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This paper reports on the second phase of a cross-sectional study of pragmatic development in Hong Kong. The first phase (Rose, 2000) involved primary school students ages 7, 9 and 11. Participants in the present study were secondary school students in Forms 2, 4, and 6 (ages 13, 15 and 17). A questionnaire was designed to elicit requests, with scenarios derived through exemplar generation and variable values arrived at through two rounds of metapragmatic assessment. The variable values were therefore determined by the participants, not the researcher. The questionnaire was administered in Chinese, with participants instructed to record their responses in English using a recording device provided to them. Data were transcribed and analyzed by the author and a research assistant using the coding categories for requests developed in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). Results indicated ample evidence of pragmalinguistic development, particularly in what appeared to be the onset of pragmatic expansion in the Form 6 group's wider range of modals and the appearance of supportive moves. However, there was little evidence of sociopragmatic development, other than the increased occurrence of please in requests to higher status hearers.

Despite the fact that research on the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics is a subset of the literature on instructed second language acquisition, pragmatics as a learning target does not figure prominently in most surveys of this area. This is due partly to the fact that instructional effects research in second language acquisition has only recently come into its own and still has a long way to go [Norris, J., Ortega, L., 2000. Effectiveness of L2 instruction: a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis. Language Learning 50, 417–528], but also is the result of a relative neglect of pragmatics in second language acquisition in general. Nevertheless, arguments have been put forward for the necessity of instruction in pragmatics [Bardovi-Harlig, K., 2001. Evaluating the empirical evidence: grounds for instruction in pragmatics? In: Rose, K.R., Kasper, G. (Eds.), Pragmatics in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 13–32], and there is now a growing body of research which addresses this issue [ Kasper, G., Rose, K.R., 2002. Pragmatic development in a second language. Blackwell, Mahwah, NJ. (Also Language Learning: Supplement 1, 52) ]. This paper will review the literature on the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics by first considering the learning targets, learner characteristics and learning contexts represented in the studies done to date. Following this, are three central issues which occupy much of the literature: the teachability of pragmatics, the relative benefits of instruction versus exposure, and whether different approaches to instruction yield different results.

This paper reports the results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of pragmatic development among three groups of primary school students in Hong Kong who completed a cartoon oral production task (COPT) designed to elicit requests, apologies, and compliment responses. The first two of these speech acts are among the most well represented in the pragmatics literature and are also included in the Hong Kong English language syllabus for primary schools. The latter has also been studied extensively but is not part of the syllabus. Data was collected in Cantonese using the same instrument. Although a number of developmental patterns are revealed—particularly in choice of request strategy, frequency of supportive moves, and use of adjuncts with apologies and compliment responses—there is little evidence of sensitivity to situational variation or pragmatic transfer from Cantonese. This study adds to the small, but growing, body of research on pragmatic development in a second language.

Pragmatics has two roles in SLA: It acts as a constraint on linguistic forms and their acquisition, and it represents a type of communicative knowledge and object of L2 learning in its own right. The first role of pragmatics is evident in functionalist (Tomlin 1990) and interactionist (Long 1996) views of SLA. The second role puts pragmatics on a par with morphosyntax, lexis, and phonology in that inquiry focuses on learners' knowledge, use, and acquisition of L2 pragmatics. It is the latter sense of “pragmatics and SLA” that is the focus of this paper. In analogy with other areas of specialization within SLA—interlanguage syntax, interlanguage lexis, and so forth—the study of nonnative speakers' use and acquisition of L2 pragmatic knowledge is referred to as interlanguage pragmatics.

Despite a heavy emphasis on pragmatics since the advent of communicative language teaching some 20 years ago, trainers of nonnative‐speaking (NNS) language teachers who wish to incorporate pragmatics in their teacher training programmes still find little practical help from existing research. While research in pragmatics offers a number of potential candidates for the construction of theoretical frameworks for language use and the definition of core concepts such as pragmatic competence, we still lack a coherent theory of language use and a comprehensive and reliable account of what constitutes pragmatic competence. The result of this is that the prevailing approach to developing pragmatic competence in the classroom is based largely on native‐speaker (NS) intuitions concerning their own language use. Given this state of affairs, of particular interest in the teaching of language use is the education of NNS teachers. This paper reviews some of the problems relevant to the teaching of language use and disc...

Speech act theory has greatly influenced both the study and teaching of language use; however, given its philosophical roots, it has been short on empirical support. In recent years numerous speech act studies have been conducted. In these studies, though, there has been little discussion of research methodology, specifically data collection techniques. This paper reports the results of a study (based on Rose, 1994), which addresses methodological validation in speech act research. We administered discourse-completion tests (DCTs) and multiple-choice questionnaires (MCQs), designed to elicit requests, to two groups of 36 Japanese female undergraduates. As with Rose (1994), there were significant differences in most situations (11 of 12), with those completing the MCQ choosing to opt out or hint more frequently than those completing the DCT. These results seem to indicate some serious problems with DCTs, which need to be addressed if they are to be used in speech act studies.

Cet article relate les resultats de deux etudes basees sur des questionnaires sur les actes de parole dans des contextes non occidentaux. L'A. propose une analyse des tests utilises et une reflexion sur la methodologie

Cooperative Learning (CL) has been adopted in many countries in recent years. This pilot study looked at a one-year investigation into the teaching of English in Hong Kong secondary school classrooms. The teachers were given support to assist them in designing and carrying out group learning activities. These were organized so that learning was dependent on the socially structured exchange of information between learners in the groups. The data indicated that there were no significant differences in the per formance of the experimental group. However, what did become clear were the difficulties of transferring laboratory-based studies of task performance to the realities of the curriculum-in-action in normal classroom conditions.

Pragmatics in Language Teaching examines the acquisition of language use in social contexts in second and foreign language classrooms. Included are 2 state-of-the-art survey chapters, and 11 chapters reporting the results of empirical research. The empirical studies cover three areas: incidental acquisition of pragmatics in instructed contexts, the effects of instruction in pragmatics, and the assessment of pragmatics ability. The studies address a number of areas in pragmatics, from speech acts and discourse markers to conversational routines and address terms, and represent a range of target languages and contexts in the United States, Asia, and Europe.