Pragmatics in Language Teaching

This book examines the acquisition of language use in social contexts in second and foreign language classrooms. Included are 2 state-of-the-art survey chapters, and 11 chapters reporting the results of empirical research, all written especially for this collection. The empirical studies cover three areas: incidental acquisition of pragmatics in instructed contexts, the effects of instruction in pragmatics, and the assessment of pragmatics ability. The studies address a number of areas in pragmatics, from speech acts and discourse markers to conversational routines and address terms, and represent a range of target languages and contexts in the United States, Asia, and Europe. A wide array of research methodologies are also employed, from questionnaires to in-depth interviews and conversation analysis. The first collection of its kind, Pragmatics in Language Teaching offers a comprehensive and essential introduction to a rapidly growing area, and should be of interest to researchers, graduate students, and language teachers.