Sofía Martín-Laguna

The role of metadiscourse in the attainment of persuasion in any type of human interaction is indisputable. In multilingual settings, learners need to develop metadiscourse knowledge in several languages at the same time. This chapter examines the learning trajectories of two sub-categories of interpersonal metadiscourse markers, i.e., attitude markers and hedges, by multilingual learners in the three languages in which they are instructed at school (i.e., Spanish, Catalan, and English).

In the Valencian Community in Spain, the coexistence of Spanish and Catalan as co-official languages and English as a foreign language, which is learned as a third language (L3), shapes a unique multilingual setting. This study examined the extent to which multilingual learners’ use of two interpersonal pragmatic markers (PMs), i.e., hedges (e.g., I believe) and attitude markers (e.g., fortunately), is related across languages and whether the relationship changes over time. Participants were 313 Spanish-Catalan bilingual high school learners of L3 English.

Cross-linguistic influence and the fluent alternation of several languages have been the focus of interest of recent research (García, 2009; Muñoz, 2007; Safont, 2001). The present study analyzes cross-linguistic influence and language switches in the oral production of English by 25 Catalan-Spanish bilingual children in a Spanish primary school. With that aim, we first identify the most common types of code-switch and their function in an EFL classroom by using Williams and Hammarberg’s (1998) categorization of code-switches.

The purpose of this study is to examine learners’ strategies to refuse during refusal focused tasks and to explore whether learners’ proficiency and type of interlocutor (L-L vs. T-L) influence learners’ performance of that speech act. Twenty-two secondary school learners of English at two proficiency levels interacted with peers and teachers during the performance of a set of role play situations to elicit refusals. Our data offer evidence that there are differences in learners’ use of refusals depending on their proficiency level and the interlocutor.

Scholars have emphasized the importance of interaction in the process of SLA (see García Mayo and Alcón 2013 for a review). Even though instructional language settings have been described as impoverished settings where opportunities for pragmatic learning are scarce (Kasper 1997), very few studies have analysed the benefits of interaction for pragmatic learning (Alcón 2002; Martín-Laguna and Alcón 2012). Therefore, the focus of this paper is to explore whether different types of interlocutor provide opportunities for pragmatic learning during the performance of a focused task.

The present study analyses teenage students’ use of e-mail requests and students’ and teachers’ perception of e-mail politeness during academic cyber-consultation. The data for this study come from a corpus of e-mails that 59 teenagers − 29 British English Speakers (BES), and 30 International English speakers (IES) − following the international Baccalaureate curriculum sent to their learning mentors. The e-mail requests were analyzed with regard to level of directness, and amount and type of mitigation.

This study explores to what extent multilingual learners’ production of metadiscourse markers (MMs) may be related in three languages present in their school curriculum, and how instructional input influences their choices and production of accurate forms. Twenty-two secondary school students wrote opinion essays in English, Catalan, and Spanish. MM use was analysed following Hyland’s (2000) classification. Our results showed that the same categories of MMs were used in the three languages, although there was more variety in Catalan and Spanish.

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.

This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective, taking into account their linguistic repertoire and using ecologically valid classroom writing tasks in a longitudinal study.