This talk provides an overview and illustration of tasks and activities used for data collection in interlanguage pragmatics. Data collection techniques are evaluated on a range of features, including, but not limited to, authenticity and consequentiality, modality (oral-for-oral, written-for-written, and written-for-oral data), planning time and access to conscious knowledge, and interactivity. The costs and benefits of the tasks are discussed and the possible influence on reported findings is evaluated.

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Acquisitional research in L2 pragmatics investigates two essential issues: changes within the L2 pragmatics systems and influences on the systems (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999). These issues can be best examined through the lens of longitudinal research, which by design allows us to observe how L2 learners change over time and helps establish causal relationships between change and time. Recognizing this benefit, the body of longitudinal studies has expanded in the past decade: there were only 9 longitudinal studies in Kasper & Rose's review (1999), while the number increased to 23 in Taguchi's (2012) recent review. Although these studies have illustrated changes in L2 pragmatic competence through a systematic data collection in specific time intervals, not all studies have documented influences on the changing pragmatic systems. Thus, the studies are largely descriptive rather than explanatory: they are limited with explanations as how and why those changes occurred. This presentation discusses mixed methods research as a promising approach to describing and explaining changes in the L2 pragmatics systems. By integrating quantitative and qualitative data in a single study, mixed methods can reveal patterns of change over time, and at the same time, help us see individual and contextual factors contributing to the observed patterns. Using existing L2 pragmatics studies as examples, I will illustrate the strengths of mixed methods approach in acquisitional pragmatics research. My talk will focus on what mixed methods can reveal and how they contribute to a fuller understanding of pragmatic development.

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Data for the present study is drawn from Language LINC, a corpus of telecollaborative eTandem interactions between German learners of English and Irish English learners of German. The eTandem meetings that comprise this corpus of recordings were centred on tasks to be completed for the students' respective language classes. The corpus is supplemented with retrospective questionnaires for each Skype meeting and language contact questionnaires. The study investigates how learners and native speakers orient to a pre-specified topic in one particular task set for the English portion of an eTandem meeting. As the task prescribes the topic, it imposes constraints on the students' interactions requiring them to extend talk on this topic for a length of time. The present analysis will focus on questions within the prescribed task topic and how they are used as a resource to confront the interactional problem of staying on the task topic. Questions are used in two distinct ways: to elaborate on the immediately prior talk and to move, sometimes abruptly, away from the immediately prior talk yet stay on task. Substantial individual differences between students' use of questions as a topic extending resource are further investigated with reference to the supplementary language contact and retrospective questionnaires.

With reference to the above analyses, the present paper will also detail the data treatment and analysis procedures employed. Methodologically, tools from conversation analysis (CA) are applied in a sequentially sensitive analysis of the collection of questions within detailed CA transcripts. In addition to outlining the procedures for the present analysis, a broader consideration of the realities of processing naturalistic discourse data will be presented. At the forefront of this discussion will be the interplay between inductive and deductive approaches to discourse data. The difficulty in implementing a deductive approach to the present data set has implications for the design of supplementary questionnaires and their later applicability. An inductive approach has proven more fruitful, but the challenges of coding and categorising discourse data to enable comparisons between speakers are tenacious. Despite these challenges, analyses of such data opens up a myriad of potential insights into the demonstrated interactional competencies and interactional struggles of second language learners and their interlocutors.

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In this presentation I will first describe and explain the advantages and problems of authentic and elicited data, of qualitative and quantitative research methods, and then plead for a mixed approach whenever feasible. I will illustrate this with a number of examples from my own research in the areas of intercultural pragmatics and translation.

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When engaged in interaction, we routinely assess one another as communication participants. That is, we react cognitively, emotionally and with our actions to incoming discourse. Our assessment of the interactional situation may be biased (e.g. subjective), inaccurate (e.g. based on incomplete data) and even unfair (e.g. selfish, mean), but is unlikely to be random. It relates to our sociopragmatic competence, which includes awareness of our motivations, expectations, norms and values, sensitivity to our rights and duties relative to our interlocutors, but also interest in or knowledge about the other party's options, constraints, needs and goals. It is usually this type of competence that makes or breaks communication.

If communication is less than comfortable or effective, it is usually because we take it for granted that our viewpoint and attitude are the only background parameters relevant to the communicative situation at hand. We are more likely to fail in this respect when we interact in an unfamiliar situation (e.g. with a superior), language variety (e.g. a specialized register) and/or cultural context (e.g. within a new community of practice). This applies in particular to an L2 context of communication.

Indeed, L2 speakers are unlikely to know what contextual elements to pay attention to in the shaping of their discourse, or to know why this is important. To raise L2 speakers' awareness of sociopragmatic issues, it is advisable to adopt a mixed-methods approach, which draws on three types of sources: the L2 speaker's competence about their L1 and L2 discourse, the teacher's analysis of their L2 discourse, and the L1 interlocutor's interpretation of and reaction to their L2 discourse.

First, it is useful to have L2 speakers reflect on their discourse choices with reference to their own and their interlocutors' circumstances (e.g. their perceived or likely beliefs, purposes, obstacles) so as to detect possible deficiencies and inaccuracies in their understanding of the communicative situation. Second, it is important to provide L2 speakers with comments on aspects of their discourse which they may be hardly aware of (e.g. sequencing of information units; level of detail), which collectively contribute to the understandability and appropriateness of their speech/writing. Third, it is crucial to sensitize L2 speakers to the socio-actional power of their discourse, by showing them that the content and form of their language output directly affects how their interlocutors react to and feel about them.

I will discuss the above points with reference to written speech acts (offers, apologies, requests and thanks) produced by L1 and L2 English speakers, as well as comments about the L2 speakers' speech acts elicited from L1 English speakers. First, L2 speakers can be trained to think about the appropriateness of their discourse in-the-making by inviting them to consider situational elements relevant to the interlocutor (e.g. for requests: degree of request legitimacy, possible obstacle to compliance, urgency of compliance; for offers: the other party's ability/willingness to accept the offer; negotiability of terms in the delivery of the offered item; suitability of the offered item). Second, L2 speakers can activate and develop their communicative skills by focusing their attention on facets of their discourse that the teacher can provide expert feedback on (e.g. cohesion and coherence; relevance of content; naturalness of encoding; lexico-grammatical accuracy), and which have a bearing on the general acceptability of their discourse (e.g. in terms of the amount of processing effort required of the addressee). Third, L2 speakers can be shown what cognitive, emotional and practical effects their discourse may have on L1 speakers that do not assess them as language learners but rather regard them as interactants who are responsible for their actions (with regard to such criteria as plausibility, agreeability, sense-making capacity, emotionality, reasonableness).

The classroom may provide a sheltered environment in which to gradually hone one's communicative-interactional skills, and be sensitized to the connections between one's language behaviour and the appropriateness of the interactions in which that behaviour is displayed. It is therefore advisable to have L2 speakers make explicit the reasons and goals behind their discursive-interactional practices. Such information will sensitize them to the multi-facetedness of interaction, may provide insights into their discourse as process, and is likely to reveal their level of L1 sociopragmatic competence, which might not be fully developed. Indeed, if L2 speakers are trained to think ahead about the overall acceptability and relevance of their discourse to the situational context, the plausible effectiveness and agreeability of their interactional practices, and the envisaged short- and long-term effects of these on the interlocutor, they will enhance their ability to socially adjust to ever-changing communicative situations in in unsupervised, real-life interactions.

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