Interlanguage pragmatics of EFL speakers in Poland: a longitudinal study of requests

Transcription

1 Interlanguage pragmatics of EFL speakers in Poland: a longitudinal study of requests Anna Szczepaniak-Kozak, PhD Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań, Poland

2 outline 1. Interlanguage pragmatics (of EFL learners in Poland) 2. Polish and English requests 3. The methodology of the study 4. Findings of the study 5. Preliminary conclusions

3 pragmatic competence (PC) a set of internalized rules of how to use language in socio-culturally appropriate ways, taking into account participants in a communicative interaction and features of context within which the interaction takes place; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000: 19)

4 PC knowledge and skills needed to understand the meanings, assumptions and actions conveyed by language in its particular sociocultural context and to use it correspondingly to these interpretations, i.e. to use contextually appropriate language, e.g.: - awareness of social distance and social status and their conditioning influence on interaction, - cultural knowledge of politeness principles, - linguistic knowledge, both of the explicit and the implicit kind; Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000: 19), Koike (1989: 279), Grundy (2008: 5);

5 interlanguage pragmatics (IP) the area of second/foreign language learning research which studies how pragmatic competence is learned and developed different from cross-cultural pragmatics - concerned with comparing second/foreign language learners pragmatic competence with that represented by native speakers of the target language;

6 IP investigates whether there is any relation between linguistic proficiency in a foreign language and pragmatic competence; although it is clear that L1 influences the learning of a second or foreign language, including pragmatics, it is still not clear what is transferred;

7 IP in (E)FL learning pragmatic competence development stands for a simultaneous increase in one s skilfulness in understanding and producing: sociopragmatic meanings with pragmalinguistic conventions ; Kasper and Röver (2005: 318)

8 IP in (E)FL learning they should be mapped accurately onto one another because: if a language user has control of pragmalinguistic tools without awareness of sociopragmatic rules of usage, she or he might produce well-formed sentences which are so nonconventional that they are incomprehensible or have disastrous consequences at the relationship level. Röver (2009: 561)

9 IP: reality in learning foreign languages the acquisition of the target culture, and its sociopragmatic rules, is very slow and never complete; Acquiring English is like going through linguistic reincarnation (Kachru 1990: 1) does not describe the reality of foreign language learning;

10 IP of a learner learner language is not a deviant system represented by language learners at successive stages of proficiency, or one typical of nonnative speakers communicating imperfectly in English (Nemser 1971: 116) but a fully effective systematic means of communication representing learner learning or their communication strategies a complex system, influenced by all the languages the learner knows or is learning, but primarily by his or her cognition, past learning history and identity;

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12 Poles learning English: cross-cultural/ linguistic differences major differences between the way Polish and English requests are formed with regard to both linguistic and cultural knowledge on the part of the request maker;

13 English requests the imposition is compensated by the speaker s subordination to the hearer, e.g. by: a) asking for permission, May I ask you? b) offering the hearer authority to turn the request down, Would you mind..? c) offering the speaker a possibility to express his or her inability to perform it, Could you? in pragmalinguistic terms it implies a restricted use of the imperative, and a wide use of (indirect) interrogatives;

14 English requests expression of the speaker s uncertainty favored through: a) mitigated conventionally indirect strategies, e.g. I was just wondering if b) requests often formed: Why don t you? c) include a wide repertoire of strategies which invite a verbal response: tag questions - will you? Okay? All right?

15 English requests

16 Polish requests differentiated on the basis of the power distance between speakers: - a person in authority s requests are direct and often not mitigated; - a person lower in authority in the same situation is much more elaborate, indirect and uses formal terms of address;

17 Polish requests most direct requests that take the form of Imperatives less so declaratives; - requesting by means of an ability question (Can you return the books?) is not conventionalized in Polish (Wierzbicka 1985); - subjunctive interrogatives are considered most polite but are not often used; - a limited choice of question tags (5) and seldomly used;

18 Polish requests

19 acquisition of requests by Poles requests have received substantial attention in foreign language acquisition research but only few studies investigate requests in English performed by Polish EFL learners and these are cross-linguistic in perspective: Wierzbicka (1985, 2003), Kalisz (1993), Ogiermann (2010a, b), Jodłowiec and Urban (2010); longitudional studies do not exist no interlanguage pragmatics studies

20 acquisition of requests by Poles most studies that called themselves acquisition oriented predominantly used either short-interval between pre- and post-test in a pedagogical intervention design or were single cohort or cross-sectional designs, and thus were more production than acquisition oriented; longitudional studies do not exist no interlanguage pragmatics studies

21 the study: aims 1) to expand the range of studies on the acquisition of pragmatic competence in English as a foreign language; 2) to examine the development of one component of learner interlanguage pragmatics, i.e. requests, and look for acquisitional regularities and transfer-related factors that influence acquisition of this speech act;

22 the study: aims a longitudinal research consisting of multiple Interventions in a sample of advanced students of English and German; to gain insight into the complex relationship between the length of instruction, learner proficiency level, and difficulty of learning targets;

23 the study: participants - 57 BA students of bilingual philology studies at AMU Poznań, Poland. - entrance English proficiency level: B2; hours a week of instruction in English; - practical classes of English, courses in literature, linguistics and methodology taught in English - functionally multilingual: L1 Polish, L2 English, L3 German, L4 Russian/Spanish/French;

24 the study: the measurment instrument to monitor their assumed development of pragmatic competence, they were given the same task in: October, 2011 (Y1)- entrance to the university; May, 2013 (Y2) end of 2nd year; April 2014 (Y3) - at the time of their graduation:

25 the data were collected by a discourse completion task (DCT); the study: the measurment instrument 15 situations that were designed, pilot-tested and selected to elicit requests (10 scenarios) and apologies (in 5 scenarios, used as distracters) devised and pilot-tested by Liu (2007: );

26 Scenario 1 a comparative analysis of the responses to two power- asymmetrical request situations 3. You are now discussing your assignment with your teacher. Your teacher speaks very fast. You don t follow what he is saying, so you want to ask your teacher to say it again.

27 Scenario 2 a comparative analysis of the responses to two power- asymmetrical request situations You are the manager of a company. You are in a meeting with the other members of your company. You need to write some notes, but realize you do not have any paper. You turn to the person sitting next to you. You know the person very well.

28 the study: method of data analysis directness of the speech act, external and internal modification instrument based on: Blum-Kulka (1987, 1989), Rue and Qiao (2008: 52-57, ), Takahashi (2001:199);

29 the study: hypothesis it was hypothesized in Y1 that the data from Y2 and Y3 would show a developmental trend for conventionally indirect request strategies and the types of modification employed, and their position in the whole sequence, and also that language production would approximate the target language norms;

30 findings of the study the services required are ordinary; both speakers have the right to ask for that favor and that it is the hearer s social obligation to provide the service; minimal rate of failure;

31 findings of the study: verbosity a visible downright tendency Scenario 1: Y1-13 words per request, Y2 6; Y Scenario 2: Y per request, Y2-9.75; Y3-8.41; Y1: I'm sorry if I distracted you, but I want to ask you about something, sir. You speak so fast, that I don t follow what you are saying. Can you speak not so fast as right now? Y3: Can you repeat?

32 external mitigation: Scenario 1 Grounder (Y1). I'm sorry, but you speak very fast. I would like to ask you to say everything again. (Y3): Could you repeat? I'm not sure if I follow. Apology (Y2): I'm sorry but I don't understand. Could you repeat? Preparator (Y1): May I ask you something. Expression of gratitude (Y1): I would be gratefull.

33 external mitigation: frequency Type % in Y1 % in Y2 % in Y3 overall frequency of external 80% 65% 71% mitigation Grounder Apology Preparator Expression of gratitude

34 head acts: types non-mitigated preparatory queries (Y3): Could you repeat it, please? mood derivables (Y2): I'm sorry, you lost me. Come again? mitigated want statements (Y1): I'd be very thankful if you could repeat the following sentence for me.

35 head acts: frequencies Directness strategy % in Y1 % in Y2 % in Y3 Query preparatory with could With can Total Mood derivable Mitigated want statement Mitigated preparatory statement Want statement Mitigated preparatory question

36 Internal mitigation Y1 in % Y2 in % Y3 in % General frequency of internal mitigation pragmatic marker please External/internal ratio / / /31.25 Understater a bit (slower) Upgrader can Upgrader so fast Downtoner maybe Conditional downgraders (inc. conditional downgrader) 1.78 (would) 5.2 (would) 0 Repetition Upgrader Option giving Zero marking

37 scenario 2: external mitigation Type % in Y1 % in Y2 % in Y3 overall external mitigation Grounder Expression of gratitude Apology Preparatory question

38 head acts: types and frequencies Directness strategy % in Y1 % in Y2 % in Y3 Query preparatory with could with can Mood derivable 22.64% Permission question Strong hint Mitigated permission question Want statement

39 Internal mitigation Y1 in % Y2 in % Y3 in % General frequency of internal mitigation Hedge some Upgrader - can 39.62% pragmatic marker - please external/internal ratio % 70/ / /0 Conditional downgraders 3.77 (would) 2.77% 0 Option giving Appealer ok? Downgraders aspect % 0 Downtoner maybe Upgrader will

40 preliminary conclusions 1. in Y1 the responses seemed verbose and on the verge of redundancy and overexplicitness but sts verbosity decreased 2. sts preferred external mitigation to internal mitigation absence of please;

41 preliminary conclusions 3. moves in Y1: dominated by the grounder but its use dropped in Y2 considerably, 45.5% to 32.2% 4. other mitigators, esp. cost minimizer in Scenario 2, used more frequently;

42 preliminary conclusions 4. positive development: increase in the use of the conventionalized query preparatory absence of mood derivables in Scenario 1 is a stable and positive feature of their PC - merge with TL; however sts are inclined to use mood derivable (imperative) when the power distance is large transfer from Polish;

43 preliminary conclusions 5. sts start to realize that in relatively low imposition contexts, biclausal request forms are not preferred, e.g. I was wondering if you is replaced by monoclausal form Could you ; 6. sts rely on a small set of formulas and lexical devices to internally modify speech acts; a feature characteristic of all EFL learners at early stages of proficiency;

44 preliminary conclusions 7. a characteristic lack of please as an internal modifier; 8. generally, despite three years of intensive EFL learning their PC continues to show features of incompleteness; 9. no considerable gain without explicit teaching!

45 selected references Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2001). Evaluating empirical evidence: Grounds for instruction in pragmatics?. In K.R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). Indirectness and politeness in requests: Same or different. Journal of Pragmatics, 11, Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., & Kasper, G. (Eds.) (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Celce-Murcia M., and Olshtain, E. (2000). Discourse and context in language teaching: A guide for teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2009). Interlanguage request modification: The use of lexical/phrasal downgraders and mitigating supportive moves. Multilingua, 28, Ellis, R. (1992). Learning to communicate in the classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14(1), Ellis, R. (2003). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ghavamnia, M., Tavakoli, M., & Rezazadeh, M. (2011). A comparative study of requests among L2 English, L1 Persian, and L1 English speakers. Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada, 10, Grundy, P. (2008). Doing pragmatics. London: Arnold. Herbert, R.K. (1991). The sociology of compliment work: The enthocontrastive study of Polish and English complements. Multilingua, 10(4), Jodłowiec, M., & Urban, M. (2010). Kompetencja pragmatyczna a poziom zaawansowania w języku angielskim wśród Polaków uczących się języka angielskiego. In W. Chłopicki, & M. Jodłowiec (Eds.), Słowo w dialogu międzykulturowym (pp ). Kraków: Tertium. Kalisz, R. (1993). Different cultures, different languages, and different speech acts revisited. Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics, XXVII, Koike, Dale A. (1989). Pragmatic competence and adult L2 acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage. The Modern Language Journal, 73, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (1989). Praising and complimenting. In W. Oleksy (Ed.), Contrastive pragmatics (pp ). Amsterdam: Benjamins. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (2010). Introspekcja i intuicja w uczeniu się kategorii językowych. In J. Nijakowska (Ed.) Interdyscyplinarne studia nad świadomością i przetwarzaniem językowym (pp ). Kraków: Tertium. Liu, J. (2007). Development of a pragmatics test for Chinese EFL learners. Language Testing, 24 (3), Marcjanik, M. (2009). Mówimy uprzejmie: Poradnik językowego savoir-vivre u. Warszawa: PWN.

46 selected references Matsumura, S. (2003). Modelling the relationship among interlanguage pragmatic development, L2 proficiency, and exposure to L2. Applied Linguistics, 24(4), Ogiermann, E. (2009a). Politeness and in-directness across cultures: A comparison of English, German, Polish and Russian requests. Journal of Politeness Research, 5, Ogiermann, E. (2009b). On apologising in negative and positive politeness cultures. Amsterdam: Benjamins. O Keeffe, A., Clancy, B., & Adolphs, S. (2011). Introducing pragmatics in use. London: Routledge. Rakowicz, A. (2009). Ambiguous invitations: The interlanguage pragmatics of Polish English language learners. Saarbrücken: VDM. Röver, C. (2009). Teaching and testing pragmatics. In: Michael H. Long and Catherine J. Doughty. The handbook of language teaching. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Rue, Y.-J., & Qiao, G.Z. (2008). Request strategies: A comparative study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Szczepaniak-Kozak, A. (2013). The relation between linguistic proficiency and pragmatic appropriacy: A study of Polish learners of English as a foreign language. In I. Headlandová Kalischová, & M. Nĕmec (Eds.), English as the lingua franca of the modern world: New challenges for academia (pp ). Brno: Masaryc University Press. Szczepaniak-Kozak, A. (2014). Interlanguage pragmatics: A study into the acquisition of pragmatic competence in English as a foreign language context. In S. Adamczak-Krysztofowicz, & A. Szczepaniak-Kozak (Eds.), Kultur-Kommunikation- Kreativität-Reflexivität. Aktuelle Beiträge zum universitären Fremdsprachenunterricht (pp ). Frankfurt a.m.: Peter Lang. Takahashi, S. (2001). Input enhancement in developing pragmatic competence. In K.R. Rose, & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching (pp ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics, 9 (2-3), Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Different cultures, different languages, different speech acts: Polish vs. English. Journal of Pragmatics, 9 (2-3),

47 Thank you for your attention