Pilar Safont

The present paper aims to contribute to research on classroom discourse and pragmatic behaviour from a multilingual viewpoint (Aronin, 2015). Studies on this issue have accounted for the effect of ESL vs EFL settings (Schauer, 2007), EFL versus CLIL settings (Nashaat-Sobhy, 2018), and L3 contexts (Portolés, 2015). The extent to which CLIL contexts may promote pragmatic development is still unknown (Tateyama, 2019). Similarly, findings in L3 educational settings reveal the peculiarities of multilingual pragmatics (Martin-Laguna, 2020) that point out the need for further analysis.

The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students’ email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17(1), 60–80], requests tend to be more direct and they may not match with the degree of imposition or social distance involved. Students’ lack of netiquette and the lack of physical presence on the Internet may influence their pragmatic behaviour.

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these aspects in mind, this paper focuses on the pragmatic awareness of multilingual learners while they are performing a collaborative writing task in three different languages, namely those of Catalan, Spanish, and English.

Multilingualism in the world is the norm and the classrooms are no exception. The dynamic and flexible practices of multilingual teachers and learners in the classroom are referred to as translanguaging . As shown in the literature on the topic, translanguaging discourse simply exists in classrooms. It is the means of communication employed by multilingual learners in multilingual learning settings. However, research on classroom pragmatics has adopted a monolingual perspective, and the need to examine multilingual learners and teachers from a multilingual viewpoint has been raised.

Studies on discourse and language learning originated in the field of general education and they focused on first language learning environments. However, since 1980s research on discourse and language learning broadened the scope of investigation to respond to second and foreign language environments. Recently, the emergence of new language learning contexts such as computer mediated communication, multilingual settings or content and language integrated contexts requires further research that focuses on discourse and language learning.

For the last 20 years a considerable amount of studies have examined L2 pragmatic production in classroom discourse (see Bardovi-Harlig, 2013, for a review). Nevertheless, most research to date still ignores the multilingual background of language learners. Research on classroom pragmatics from a multilingual perspective is still scant but findings point to the peculiarities of L3 pragmatic production and development (Alcón, 2013; Portolés, 2015; Safont & Portolés, 2015).