Pragmatics & Language Learning, Volume 15
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This volume emerged from the 2022 Pragmatics & Language Learning online conference, organized with support from the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon. Centered on the theme Teaching and Learning Interactional Pragmatics in a Digital World, it brings together contributions from keynote speakers and selected presenters who explore how digital communication shapes and reshapes pragmatic competence in both human and machine interaction. The volume seeks to advance the field of technology-mediated L2 pragmatics by proposing five foundational principles: (1) utilize methodological potential, (2) create a deep understanding of “the digital,” (3) carefully consider learning contexts, (4) explore digital tools to connect people, and (5) critically examine emergent technologies. These guiding concepts not only push research forward but are also essential for equipping language learners with the multilingual digital competencies essential to achieving communicative competence.
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Item PLL Volume 15: Table of Contents & front matter(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) González-Lloret, Marta; Sykes, Julie M.; Yoshioka, Jim K.Pragmatics & Language Learning, Volume 15: Cover, copyright page, table of contents, acknowledgementsItem Teaching and Learning Interactional Pragmatics in a Digital World: Introduction(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) González-Lloret, Marta; Sykes, Julie M.This volume was born from the 2022 Pragmatics & Language Learning online conference that was organized by the editors of this volume with the support of the National Foreign Language Resource Center (NFLRC) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and the The Center for Applied Second Language Studies (CASLS) at the University of Oregon. The topic of the conference was Teaching and Learning Interactional Pragmatics in a Digital World, and our intention was to give voice to presentations on a range of topics that explored how pragmatics are affected by our digital communication practices and how the digital world is also affecting the pragmatics of how we communicate with each other and with machines. The online format of the conference allowed us to include six top researchers in the field of L2 pragmatics, and we were delighted that three of them agreed to contribute to the volume with chapters reflecting their talks. In addition, nine conference participants were selected to contribute their work. In this introductory chapter, we synthesize each chapter as part of a larger vision for the field. This vision focuses on five critical considerations as we plant and tend to the seeds presented here: (1) utilize methodological potential, (2) create a deep understanding of “the digital,” (3) carefully consider learning contexts, (4) explore digital tools to connect people, and (5) critically examine emergent technologies.Item Technology, Mediation, and the Intersection of L2 Pragmatics Research, Teaching, and Assessment(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) van Compernolle, Rémi A.This chapter examines the mediating role of digital technology in second language (L2) pragmatics research and explores the potential for technology to integrate these practices into a cohesive enterprise. The focus of the chapter is on researching L2 pragmatic knowledge and abilities in relation to a learner's proximal zone of development. To support this praxis-oriented approach, the chapter provides an overview of the concept of mediation in the L2 pragmatics literature and highlights recent examples of technology-mediated research, teaching, and assessment practices. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future work in this significant field.Item Do Pair and Group Work Modalities Affect the Outcome in Telecollaboration?(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Di Sarno-García, SofíaThis study presents two six-week telecollaboration projects. The first was carried out between students from the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) (n = 7), Spain, and the University of Bath, UK; the second between students from UPV (n = 24) and the University of Hawai‘i, US. The aim is to compare the production of apologies of Spanish-speaking students in both projects and to seek any differences among them depending on whether they worked in pairs or groups. Open role-plays were used to elicit apologies during synchronous Zoom sessions. The apologies produced were coded following a taxonomy based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), Leech (2014), and Martínez-Flor (2016). The findings from the qualitative analysis did not reveal considerable differences among the two groups. However, the results of the quantitative analysis carried out through an Eta correlation coefficient revealed a significant correlation (r = .79) between the number of strategies used to apologise by each student and how they were grouped. Participants from the first group (working in pairs) slightly outperformed the second group (working in groups) in the post-test. This suggests that collaborating in pairs could be more beneficial to learning L2 apologies in telecollaboration than collaborating in groups.Item Remedial Action in Emails from Australian Learners of Italian to Academic Staff(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Walker, TaliaThis chapter investigates the apology strategy of Remedial Action, as performed in emails by learners of Italian from Australian universities. Remedial Action refers to attempts to remedy a situation or relationship. It is an important strategy which aids in achieving the apology’s key function of maintaining and repairing relationships and, therefore, can have implications beyond the apology itself. The focus on email communication is timely given the shift of many institutions to online education in the last few years, as well as the increasing presence of technology in education even prior to 2020. Email communication fails to convey cues embedded in face-to-face interaction, particularly non-verbal cues, which often carry key pragmatic information. Without these cues, successful communication can be more difficult, and miscommunications may occur. Hence, this chapter considers student and academic staffs’ perspectives of student apologies, to understand their impact. Here, Remedial Action is explored through an analysis of elicited emails collected through a written discourse completion task (DCT), completed by both learners of Italian and native speakers of Italian and of Australian English. Authentic emails addressed by the learners to academic staff are also referenced. The perspectives of the learners are considered through excerpts from post-DCT interviews. Academic staff perspectives are considered through an appropriateness evaluation used to investigate the point of view of those receiving student apology emails. These analyses demonstrate the prevalence of Remedial Action within student-to-teacher email communication and that students and academic staff in the Australian university context may disagree in their understandings of what constitutes appropriate Remedial Action.Item Computer Simulations for (Im)politeness Instruction: Avatar versus Interface Feedback(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Richards, PaulL2 pragmatics researchers have expressed increasing interest in the use of computer games to allow learners to practice language in virtual contexts that simulate real-world use (Holden & Sykes, 2011, 2013; Sykes, 2009, 2013; Taguchi et al., 2017; Tang & Taguchi, 2021). It is anticipated that by interacting with a variety of avatars across different settings, games will afford learners opportunities to practice adapting their language use to different social variables and that learners will be able to carry this practice over to real-world contexts (Holden & Sykes, 2013; Sykes & Reinhardt, 2013). The current study contributes to this line of research by examining the effectiveness of pragmatic feedback presented from an in-game avatar against feedback presented as part of the simulation’ s interface. While feedback is considered a central component of computer game design, previous game-based studies on pragmatics instruction have not attempted to isolate the effects of feedback on the learning of pragmatics. The study finds that feedback presented from characters in the simulation led to greater use of the target semantic formula from the simulation than feedback presented as part of the interface. Participant evaluations of pre- and posttest performance further revealed that while the avatar feedback group primarily described differences between their pre- and posttest responses in terms of (im)politeness, participants in the interface and comparison groups reported that their responses were largely the same.Item Integrating Naturalistic Digital Interaction in Foreign Language Programs(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Tudini, VincenzaInteraction by textual means, also known as chat, remains the most popular form of interaction for young people (Anderson & Jiang, 2018; Statista, 2022b). In foreign language programs, chat tools allow language learners to connect with multiple L1 speakers of the target language in a variety of technological-interactional configurations (Tudini, 2020). Access to age-peer L1 speakers of the target language is also known to be highly motivating, especially in one-to-one chat interactions (Tudini, 2010). Given these advantages, it is, therefore, appropriate to incorporate chat in foreign language programs, to adequately prepare learners to engage in this form of social interaction in the target language. This chapter presents one model for integration of chat interaction which was adopted at an Australian university to promote the inclusion of regular digital target language interaction practice through assessment. The language learner interconnectivity framework and support nodes presented here promote a balance between digital and face-to-face, and formal versus informal interaction contexts, to assist foreign language learners in consolidating their linguistic and pragmatic repertoires. This chapter focuses on affordances and constraints of real time chat for language learning. It then proposes examples of suitable assessment tasks for online text chat, mainly at the B1/B2 (CEFR) level, with brief consideration of suitably scaffolded chat assessment tasks for language learners at the A1/A2 level. Various chat tools are also examined to differentiate between those which are likely to promote form and accuracy rather than pragmatic and intercultural orientations. The chapter concludes with suggestions for further research on the use of chat in the language classroom.Item A Corpus-informed Approach to Multimodal Pragmatics: Insights from an Exploration of Requests in B2 Spoken Language on Zoom(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) O’Hanlon, GerardEmbodied actions have a key role to play alongside spoken interaction in pragmatic development when learning a second language. Multimodal corpora have much to offer researchers, language educators and learners within pragmatics. This methodological study outlines a multimodal corpus pragmatic approach to analyse a video-mediated dataset, gathered via the videoconferencing platform Zoom. Two English language learners at B2 level participated in the study. Elicitation tasks were employed through open roleplays centred on request sequences. The data was transcribed and then manually annotated in tiers with xml coding, first for spoken request sequences, then for embodied features relating to those requests (gesture, head movement, gaze patterns and facial expression). The corpus software AntConc and the audiovisual tool ELAN were used for transcription, annotation and recall. A function-to-form corpus pragmatic approach was used to investigate the spoken and embodied resources of the participants’ request sequence. Preliminary findings show that the participants augmented request sequences at key pragmatic junctures during video-mediated interaction with embodied resources. These include the use of paralanguage (e.g., exhaling, pauses, loudness, rapid speech), gesture (literal, deictic, stress and non-literal movements), gaze patterns and gaze aversion connected to politeness, and the use of face and eyes to convey hesitation in response.Item Pragmatic Development in Study Abroad: Recent Advances and New Directions(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Shively, RachelStudying 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.Item “Body for Talk”: Bringing the Pragmatics of Indigenous Contact Languages into the Classroom(National Foreign Language Resource Center, 2025) Steele, Carly; Yeatman, Bernadine; Oliver, RhondaMany 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.