Читать книгу Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA - Salvatore Attardo - Страница 23

Let’s start with an example. Imagine you are an English speaker who is learning Japanese. You will be introduced fairly quickly to the idea of honorific language. This includes the use of specific titles and parts of speech such as pronouns that vary systematically depending on the relationship between the interlocutors and particularly differences in social rank and social distance, such as the T/V pronouns we saw in the previous chapter. Of course, English has words that do similar work such as sir or ma’am, but the extent of the grammatical differences is far more intricate in the Japanese system. In this case, although the underlying “job of work” from a perspective of pragmatics is the same, that is, to mark the social distance between interlocutors, the way in which it is realized by the two languages is quite different. Cross-cultural or inter-cultural¹ pragmatics addresses these differences, and L2 pragmatics focuses on how they are learned in second-language contexts.

The concept of distance between speakers is both literal and metaphorical in the sense that it can be both physical and social. Within speech communities, because this distance has to be regularly covered successfully, we have developed linguistic conventions that signal our intentions effectively. As L2 learners, we must relearn these conventions. This sounds fairly straightforward, but it is perhaps not quite as easy to bridge these differences as it might seem.

Returning to our Japanese example, Minegishi Cook (2001) reports a study in which 120 American learners of Japanese (JFL) were asked to judge three job applicants for the role of an English-Japanese bilingual clerk in a clothing store. The students were explicitly told that a critical requirement was the ability to speak polite Japanese, that is, to use honorific language as opposed to plain forms. Of the three applicants, Applicant A, who was most qualified in all other respects, used the most pragmatically inappropriate language by using plain language forms and additional negative pragmatic features. Despite this, the JFL students overwhelmingly chose Applicant A (97 out of 120) and appeared to be unaware of the negative impact of the applicant’s language choices. The Japanese instructors were “unanimously surprised” by their students’ choice as “it was obvious that Applicant A’s speech style was definitely impolite for applying for a job” (p. 96), and the students had been repeatedly exposed to the correct pragmatic forms as part of their instruction.

So why were these crucial pragmatic features not salient to the learners? One possibility is that the overall language proficiency of the L2 learners was such that they were focused solely on the grammatical presentation of the referential information, and they were unable to process additional information (see, e.g., Ishida, 2007). Another possibility is that they perceived the interaction through their “L1 lens” in which other aspects of the applicant’s presentation such as their perceived enthusiasm would be more salient from a US perspective than the grammatical markers. Yet another possibility is that despite the instructors’ best efforts, this kind of linguistic knowledge is undervalued in typical classroom curricula and becomes part of the “secret rules” of an L2 (Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003).The investigation of these questions regarding the development of L2 pragmatic skills falls under the area of Interlanguage Pragmatics. Just as the study of interlanguage tells us about the development of learners’ grammatical systems, interlanguage pragmatics focuses on the developmental patterns found in all aspects of the acquisition of pragmatics by L2 learners. In the remainder of this chapter, we introduce some of the questions that have been at the heart of the study of interlanguage pragmatics and that we will return to throughout the book.