Rose 2005 Pragmatics Synthesis.pdf - Oncourse

396 K.R. Rose / System 33 (2005) 385–399
that the students in the implicit group had more out-of-class contact with native
speakers of Japanese, an obvious threat to internal validity, and a clear reminder
of the importance of collecting as much information as possible on learnersÕ exposure
to the target language outside of the classroom.
In addition to studies which produced inconclusive results, there were also cases in
which certain aspects of the target language proved resistant to instruction. House
(1996) found that even though learners in her explicit group had made considerable
progress in incorporating pragmatic routines and discourse strategies into role-play
interaction, they continued to evidence negative transfer from German, for example,
in reliance on content-oriented and self-referenced gambits instead of interpersonal
gambits, overuse of yes in various interactional slots surrounding turn-taking, and
especially problems in producing well-aligned responding turns. These lingering problems
are reminiscent of those noted by Liddicoat and Crozet (2001) and Yoshimi
(2001), both of whom also found that learners had difficulty incorporating some target
features into online interaction. Once again, the explanation for these problems is
likely to be limitations in control of processing (Bialystok, 1993). Takahashi (2001)
also found that participantsÕ use of I wonder if you could VP predominated across
all situations, regardless of degree of imposition, providing no evidence of development
in terms of sociopragmatic proficiency. The fact that even her explicit learners
– who clearly benefited from the instruction in terms of frequency of use – still did not
differentiate request forms appropriately across contexts is likely another indicator of
the difficulty of learning sociopragmatics, especially in a foreign language context.
Perhaps metapragmatic discussion on the use of the target request forms in context
would be more effective for learning sociopragmatic distinctions than the teacherfronted
approach used for the explicit group, but that is an empirical question. It is
fair to say, however, that studies comparing different instructional approaches – despite
some seemingly contradictory findings – provide considerable support for the
value of explicit instruction (and thus the noticing hypothesis). In most cases where
there was not some apparent methodological (or other) flaw, learners who had been
provided with metapragmatic information regarding the target feature(s) outperformed
those who did not. Of course, certain areas remained difficult for all learners,
particularly where online use of the target features in interaction was concerned.
Sociopragmatics was also frequently an area of difficulty, although there is evidence
that better results are produced with metapragmatic discussion than without (Rose
and Ng, 2001).
5. Conclusion
Based on results from the studies carried out to date, it is possible to come to some
tentative conclusions regarding the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics.
First, there is considerable evidence indicating that a range of features of second
language pragmatics are teachable. These include a variety of discoursal, pragmatic,
and sociolinguistic targets of instruction, such as discourse markers and strategies,
pragmatic routines, speech acts, overall discourse characteristics, and pragmatic com-