ScholarSpace
ScholarSpace is an open-access, digital institutional repository for the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa community. ScholarSpace stores the intellectual works and unique collections of the UH at Mānoa academic community and also provides a permanent web location for those accessing these resources.
Communities in ScholarSpace
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
Learning Interactional Metadiscourse in an EFL Educational Context: Insights from Case Stories
(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Martín-Laguna, Sofía
Written modes of communication have gained prominence in the last few decades, fostered by the development of technology-mediated communication, such as e-mail or chat. Even within diverse communicative scenarios, writers must appropriately employ interactional metadiscourse markers to help readers understand their intentions regarding the message being conveyed, and learning to use metadiscourse markers appropriately becomes crucial. This study explores individual trajectories of four case learners (low and high generators of interactional metadiscourse). Each participant wrote their opinion about school issues in three e-mails addressed to the school principal over one academic year. Considering that metadiscourse has been identified as a resource used by writers to persuade readers (Hyland, 2005, 2017), pragmatic competence was measured as the ability to produce interactional metadiscourse (e.g., in my opinion). The results illustrate the complexity of the process of learning interactional metadiscourse. The study showed variation and fluctuations at the individual level, which were related to aspects such as learners’ affective domain and attitude toward content learned in the classroom, their overall academic performance at school, and their social integration with their classmates. The paper discusses pedagogical implications related to the need for teachers to
consider the dimensions that learners bring with them into the classroom (e.g., emotions, socialization with classmates and overall academic achievement), the importance of raising learners and teachers’ awareness of metadiscourse, and the suitability of using technology-mediated tasks to teach pragmatics in a real context.
Instructional Effects, Retrospective Verbal Protocols, and Conventional Expressions: A Mixed-Method Approach
(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Arrufat-Marqués, María-José
Conventional expressions (CEs) have regained importance in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research since the early 21st century (e.g., Wray, 1999). CEs are everyday specific recurring expressions whose pivotal role in social interactions is highlighted (Bardovi-Harlig, 2009). Since successful communication heavily relies on them, teaching them is capital, especially in English as a foreign language (EFL) environments, which have been identified as impoverished settings (Eslami & Eslami-Rasekh, 2008). There, pragmatic learning and teaching opportunities should be provided frequently to further enhance adult EFL pragmatic acquisition (e.g., Taguchi, 2015). Attempting to contribute to research in (1) CEs, (2) pragmatic instruction, and (3) retrospective verbal protocols (RVPs) in pragmatic production, this investigation focuses on the instructional effects on oral production of CEs as reflected on students’ answers to RVPs. A four-week pretest-posttest-delayed-posttest research design was implemented on a cohort of 46 college EFL students assigned to one control or one experimental group. Data were gathered via a computer-delivered oral discourse completion task (ODCT) involving 15 social communicative situations. Quantitative results unveiled statistically significant differences between groups at posttest and delayed posttest and a significant increase in pragmatic production across times for the experimental group only. Qualitative results showed that students used different topics to explain pragmatic production and differences among topics. These results support existing findings on the effect of instruction. In addition, RVPs proved beneficial to understand results more comprehensively, showcasing the benefit of including students’ reflection on their pragmatic learning. To end the chapter, some pedagogical implications are proposed.
Interaction between Korean Honorifics and Gestures in Thanking and Apologizing
(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Woo, Boeui
The aim of this study is to investigate how Korean honorifics interact with gestures and to propose pedagogical implications. For the study, four different Korean dramas showing verbal expressions and gestures of thanking and apologizing were chosen to conduct a multimodal analysis. Then the use of honorifics and relevant gestures was annotated using EUDICO Linguistic Annotator (Version 6.4) and categorized according to grade of honorifics (i.e., addressee-raising, addressee-lowering) and types of gestures. In addition, each category was quantified. The results suggest that Korean speakers are prone to use different gestures depending on age and status. Moreover, based on the results, several pedagogical implications were drawn in this study. Among them are the necessity of teaching Korean honorifics using multimedia materials, of selecting educational content depending on speech acts, and of conducting surveys of Korean language educators. Overall, this study contributes to research on Korean honorifics and their gestures and helps Korean language educators teach honorifics with gestures.
“Body for Talk”: Bringing the Pragmatics of Indigenous Contact Languages into the Classroom
(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Steele, Carly; Yeatman, Bernadine; Oliver, Rhonda
Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children across Australia come to school speaking an Indigenous contact language, a dialect or creole formed from their traditional languages and English. These languages differ from standardised Australian English (SAE) at all levels–pragmatically, semantically, morphologically, syntactically, and phonologically. However, because these languages are not always recognised, speakers of Indigenous contact languages are often not positioned as learners of SAE in Australian classrooms. Furthermore, the role that pragmatic differences play in the classroom is often overlooked, despite the issues these differences can create for classroom communications for teachers and students alike. In this study, lessons were conducted with First Nations students in years 1, 3 and 5 (aged 5–10 years), and two highly salient pragmatic features of Aboriginal languages were examined: the use of signs and parsimonious sentences where context serves to derive meaning. These two pragmatic features were compared with two communicative strategies from SAE: verbal communication and elaboration. The lessons were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using sociolinguistic discourse analysis which focused on students’ responses to the lessons and their ability to identify the pragmatic differences. Overall, it was found that students were very engaged with the lessons and highly attuned to the pragmatic language differences presented. However, student responses revealed the presence of some deficit views about their language. The findings highlight the need to explore language pragmatics in the classroom as this will assist students to develop a holistic understanding of language and learn important skills for intercultural communication. This could be significantly enhanced through the use of technology.
Pragmatic Development in Study Abroad: Recent Advances and New Directions
(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Shively, Rachel
Studying abroad can positively impact students’ second or additional language (L2) pragmatic development. A growing body of research in this area has documented the development of various pragmatic features and factors that facilitate learning, as well as the role of pragmatics instruction prior to or during study abroad (SA). Recent research has also begun to cast the net wider in terms of the settings, participants, targets, and technologies. This article begins with a discussion of trends in research on language learning in SA and then considers what we know about pragmatic development in target-language-speaking communities. Recent advances and new directions in pragmatic development in SA are then presented.