Teaching L2 pragmatics : from an empirical study to recommendations for pedagogical practice

Abstract

Various studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of teaching L2 pragmatics in the past 20 years. An extensive meta-analysis on instructed L2 pragmatics studies conducted by Jeon and Kaya (2006, 180) reveals that most of these studies deal with participants whose L1 is an Asian language, with a very few studies focusing on participants whose L1 is a European language besides English. The vast majority of studies employ university students (e.g., Liddicoat and Crozet 2001; Koike and Pearson 2005; Codina Espurz 2008; Félix-Brasdefer 2008b), who are probably easier to recruit. The same views are shared a couple of years later by Alcón-Soler and Martínez-Flor (2008, 7), who state that the most common characteristics of learners taking part in these studies are that they have English or Japanese as first language and that the university learning context is the main research setting. The range of targeted languages is also quite narrow, with a concentration of research interest in English and only more recently in other European languages (e.g., Félix-Brasdefer 2008a, 2008b for Spanish).