Alicia Martínez-Flor

Co-authored with Júlia Barón (Universitat de Barcelona) and M. Luz Celaya (Universitat de Barcelona).

Corrective feedback (CF) has been regarded as a complex phenomenon with cognitive, social and psychological dimensions influencing its effectiveness for language development. Despite the extensive research conducted on its impact on morphosyntactic aspects of the language, CF on pragmatic aspects has received scant attention. One possible reason may be related to the potential challenges that pragmatics itself represents as it is defined by choice. Thus, it is important to examine teachers’ beliefs towards the five key pedagogical decisions that influence the provision of CF (i.e.

*Non-affiliated co-authors: Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) & Júlia Barón (Universitat de Barcelona)

*Non-affiliated co-editors: Ariadna Sánchez-Hernández (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) & Júlia Barón (Universitat de Barcelona)

Refusals are complex face-threatening speech acts whose appropriate performance requires not only lengthy sequences of negotiation and cooperative achievements, but also face-saving strategies to accommodate the disruptive nature of the act (Gass & Houck 1999). Also, since they have a face threatening nature, they are subject to cultural variations. Consequently, care must be taken in the choice of refusal strategies.

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the majority of whom are non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. While such reality is widely acknowledged, few attempts have been made to teach pragmatic competence in EIL.

Film-based dialogues have been praised in the current work on pragmatics as a potentially useful source that can enhance learners’ (meta)pragmatic awareness of the pragmatic phenomena in actual communicative events. Following this view, this paper first outlines the concept of (meta)pragmatic awareness and explains, drawing on McConachy and Spencer-Oatey (2020), the different theoretical perspectives examining the role that awareness plays in developing learners’ pragmatic ability.

Nowadays, English has been adopted as an international language that speakers from distinct linguacultural backgrounds use to achieve any communicative goal. An important part of this communicative process is undoubtedly the mastery of pragmatic competence. More specifically, second language pragmatics needs to respond to the challenges of globalization. To that end, it is essential that teachers become aware of the importance of developing their learners’ pragmatic competence so that they can successfully communicate in diverse English as an international language interactions.

Speech acts are one of the most widely examined pragmatic features that second and foreign language (L2/FL) learners need to master in order to communicate appropriately in the target language. Without a proper knowledge of how to use and understand a particular speech act that is appropriate to the contextual and cultural parameters of a specific situation, L2/FL learners may run the risk of being perceived as rude and/or impolite.

Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters.