33.238, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Pragmatics: Attardo, Pickering (2021)

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Subject: 33.238, Review: Applied Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Pragmatics: Attardo, Pickering (2021)

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Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2022 20:47:06
From: Susan Burt [smburt at ilstu.edu]
Subject: Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36759537


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2131.html

AUTHOR: Salvatore  Attardo
AUTHOR: Lucy  Pickering
TITLE: Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA
PUBLISHER: Wiley
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Susan Meredith Burt, Illinois State University

SUMMARY

The goal of this volume is to provide a course text for courses in pragmatics
and related aspects of teaching a new language, either English for speakers of
other languages, or other languages (usually “world languages”) for English
speakers. Attardo and Pickering are veteran instructors of such courses, and
cite the difficulty of finding suitable textbooks as part of their motivation
for producing the volume at hand. Their goal is a volume of sufficient breadth
and depth to give students, usually advanced undergraduates and graduates,
both a view of the range of pragmatic phenomena relevant to language
acquisition, as well as an understanding of how current views of those
phenomena came about. The completion of at least an introductory semester in
Linguistics will probably be necessary for users of this textbook.

Chapter 1, entitled “Meaning,” discusses semantics as both part of philosophy
and part of linguistics, and distinguishes between “word meaning” and speaker
meaning. Semiotics sees language as a “system of signs” (p. 4), and signs are
conventional. Other notions introduced in this chapter include extensional and
intensional semantics, propositions, truth-conditions, compositionality,
senses, encyclopedic information, ambiguity, and the very broad notions of
context and culture. The difficulties of establishing a semantics/pragmatics
boundary are discussed, as when, for example, pragmatic distinctions (such as
T and V pronouns) are encoded into a language’s grammar. 

Chapter 2 covers “The Language Teaching and Pragmatics Interface.” Here, the
authors pose questions (with brief answers) of the relevance and efficacy of
studying pragmatics and using it in second language instruction. The questions
include: Are there universals in pragmatics that learners can bring to their
L2? What do learners typically transfer from their L1? Can pragmatics be
taught through instruction? Is there a developmental path for pragmatics? Is
acquisition of pragmatics different for L2 child and adult learners? Does the
learner have to sound exactly like a native speaker? Can pragmatics be
assessed in the classroom? 

The third chapter, “Speech Acts,” focuses on those uses of language that are
not possible to evaluate in terms of truth conditions, and demonstrates the
relevance to SLA and TESOL of notions of illocutionary force, felicity
conditions, and indirect speech acts (to name just a few). While early
sections of the chapter cover Ordinary Language Philosophy, Austin (1962),
performativity, Searle (1969), “force,” speech act types and typologies,
conditions for felicitous speech act performance, and indirect speech acts,
the last sections cover speech acts as the “low hanging fruit” (p. 35) of
pragmatic instruction; frequently used formulas for speech act realization,
often decontextualized, are frequent in language instruction materials, but a
great deal of research, including with corpora, should guide us to more
nuanced approaches. This chapter ends with lesson plans for discussing
indirect complaints and advice giving. 

Chapter 4, “Grice’s Principle of Cooperation,” begins with dispelling frequent
misunderstandings of the Cooperative Principle (CP), i.e., that it claims that
humans are “nice,” and inclined to cooperate with each other, either that, or
that it is prescriptive about our interactions with each other. Rather, the CP
is presented as a statement of human rationality; “one does not cooperate out
of altruism, but out of self-interest” (p.43). The authors present an
appealing example: Attardo desires (deeply, and throughout several chapters) a
doughnut, and his desire will be fulfilled if he adheres to the CP in his
communications, but is likely to be thwarted if he deviates too widely from
it. Furthermore, either adhering to the CP or failing to adhere will trigger
implicatures, whose workings are outlined in the chapter, along with
inferences and presuppositions. Further sections of the chapter outline
developments, critiques, misunderstandings, and proposed revisions of Grice,
including Relevance Theory, and some of the applications of these to SLA.
Teaching materials for implicature are included. 

Chapter 5, “Politeness,” covers a great deal of ground, as might be expected,
including “first wave” or classical politeness theories, such as Lakoff
(1973), Brown and Levinson (1987), and Leech (1983). While these approaches
are grounded in Gricean pragmatics, “second wave,” “postmodern” or
“discursive” politeness approaches may focus on disagreements of
speakers/hearers within one culture on evaluations of the (im)politeness of an
act or utterance, issues of power and class, status, ritualization, and
problems with notions central to the classical theories such as face.
Questions of the cross-cultural applicability of classical theoretic notions
(such as the assumption that indirectness is more polite than directness)
characterize the second wave as well. Third wave approaches, following
Terkourafi (2005), see polite acts as expected, unmarked, and rational, if
appropriate to the larger frames (situations) and norms associated with the
setting. Questions of cultural differences and how to characterize and
understand them still remain, however, along with how native and new language
users may prefer and (mis)interpret strategies of usage. The chapter discusses
several ways in which instructional materials may be inadequate in their
treatment of politeness. 

The sixth chapter situates its topic, “Functional Sentence Perspective,” in
functionalist theories, and describes how the interplay of word order,
intonation, context, and semantics can communicate notions such as
definiteness and newness or known-ness of information. Differences in how
languages organize such information in sentences and in texts can be difficult
for learners to recognize and learn. 

Chapter 7, entitled “Stance, Deixis and Pragmatic Markers,” covers a large
number of phenomena which the authors characterize as metapragmatic, such as
sentence modality, deixis, pragmatic markers, “procedural information
markers,” connectors, and affective and epistemic stances. As these items tend
not to be “translatable,” non-native speakers may under-utilize them until
they gain proficiency; in addition, these things tend to be under-taught. 

The eighth chapter focuses on an era, a milieu, and the related approaches to
linguistic and social interaction that arose there. Entitled “Interactional
Sociolinguistics,” the chapter also discusses ethnomethodology, social
constructivism, discourse analysis, frame analysis, conversational analysis,
communicative competence, speech events, and activity types. Each of these
approaches points towards the possibilities that different languages and
cultures will have different interpretive conventions, with interactants
frequently unaware of the differences, and thus unprepared for the
miscommunication that can result. This chapter’s section of applications for
the classroom discusses role-plays as accessible teaching techniques. 

Chapter 9 outlines research designs and methods in second-language pragmatics
research, and the advantages and drawbacks of each, including varieties of
discourse completion tests/questionnaires (DCTs/DCQs), field notes, natural
conversation data, the observation of oft-repeated situation types, such as
job or intake interviews, role plays, diary studies (and other methods) in
study abroad situations, service encounters, computer-mediated communication,
the use of corpora, action research, and student/learner-collected research. 

Chapter 10, on “Metapragmatics,” is similarly wide-ranging, covering
metalanguage, metadiscourse, social deixis, semiotics-in-sociolingusitics, and
ideologies of language. The topic of metapragmatics brings us back to the
appealing example from Chapter 4: Attardo is given a doughnut; his reaction is
polite, but unenthusiastic, prompting Pickering to ask “What’s wrong?” as she
is “paying attention to [his] very act of speaking.” (p. 167) Metadiscourse,
on the other hand, can be seen as “audience management” (p. 169), textual
mechanisms for expressing stance or strengthening the coherence,
intelligibility or persuasiveness of the text. In the discussion of
indexicality and enregisterment, metapragmatics emerges as (following
Verschueren) “the reflexive awareness of language use” (p. 174), while
language ideologies, sets of beliefs about language, are characterized as a
lack of awareness (p. 175), whose effects can be harmful. The authors end this
chapter with a caveat that these developments in pragmatics may be too recent
to have yet developed obvious applications to second language acquisition, but
they do provide a list of ideological statements (p. 180) whose relevance to
second language acquisition and teaching is apparent; student discussion of
these statements would be of clear benefit to future language teachers. 

The last chapter, “Frontier,” covers a variety of topics which can be
predicted to affect second-language pragmatics as the field continues to
develop: the pragmatics of English as a Lingua Franca, Multilingualism,
Embodied Cognition, Complexity Theory, Cyberpragmatics, and Neuropragmatics. 

EVALUATION

The textbook ranges broadly across the field of pragmatics, as the summary of
coverage shows. This has advantages in that an instructor can introduce
students to a great many topics and approaches which are likely to get short
shrift or no shrift at all in the language textbooks available to learners.
That there are more such topics than some instructors may be able to cover in
a semester means that instructors may want or need to choose chapters to omit
or to present in a rearranged order. In any case, instructors will probably
want to select full journal articles or chapters from among those cited in the
text to assign students to read, to give depth to the broad yet detailed
overview presented here. Alternatively, the authors themselves might consider
assembling a volume of readings to accompany this textbook. Instructors will
need to make their own pedagogical adjustments to accommodate their
populations of students, but Attardo and Pickering have given us a textbook
more than equal to the task at hand.

REFERENCES

Austin, J.L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.

Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in
language usage. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 

Lakoff, Robin Tolmach. 1973. The logic of politeness, or minding your p’s and
q’s. In C. Corum, T. Smith-Stark, and A. Weiser (eds.), Papers from the Ninth
Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, pp.292-305. Chicago:
University of Chicago Department of Linguistics. 

Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London, New York: Longmans.

Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language.
Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 

Terkourafi, Marina. 2005. An argument for a frame-based approach to
politeness: Evidence from the use of the imperative in Cypriot Greek.  In
Lakoff, R.T., and S. Ide (eds.) Broadening the Horizon of Linguistic
Politeness, pp. 99-116. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Susan Meredith Burt is Professor Emerita at Illinois State University, where
one of her favorite teaching assignments was the course in ''Cross-Cultural
Issues in TESOL,'' for which she would have been delighted to use this
textbook. She holds a B.A. with Honors in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College,
and M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from University of Illinois.





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