The pragmatic system consists of the rules for appropriate and communicatively-effective language use. This book provides an integrated view of the acquisition of the various pragmatic subsystems, including expression of communicative intents, participation in conversation, and production of extended discourse. The three components of the pragmatic system are presented in a way that makes clear how they relate to each other and why they all fall under the rubric of "pragmatics". The authors combine their own extensive work in these three domains with an overview of the field of pragmatic development, describing how linguistic pragmatics relates to other aspects of language development, to social development, and to becoming a member of one's culture.

Gila Schauer's study of interlanguage pragmatic development in English is situated in the context of studying abroad. It is the first book-length study of a common occurrence worldwide, but one that has not received the focus it deserves. Schauer examines the interlanguage pragmatic development of German learners of English at a British University over the course of a year. The focus is not only on the learners' productive pragmatic development, but also on their pragmatic awareness, which is compared with their grammatical awareness. The analysis undertaken is both qualitative and quantitative, and the book draws some important conclusions relevant to the whole field of interlanguage pragmatics. It will be engaging reading for researchers and postgraduate studies in applied linguistics, especially those working on interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, multilingualism and second language acquisition.

The pragmatic system consists of the rules for appropriate and communicatively-effective language use. This book provides an integrated view of the acquisition of the various pragmatic subsystems, including expression of communicative intents, participation in conversation, and production of extended discourse. The three components of the pragmatic system are presented in a way that makes clear how they relate to each other and why they all fall under the rubric of "pragmatics". The authors combine their own extensive work in these three domains with an overview of the field of pragmatic development, describing how linguistic pragmatics relates to other aspects of language development, to social development, and to becoming a member of one's culture.

In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions such as: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language.

This book probes into under-researched issues in L2 pragmatics. Firstly, pragmatic competence, pragmatic awareness and metapragmatic awareness are re-defined and clearly distinguished on theoretical grounds. Secondly, pragmatic competence and its manifestations are evaluated on empirical grounds by distinct criteria and validated testing measures. More importantly, genuine pragmatic inference is elicited in contexts of online interpretation where figurative speech plays a central role. Genre-specific discourse which occurs in editorials and news reports serves as a natural testbed for examining the role of advanced mind-reading abilities in developing pragmatic competence. Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory accommodates the findings of empirical assessment and yields new insights in the cognitive procedures activated during interpretation. The comprehensive theoretical and methodological treatment of pragmatic competence makes this book of interest to researchers and students in pragmatics, L2 theory and applications, genre studies, and to those concerned with the cognitive underpinnings of communication in L2.

This book adopts a cross-sectional approach and mainly focuses on one of the core pragmatic constructs, formulaic/pragmatic routines, in addition to components put forward by Roever (2011) and Taguchi (2013). It actively integrates multidimensional pragmatic modalities—including both production (initiating and responding) and reception (recognition, comprehension, and perception), together with learners’ cognitive processes—rather than one or two types of task modalities. Focusing more on the Chinese EFL context instead of Japanese or European L1 learners, it also takes advantage of an emerging instrument, the computer-animated elicitation task, for data collection based on authentic oral responses and to avoid “coached” responses. The socio-cognitive approach, proposed by the famous linguistic expert Prof. Istvan Kecskes, is subsequently applied to conduct an in-depth analysis of the data. Hence, the book introduces a new and fruitful theoretical perspective to the traditional L2 pragmatic research field.

This volume includes eleven chapters written by well-known specialists in foreign language teaching and interlanguage pragmatics: K. Bardovi-Harlig, D. Boxer, C. Clennell and S. Nichols, A. Cohen, M. A. Dufon, J. House, H. Kobayashi and C. Rinnert, A.J. Meier, M. P. Safont, P. Salazar, and A. Trosborg. The authors bring together both theoretical and empirical studies dealing with pragmatic competence and its teachability: they review the latest studies carried out in the field, examine issues of developmental pragmatics in the classroom, describe various projects and analyses of different pragmatic aspects, provide evidence of the benefits of explicit teaching of pragmatics, and suggest interesting activities to develop learners' pragmatic knowledge.

This book describes second language learners? development of pragmatic competence - the appropriate language use in a social context. It reveals patterns of development across different aspects of pragmatic abilities measured over one year and presents rich descriptions of participants? experiences and the individual characteristics that shaped their developmental trajectories.

This book offers an analysis of blind people’s pragmatic abilities. By exploring the impact of visual impairment on the interpretation of utterances, it identifies common ground between the pragmatic analysis of comprehension and visual impairment, and shows how the study of pragmatics can be enriched by the study of visual impairment. It also investigates the role of accessible contextual cues and the effect of visual impairment on comprehension. Although it is generally accepted that context plays a crucial role in comprehension, it is still unknown what effect a lack (or insufficiency) of certain contextual information has on interpretation and mutual communication between people. This raises the question of whether people who are blind are equally competent and successful in interpreting spoken language as sighted people. Also, bearing in mind the specific difficulties and delays faced by blind children in social and linguistic development indicated in previous studies, it is worth exploring whether these initial difficulties are eventually overcome by blind adults. This book, in offering a satisfactory answer to this relevant question, is one of the very few publications devoted to the analysis of the pragmalinguistic consequences of blindness.

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Second Language Acquisition is the first reference work of its kind. The handbook contains twenty contributions from leading experts in the field of Chinese SLA, covering a wide range of topics such as social contexts, linguistic perspectives, skill learning, individual differences and learning settings and testing. Each chapter covers historical perspectives, core issues and key findings, research approaches, pedagogical implications, future research direction and additional references. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Second Language Acquisition is an essential reference for Chinese language teachers and researchers in Chinese applied linguistics and second language acquisition.