Eva Alcón

The present study examines whether task supported language teaching (TSLT) has an impact on L2 English learners’ use and knowledge of request mitigators, assessing the impact of student-students vs. teacher-students interactions on students’ attention to pragmatics during task-based interaction. Forty-eight students of English at a Spanish university participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: the student-students interaction group (N = 16), the teacher-students interaction group (N = 16), and the control group (N = 16).

This study investigates pragmatic development in the English-medium instruction (EMI) setting of the Valencian Community in Spain. More specifically, the study examines whether the intensity of EMI influences functional adequacy (FA) in second language (L2) writing. Participants were 102 EMI learners, each of whom wrote three motivation letters over one academic year in English. The rating scales designed by Kuiken and Vedder (2017) were used to examine the FA of the written texts in terms of cohesion, coherence, task requirements, content, and comprehensibility.

Research has shown that being multilingual is a valuable asset for learning pragmatics. By adopting a multilingual turn perspective, this study investigates patterns of pragmatic development in the multilingual classroom setting of the Valencian Community in Spain, where English, Catalan and Spanish coexist. Participants were 313 learners of English and 15 teachers. Each learner wrote three argumentative essays over one academic year in three languages: English, Catalan and Spanish.

The present study investigates second language (L2) learners' pragmatic development during study abroad (SA) programs by focusing on the recognition of pragmatic routines, and how sociocultural adaptation and intensity of interaction influence pragmatic gains. It is a longitudinal investigation that employed a mixed-method approach. Thirty-one Brazilian students in their first semester of study in a US university completed a pretest and posttest version of a sociocultural adaptation questionnaire, a language contact survey, and a routine recognition test.

La importància d’aspectes discursius en l’ensenyament i aprenentatge de segones llengües s’ha fet palesa en les últimes dècades, sobretot a partir de la presència de l’enfocament comunicatiu en l’ensenyament. Com a conseqüència d’aquesta visió, diversos estudis s’han dut a terme tot considerant el desenvolupament i la promoció de la competència comunicativa dels aprenents.

Over the last few years, research has explored the reliability and feasibility of the functional dimension for the assessment of writing proficiency (Kuiken & Vedder, 2016; Palloti, 2009). More recently, studies have analyzed the effectiveness of different learning environments, such as the study abroad (SA) and English-medium instruction (EMI), in increasing language proficiency (Ament & Pérez-Vidal, 2015; Humphreys & Mousavi, 2010; Storch & Hill, 2008; Taguchi, 2011).

The present study explores the role of three individual variables, namely proficiency, cultural background, and attitude towards the target-language (TL) culture, on learners’ recognition and production of pragmatic routines. Eighty-seven international students in their first semester of study in a US university completed a vocabulary knowledge scale (VKS) and a written discourse-completion task (DCT) that measured their knowledge of pragmatic routines. Additionally, they answered a series of open-ended questions to determine their attitude towards the TL culture.