Gabriele Kasper

Linguistic politeness:: Current research issues

Abstract The paper reviews a substantial part of the research on linguistic politeness, with the objective to evaluate current politeness theories and to outline directions for future politeness studies. The topics addressed comprise (1) the distinction of politeness as strategic conflict avoidance and social indexing; (2) the linguistic enactment of politeness; (3) social and psychological factors determining politeness forms and functions; (4) the impact of discourse type on politeness; (5) the counterpart to politeness, i.e. rudeness. Furthermore, the paper provides an introduction to the remaining contributions to this Special Issue.

Developmental Issues in Interlanguage Pragmatics

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics that shed light on some basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories that might offer explanations of different aspects of pragmatic development, and proposing a research agenda for the study of interlanguage pragmatics with a developmental perspective that will tie it more closely to other areas of SLA.

Locating Cognition in Second Language Interaction and Learning: Inside the Skull or in Public View?.

Abstract A key question in the debate on conversation analysis as an approach to SLA concerns the role of cognition in interaction and learning. Where is cognition located, and how is understanding in interaction achieved? For an empirically grounded answer, I will explore the procedural apparatus that sustains socially shared cognition. Following a brief introduction of three discursive approaches to cognition as socially shared, the article will examine how interactional organizations and linguistic resources serve to generate and sustain mutual understanding in a segment of ordinary conversation between an L1 speaker and an L2 speaker of English. I will then discuss the standard treatment of repair in interactionist SLA from a conversation-analytic perspective. Lastly, I will consider how interactional competencies may be learnable, and how their learnability informs the issue of whether CA is capable of furnishing an explication of second language learning without the help of exogenous theory.

Teaching-induced aspects of interlanguage discourse

The paper examines the influence of the formal classroom as a learning environment on the discourse behaviour of advanced German students of English in conversations with English native speakers. It is proposed that FL teaching as a causal factor in the formation of IL-specific rules can operate either directly, in presenting the learner with FL material which deviates from target norms, or indirectly, by triggering off psycholinguistic processes which in turn lead to IL-specific rule formation. These are referred to as primary and secondary teaching induction, respectively. On a more concrete level, the impact of two constituents of FL teaching on IL discourse is discussed: (1) the textbook and other teaching materials; (2) classroom specific discourse norms. The influence of the first factor type manifests itself primarily in (a) the use of an inappropriately formal register, (b) an inappropriate use of modal verbs. The second factor type is found to result in (a) rising intonation with non-interrogative function, (b) inappropriate propositional explicitness of speech act realizations and discourse functions, (c) “complete sentence” responses, (d) a lack of marking for expressive and relational functions (“speech act modality”). In conclusion of the data analysis, a classroom specific pidgin will be hypothesized which, when transferred to non-classroom settings, leads to pragmatically inappropriate communicative behaviour. On a more general level, it will be postulated that second language acquisition hypotheses should be formulated with reference to specific types of acquisition/learning contexts.

Conversation Analysis in Applied Linguistics

For the last decade, conversation analysis (CA) has increasingly contributed to several established fields in applied linguistics. In this article, we will discuss its methodological contributions. The article distinguishes between basic and applied CA. Basic CA is a sociological endeavor concerned with understanding fundamental issues of talk in action and of intersubjectivity in human conduct. The field has expanded its scope from the analysis of talk—often phone calls—towards an integration of language with other semiotic resources for embodied action, including space and objects. Much of this expansion has been driven by applied work. After laying out CAs standard practices of data treatment and analysis, this article takes up the role of comparison as a fundamental analytical strategy and reviews recent developments into cross-linguistic and cross-cultural directions. The remaining article focuses on applied CA, the application of basic CAs principles, methods, and findings to the study of social domains and practices that are interactionally constituted. We consider three strands—foundational, social problem oriented, and institutional applied CA—before turning to recent developments in CA research on learning and development. In conclusion, we address some emerging themes in the relationship of CA and applied linguistics, including the role of multilingualism, standard social science methods as research objects, CAs potential for direct social intervention, and increasing efforts to complement CA with quantitative analysis.

Handling Sequentially Inapposite Responses

As a critical interactional resource to establish or re-establish shared understanding in talk-in-interaction, participants deploy various practices of repair organization. Repair can address any sort of problem in speaking, hearing and understanding, anywhere in the interaction, in any type of activity (Schegloff 1992b; Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977). It is precisely the availability of a robust mechanism for dealing with trouble in interaction that permits oral non-scripted language use to be as ambiguous, indirect, allusive, elliptic, incoherent and otherwise ‘fundamentally flawed’ (Coupland, Wiemann and Giles 1991) as it is and yet enable participants to manage their language-mediated activities largely successfully (House, Kasper and Ross 2003; Schegloff 1991). Following Schegloff and colleagues’ (1977) seminal paper, a large volume of research attests to the ubiquity of repair in talk among linguistically expert speakers. Second language researchers working in the tradition of conversation analysis (CA) have been particularly interested in examining the formats and functions of repair in talk including second or foreign language speakers. The impetus for this focus comes first and foremost from the empirically sustained assumption that when shared linguistic resources are limited, mutual understanding may be at an increased risk, requiring more repair work from participants in order to manage their joint activities.

Assessing second language pragmatics: An overview and introductions

Pragmatics is a key domain in language assessment. For more than two decades, advances have been made in conceptualizing the domain, developing assessment instruments, and applying current methods of data treatment to the analysis of test performance. This book, the first edited volume on the topic, brings together empirical studies on a range of well-established and innovative strategies for the assessment of pragmatic ability in a second language. In this introductory chapter, we will first offer an overview of key concepts, situate theoretical models of pragmatic competence within the larger frameworks of communicative language ability and interactional competence, and consider the relationship between pragmatics and language testing. We will then introduce the chapters, organized into two Parts. The chapters assembled in Part I investigate assessment instruments and practices for a variety of assessment constructs, purposes, and contexts, guided by different theoretical outlooks on pragmatics. Part II comprises studies of interaction in different forms of oral proficiency interview, conducted from the perspective of conversation analysis.

Managing task uptake in oral proficiency interviews

Tasks are a key organizing principle in second language learning, education, and performance assessment. Their appeal comes from the need to learn, teach, and test language for use in social domains and activities that have real-life relevance for second language speakers, and the fundamental insight that the activity is the most powerful (although not necessarily the only) structuring force of language use and attendant social and cognitive processes. Other than this basic consensus, conceptualizations of tasks and the practices of conducting task-structured activities vary widely among a range of epistemological and theoretical traditions and are shaped by domain-specific concerns and objectives (e.g., Branden, 2006; Branden, Bygate, & Norris, 2009; Bygate, Skehan, & Swain, 2001; Ellis, 2003; Robinson, 2011). In approaches to instructed second language acquisition that consider interaction as fundamental to language learning, the interactional and cognitive environments generated through task-based interaction offer important opportunities for L2 learning. In oral language assessment, tasks are designed to generate speech samples that enable inferences to the test taker’s oral language proficiency. Despite the diversity of research and educational practices in task-based language learning, teaching, and assessment that has evolved over the past thirty years, the task principle continues to provide a lasting unifying focus.

Clarification requests as a method of pursuing understanding in CLIL physics lectures

Abstract Using multimodal conversation analysis, this article examines how students strive to resolve non-understandings through requests for clarification during teacher-fronted physics lectures taught in English in Finland. The findings provide new insights on the sequential environments in which students launch the requests (i.e. between or during teacher’s explanation turns) and how different problem categories (e.g. language, conceptual, textual) are made relevant and oriented to in the requests. Moreover, the findings show the role of different textual objects (e.g. inscriptions on the board) in the formulation and resolution of the clarification requests as well as the relevance of students’ note-taking to both their proximal and distal goals of trying to understand the instruction. Overall, the clarification requests are shown to influence in different ways the teacher’s instructional process and offer valuable feedback to the teacher about the success of his explanations, i.e. how students understand them and whether he can proceed with his instructional agenda. Finally, the findings shed new light on how the integration of language and content is oriented to and accomplished by participants during teacher-fronted lectures in content-based lessons taught in a foreign language.

Achieving epistemic alignment in a psycholinguistic experiment

Abstract A critical condition for obtaining valid data in a psycholinguistic experiment is that the participants understand how to perform the experimental tasks. Participants usually are not familiar with the organization and requirements of the experiment and are therefore given instruction and often practice opportunities prior to the actual test trials. Pre-experimental instruction is a regular component of the experimental set-up, yet no research exists on how the activity is organized with a view to its purpose in the research context and as the experimenter’s and participant’s joint interactional project. This case study is the first to begin to fill the gap. The instruction in focus aimed at preparing the participant to take part in a reaction time experiment designed to measure the implicit grammatical knowledge of L2 speakers of English. Building on ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic research on instruction delivery and understanding displays in different settings, the analysis reveals how in the course of the instruction the asymmetric epistemic statuses (Heritage 2012) of researcher and participant were incrementally aligned as they collaboratively accomplished explanation sequences and worked through practice items. It also shows how both participants selectively referenced the onscreen written instructions and how these became resources for the experimenter’s explanations and the participant’s evolving understanding of the experimental requirements. The main goal of this paper is to bring an unexamined but indispensable component of the experimental research process to applied linguists’ attention and encourage further studies in this area. A further intention is to explore pre-experimental instruction practices in a larger archive of task instructions and eventually empirically test whether the interaction during instruction delivery is at all related to variation in the reaction times as measures to operationalize cognitive processes.