc-

tional intervention may prove differentially appropriate for different

pragmatic learning targets, student characteristics, and institutional and

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Pragmatics in language teaching9

sociocultural contexts. It is a central goal of this book to take stock of

what is known about the effectiveness of instruction in pragmatics to

date and illustrate the wide range of research approaches that can use-

fully be adopted to investigate this issue. To that end, Kasper (this volume)

reviews the classroom-based research on the teaching of pragmatics up to

the present. Part II includes studies examining learning processes and out-

comes of second and foreign language teaching when instructional envi-

ronments have not been arranged to target particular features of L2 prag-

matics. The studies presented in Part III investigate the effects of

instruction in a variety of specific pragmatic features and skills, aiming

at different target languages and student populations and employing

different instructional approaches.

It has often been noted that the content and forms of language teach-

ing are significantly influenced by the content and forms of language

testing. Especially in instructional contexts where formal testing is reg-

ularly performed, curricular innovations that comprise pragmatics as a

learning objective will be ineffective as long as pragmatic ability is not

included as a regular and important component of language tests. The

models of communicative language ability we referred to initially

(Canale & Swain, 1980; Canale, 1983; Bachman, 1990; Bachman &

Palmer, 1996) were expressly designed to provide constructs for lan-

guage instruction andassessment, yet tests of pragmatic ability are few

and far between. One exception is the Canadian Development of

Bilingual Proficiency project (e.g., Harley, Allen, Cummins, & Swain,

1990a), in which tests for grammatical, discourse, and “sociolinguistic”

competence in L2 French were developed. Sociolinguistic ability, defined

as “the ability to produce and recognize socially appropriate language in

context” (Harley, Allen, Cummins, & Swain, 1990b, p. 14), was opera-

tionalized as requests, offers, and complaints produced in oral role-

plays, the selection of contextually appropriate realizations of speech

acts in a multiple-choice format, and written directives in a formal let-

ter and informal notes. But until recently, comprehensive approaches to

the assessment of pragmatic abilities in a variety of second languages

have been lacking. Two roads have been taken to remedy this problem.

One is to examine the sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and discourse prop-

erties of existing tests, such as oral proficiency interviews, in order to

evaluate how capable these tests are of assessing pragmatic ability. The

other approach is to develop principles, instruments, and procedures

specifically for pragmatic assessment. The final part of this book illus-

trates both options for the testing of pragmatic ability.

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PART I:

THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL

BACKGROUND

The chapters in Part I provide the theoretical and empirical back-

ground to the data-based studies which follow. In Chapter 2, Kathleen

Bardovi-Harlig discusses how native speakers (NSs) and nonnative

speakers (NNSs) differ in their use of pragmatic knowledge in produc-

tion and comprehension. The production section of her chapter is

organized around the four-way distinction utilized in Bardovi-Harlig

(1996), namely, culture-specific speech act use, use of semantic formulas,

use of linguistic devices, and utterance content. After providing ample

evidence from the research literature that NNSs’ understanding and use

of the pragmatics of the target language often differ considerably from

those of NSs, she discusses how these differences have been explained,

including input factors, learner expectations, teaching materials, level

of proficiency, and washback. The chapter concludes with a summary

of evidence of the need for instruction, but Bardovi-Harlig is careful to

note that although the evidence indicates divergence of interlanguage

pragmatics from target-language pragmatic practices, such differences

per sedo not constitute a mandate to teach (or facilitate the acquisition

of) target-language pragmatics – many other factors need to be considered

in determining what, if any, areas need to be targeted for instruction,

or how instruction is to be implemented.

Gabriele Kasper begins in Chapter 3 by noting that although prag-

matics has played a considerable role in approaches to first and second

language classroom research, classroom research has played only a

minor role in interlanguage pragmatics thus far. She then reviews the

small body of research on pragmatic learning in the second or foreign

language classroom, considering both observational studies, which

focus on classroom processes and the opportunities they afford for

pragmatic learning in authentic instructional contexts (that is, contexts

that have not been specifically arranged for research purposes), and

interventional studies, which examine learning outcomes subsequent to

some form of (often quasi-experimental) treatment. One recurrent out-

come of the observational studies is the limited opportunities that

teacher-fronted instruction offers for the acquisition of target-language

pragmatics. The interventional studies converge on demonstrating that,

11

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