Assessing Development of Meta-Pragmatic Awareness in Study Abroad.

By C. Kinginger, Kathleen Farrell. 2004

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A hallmark of advanced language competence is the ability to understand the meaning of linguistic variation in a range of different socio-pragmatic contexts. In a summary of the state-of-the-art in research on language learning during study abroad, Freed (1995) highlighted the significance of these learners’ “highly-developed metacognitive awareness of sociolinguistic differences and potentially conflicting pragmatic demands”(p. 27). Thus it would appear that the study abroad context may complement classroom foreign language learning as students are socialized into language use, linking linguistic and pragmatic features of the languages they are learning. The range of social meanings of particular features of the language are potentially clarified and linked to sociocognitive scripts as the learners participate in a range of speech events and develop communicative repertoires. Many researchers have examined study abroad participants’ performance in relation to variable features of second languages, studying the use of speech acts (Barron, 2002; Hoffman-Hicks, 2001; Lafford, 1995; Matsumura, 2001), the manipulation of stylistic variants (Dewaele & Regan, 2002; Regan, 1995), or the appearance of colloquial lexis in learners’ speech (Dewaele & Regan, 2001). The general findings of this research suggest that while the study abroad context offers potential for the development of pragmatic competence, second language learners do not perform according to native speaker norms. Many learners tend to avoid using forms perceived as nonstandard or informal, even when these forms are known to the learners. The status of “learner” or of “non-native” language user tends to convey with it an attitude of caution when it comes to employing the full range of available second language resources. Other learners do employ a variety of forms but match them to contexts in

Subfields: Language and Linguistics

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In Language and Linguistics

  1. Jean–Marc Dewaele
  2. Naoko Taguchi
  3. Chengchen Li
  4. P. Macintyre
  5. Livia Dewaele
  6. Xian Zhang
  7. Chunmei Pan
  8. Lawrence Jun Zhang

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