Research Griet Boone

Abstract

In today's multilingual world, one of the main goals of learning a second or foreign language (L2 or LX) is no longer to become 'nativelike', but to become an intercultural speaker – a person who is sensitive to other cultures and aware of his/her own cultural position to mediate across linguistic and cultural boundaries (Byram, 2012; Wilkinson, 2012). L2 pragmatic competence can serve as a resource that helps in this process of mediation, and as a tool to interact with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Taguchi & Roever, 2017). The acquisition of L2 pragmatic competence – consisting of pragmatic production and comprehension (Ren, 2022; Wang, 2022) – has shown to be a complex and challenging process for L2 learners (Taguchi, 2022). It is not only affected by individual difference (ID) factors (Takahashi, 2019), but also by the context (Taguchi, 2015). However, there are still many ID factors (e.g., affective variables such as anxiety and enjoyment, and agency) that have been underexplored in L2 pragmatic development studies. In this project, we will focus on a variety of learning contexts (i.e., the classroom, study abroad, and the workplace) and investigate how pragmatic development in LX German is affected by IDs. The project also wants to inform the theoretical foundations of L2 pragmatics, specifically in the tradition of the emergentist or dynamic systems approach (de Bot, 2008; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2006). The project will implement a mixed methods design, since this approach has been shown to be promising when investigating pragmatic development (Taguchi, 2018). By integrating quantitative and qualitative data analyses in a single project, the research questions can be addressed from multiple angles and provide a more holistic understanding of the observed patterns in L2 pragmatic development. The project is divided into four studies. The first study is a longitudinal investigation of the specific predictive role of several ID variables in pragmatic development of speech acts among LX learners of German in a classroom context. The second study also concerns a longitudinal investigation – now in a study abroad context – that aims to examine which IDs affect the pragmatic development of speech acts among LX learners' of German. In the third study, the concept of learner agency will be linked to pragmatic competence in a workplace context. For the fourth and final study, we return to the foreign language classroom context to examine how learners develop pragmatic competence via a technology-based approach (González-Lloret, 2022, for a recent review) and how it is influenced by several ID variables. In sum, this project as a whole is innovative and might make a significant contribution to the field of L2 pragmatics, because of (1) the adopted mixed-methods approach, (2) the focus on several ID factors explaining variation in L2 pragmatic competence, both on a productive and receptive level, (3) the exploration of a variety of contexts, and especially the addition of the workplace context, (4) the longitudinal and developmental perspective, and (5) the focus on an underrepresented language in the field, namely German.

Researcher(s)

• Promoter: Boone Griet

Research team(s)

• Grammar and Pragmatics

Project type(s)

• Research Project