Exploring Textual Pragmatic Markers in a Multilingual Classroom Context

Researchers in the Multilingual Turn(see Ortega 2014) have emphasised that multilingual learners possess valuable resources for additional language development (Cook 2013a; 2013b). In spite of this, little research on interlanguage pragmatics has taken into account the language background of the participants. In this chapter, we provide evidence for the relationships between languages in the learners’ linguistic repertoire, which may reveal the pedagogical potential that learners bring to the language classroom in multilingual classroom settings. With this aim, 313 secondary school learners of English were asked to complete pragmatics-focused tasks in the languages present in their educational context (i.e. English, Catalan, and Spanish) during regular classes. The tasks were designed to elicit a pragmatic target that was relevant in the context under study, that of textual pragmatic markers (Hyland 2005). Additional information on learners’ awareness of textual pragmatic markers in the three languages was also obtained by means of learners’ guided diaries and teachers’ interviews. The analysis shows statistically significant correlations between each pair of languages, suggesting that learners’ pragmatic multicompetence is related in the three languages. Pedagogical insights are suggested for teaching pragmatics in multilingual contexts.