Teaching second language pragmatics in the current era of globalization: An introduction

I Introduction

The increasing connectivity of speakers of different languages from different countries, together with the globalized world we live in, have led to multilingual societies in which linguistic exchanges between both native and non-native speakers have become a very common practice. This reality emphasizes the need to help learners of foreign (FL) and second languages (L2) become not only linguistically competent but also pragmatically competent, in order not to sound impolite or inappropriate in the target language (TL). Addressing this need, studies in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) have shown that pragmatic competence is teachable and, indeed, both beneficial and necessary to learn a TL (Alcón-Soler, 2005, 2012; Bardovi-Harlig, 2001, 2020; Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen, 2012; Ishihara & Cohen, 2010; Martínez-Flor, 2006; Nguyen, 2018; Rose, 2005; Taguchi, 2011, 2015; Takahashi, 2010). As these studies have pointed out, language students need to be guided to gain awareness of the linguistic resources and socio-cultural norms they should master for successful communication in a TL.

ILP instructional studies have mostly focused on exploring which methodology is most effective for teaching pragmatics. Earlier studies compared explicit versus implicit instruction, showing that explicit groups tend to outperform the implicit ones, since learners seem to benefit from metapragmatic explanations (Alcón-Soler, 2005, 2012; Martínez-Flor, 2006; Nguyen, Pham & Pham, 2012; Safont-Jordà & Alcón-Soler, 2012). Implicit instruction, however, may also be beneficial as long as students’ attention is drawn to the target pragmatic forms (Taguchi, 2015). Moving beyond explicit versus implicit instruction, more recent studies have examined the effects of a variety of teaching techniques on L2 pragmatic learning. These include the use of consciousness-raising tasks (e.g. Nguyen et al., 2012), concept-based pragmatic instruction (e.g. Compernolle & Henery, 2014), the combination of explicit and inductive instruction (e.g. Glaser, 2016), strategy-based instruction (Taguchi, 2018), and task-based instruction (e.g. Taguchi & Kim, 2018), among others.

To shed some light on these current trends on L2 pragmatic instruction, the special issue ‘Teaching second language pragmatics in the current era of globalization’ includes different studies that illustrate the implementation of L2 pragmatic teaching practices in actual classrooms across the globe. In doing so, it will account for the fact that with globalization, teaching is evolving from guiding students into nativelikeness to empowering them to be successful intercultural speakers, able to use a TL appropriately across contexts and interlocutors.

II Current trends in teaching L2 pragmatics

A common concern in L2 pragmatic instruction is how to create opportunities for authentic pragmatic practice inside of the classroom. To address this issue, recent ILP studies have implemented task-based language teaching (TBLT), a pedagogical approach that has traditionally been examined in second language acquisition and language teaching, but which has not been widely explored in relation to pragmatic instruction (Taguchi & Kim, 2018). The main benefit of TBLT for L2 pragmatic instruction is that it provides students with goal-oriented meaningful activities that address their real-world needs and promote authentic communication in the classroom (Kim & Taguchi, 2015, 2016; Taguchi & Kim, 2018). Because tasks are both contextually and socially situated, their implementation allows students to practice their pragmatic knowledge to interact with different interlocutors in a variety of simulated contexts (González-Lloret, 2019). Drawing from these ideas, in the first article of the current issue, González-Lloret presents a rationale for using technology-mediated tasks in the classroom. Since a large part of today’s interactions take place in the digital era, technology-mediated tasks allow learners to engage in pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic practice in digital communication platforms such as emails, chat rooms or instant messaging. As the author explains, technology-mediated TBLT would ultimately guide learners into being better prepared for an increasingly digital professional career.

As a matter of fact, the incorporation of technology-enhanced materials in L2 pragmatic instruction represents a major innovation in ILP research. Nowadays, we live in an era in which technology has become part of our daily-life experience, and this has increased even more with the current Covid-19 pandemic. Its use in language classroom environments has been examined in applied linguistics (see González-Lloret & Ortega, 2014), and more recently in ILP research (Taguchi & Sykes, 2013). The use of technology allows students to go beyond authentic language use in the classroom and immerse themselves in out-of-class real-world contexts where they can develop their L2 pragmatic ability. Emergent technologies such as simulated immersive environments (Sykes, 2012, 2014; Taguchi & Sykes, 2013; Taguchi, Li & Tang, 2017), place-based augmented reality (Holden & Sykes, 2011, 2013), and social networking sites (Belz & Thorne, 2005; Gonzales, 2013) offer students the opportunity to engage in authentic use of the language in a wide range of situations. In addition to this, not only language students, but also individuals all over the world need to learn how to be pragmatically appropriate in contexts that have emerged in the current era of globalization, such as Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) (e.g. emails, online forums, social networks), text messaging, online learning platforms, or virtual games (González-Lloret, 2018; Sykes, 2021). As González-Lloret explains in the first article of the current special issue, students nowadays need to be exposed to the cyberpragmatics of such new communicative contexts.

To shed more light on how L2 pragmatic instruction may be framed within emergent technology-mediated contexts, articles two and three of this special issue focus on CMC. In the second article, Maa and Taguchi explore the use of interactional resources specific to CMC (i.e. unique orthography and emojis) during online text-based chat interactions between learners of Japanese and native speakers of Japanese. Their study shows that CMC is an environment where students can practice their use of different interactional resources that allow them to convey pragmatic meaning. Moreover, the study illustrates how pragmatic learning takes place in CMC without direct instruction by presenting the participants’ reflections from stimulated verbal recalls about their own and their peers’ pragmatic performance. In the third article of the special issue, Usó-Juan presents a pedagogical intervention on requests in emails to faculty. More particularly, the author illustrates how strategy-based instruction enhanced Spanish EFL students’ ability to write more appropriate emails in the academic context. By guiding students into different strategies to deal with L2 pragmatics, they were able to understand the form-function-context mapping of email requests and in turn produce more authentic emails.

The teaching of L2 pragmatics in the current era of globalization also involves the challenge of how to obtain authentic pragmatic input that may be used to enhance implicit instruction (see Bardovi-Harlig, 2020). To address this concern, different scholars have pointed out the value of audiovisual material as a source of pragmatic input (Alcón-Soler, 2007; Martínez-Flor, 2008). In a time in which people have access to online streaming of TV series and films in the original language, it seems relevant to explore how such input affects pragmatic learning and how it can be implemented in the language classroom. However, to our knowledge, few studies have explored the effects of audiovisual material and captions on L2 pragmatic learning (some exceptions include Khazdouzian, 2018; Khazdouzian, Celaya & Barón, 2021). Addressing this research gap, the fourth study of this special issue, by Barón and Celaya, explores the effects of audiovisual material on pragmatic learning by teenage English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. More specifically, it investigates whether the use of L2 captions affects learners’ speech act performance, pointing out to the beneficial role of audiovisual material itself, regardless of the presence of captions. Moreover, the use of captions seemed to have positive effects regarding pragmalinguistic competence.

But, how can we ensure that such pragmatic input illustrates the actual use of languages across the world? A further current concern in L2 pragmatic instruction is how to account for the emergence of English as an International Language (EIL). Traditional EFL approaches focused on developing students’ native-likeness and fluency in a target English variety no longer prepare students to communicate in a world where 80% of English is spoken by non-native speakers (Crystal, 1997). With globalization, the traditional view of language learning as an approximation to native-like proficiency has changed to conceiving language acquisition as a tool to mediate across linguistic and cultural boundaries (Wilkinson, 2012). Students are now required to be ‘intercultural speakers’ (Byram, 2012), which implies that they need to be both pragmatically and interculturally competent. Drawing from this idea, a few approaches to teaching English pragmatics from an EIL perspective have been made, highlighting the need to develop students’ metapragmatic awareness and strategies to deal with the hybrid nature of English, its different varieties and its wide range of associated cultures (Tajeddin & Alemi, 2021). This pedagogical approach ultimately aims to enhance students’ autonomy to be able to make their own informed pragmatic choices depending on how they want or need to address different communicative situations. The fifth article of this special issue, by Sánchez-Hernández and Martínez-Flor, is an example of pragmatic instruction from an EIL perspective. After reviewing the key principles that should be taken into account to teach EIL pragmatics, the authors show the positive effects that a pedagogical intervention on EIL pragmatics has on the oral use of pragmatic markers by Spanish EFL learners. Pragmatic markers are considered a key tool for communicative effectiveness, as they contribute to maintaining the flow and smoothness of a conversation (House, 2012). Therefore, the ultimate goal of the study is to enhance students’ ability to interact with speakers of diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Indeed, instruction on pragmatic markers contributes to the expansion of the repertoire of pragmatic targets, which is a further characteristic of L2 pragmatic instruction in the current globalized era. Traditionally, L2 pragmatic instruction has focused on guiding students into performing speech acts appropriately according to the different settings and interlocutors. Nevertheless, recent ILP instructional studies have realized that everyday communication involves different further pragmatic aspects that should also be practiced in the classroom, such as pragmatic routines, interactional skills, and comprehension of implicature (Taguchi & Roever, 2017). The sixth article of this special issue is an attempt to move beyond instruction on speech acts by illustrating how humorous verbal irony may be taught. In this article, Shively, Acevedo, Cano and Etxeberria-Ortego present the results of a pedagogical intervention about humorous verbal irony, which was effective not only for the comprehension of irony cues but also for the production of more irony and ironic responses. In addition to this, the study is innovative with regards to the participants, as the students are a group of students of Spanish that include both L2 learners and heritage language speakers. As Xiao-Desai (2020) explains, heritage learners are by-products of globalization; speakers whose linguistic system develops in between the sociolinguistic experience of a home language and that of a societal language. Their main difficulty when learning the pragmatics of an L2 lies in the fact that it is typically their home language since their childhood, and they have to re-learn it during adulthood by gaining knowledge of new pragmatic rules.

All in all, the special issue ‘Teaching second language pragmatics in the current era of globalization’ illustrates current trends in L2 pragmatic instruction, and in doing so it hopes to reach both researchers in the field of L2 pragmatics and language teachers across the globe. Indeed, the collection of articles highlights the number of opportunities that instructors have in order to teach L2 pragmatics in the current increasingly multicultural and multilingual society. The contributors to the issue are from around the world, and include internationally-renowned scholars as well as young researchers. They focus on different L2s (mainly English, Spanish, and Chinese), and include participants of different profiles that range from secondary-school students to heritage learners. Moreover, the contributions address a wide range of pragmatic features, from more traditional foci such as speech acts, to more current ones such as emojis and humor. As the editors of this special issue, we hope the issue contributes to the field of L2 pragmatics and sets new perspectives and future lines of research.