Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (1999) 19, 81–104. Printed in the USA.

Copyright © 1999 Cambridge University Press 0267-1905/99 $9.50

PRAGMATICS AND SLA

Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose

INTRODUCTION

Pragmatics has two roles in SLA: It acts as a constraint on linguistic forms

and their acquisition, and it represents a type of communicative knowledge and
object of L2 learning in its own right. The first role of pragmatics is evident in
functionalist (Tomlin 1990) and interactionist (Long 1996) views of SLA. The
second role puts pragmatics on a par with morphosyntax, lexis, and phonology in
that inquiry focuses on learners’ knowledge, use, and acquisition of L2 pragmatics.
It is the latter sense of ‘pragmatics and SLA’ that is the focus of this paper. In
analogy with other areas of specialization within SLA—interlanguage syntax,
interlanguage lexis, and so forth—the study of nonnative speakers’ use and
acquisition of L2 pragmatic knowledge is referred to as interlanguage pragmatics.

A substantial body of research on interlanguage pragmatics now exists (see

Ellis 1994, Kasper 1998), but the great majority of studies focuses on L2 use rather
than development. Topics investigated in these studies include the following:

1. The perception and comprehension of illocutionary force and politeness;

2. The production of linguistic action;
3. The impact of context variables on choices of conventions of means
(semantic formulae or realization strategies) and form (linguistic material
used to implement strategic options);
4. Discourse sequencing and conversational management;
5. Pragmatic success and failure;
6. The joint negotiation of illocutionary, referential, and relational goals in
interpersonal encounters and institutional settings.

These topics have been borrowed from studies of native speakers’ linguistic actions
and interactions, conducted mostly in the disciplinary traditions of empirical
pragmatics, especially studies of speech acts, crosscultural pragmatics, and

81
82 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

interactional sociolinguistics, none of which has an immediate link to SLA. The

one single SLA issue that has consistently been addressed in interlanguage
pragmatic research is pragmatic transfer.

Because interlanguage pragmatics has been sociolinguistic rather than

psycholinguistic in its orientation, processing issues have not received much
attention. The topic that has been examined most from a processing perspective is
pragmatic comprehension, where theory and methodology have been inspired by
work in psycholinguistics rather than descriptive pragmatics. (See Takahashi and
Roitblat 1994 for review and a key study.) Very little is known about the planning
and monitoring processes involved in nonnative speakers’ production of linguistic
action; the few available studies are reviewed by Cohen (1996).

This paper will review interlanguage pragmatics studies with a focus on

learning in a somewhat liberal sense: In addition to studies with an explicit focus on
development, we will also consider investigations that examine the effect of
proficiency as an independent variable on pragmatic performance. The broader
scope is indicated since a good number of studies fall into the latter category.
Studies will be classified and discussed according to a major design feature,
whether a study is cross-sectional versus longitudinal. We will then consider the
relationship between pragmatic transfer and development on the one hand and
instructed learning of L2 pragmatics on the other.

CROSS-SECTIONAL STUDIES

Developmental studies using pseudo-longitudinal designs are a common

form of cross-sectional studies and they are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Cross-sectional interlanguage pragmatic studies

Study Focus L1/L2 Subjects (n) Data

Scarcella invitation Arabic / beginning (10) roleplay
1979 request English advanced (10)
NS Engl. (6)
Olshtain appropriateness various/ LOR: rating scale
& Blum- of request & Hebrew >2 yrs (36)
Kulka apology <2>10 yrs (44)
1985 strategies <10 yrs (44)
NS Hebrew (160)
Blum- request English/ low interm. (80) DCT
Kulka & Hebrew high interm. (80)
Olshtain adv. (80)
1986 NS Hebrew (172)
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 83

Takahashi refusal Japanese/ undergrad. (20) DCT

& Beebe English grad. (20)
1987 NS Japan. (20)
NS Engl. (20)
Trosborg apology Danish/ high beginn. (NR) roleplay
1987 English intermed. (NR)
adv. (NR)
NS Danish (NR)
NS Engl. (NR)
Takahashi request Japanese/ intermed. (8) roleplay
& DuFon English adv. (8)
1989
Omar greeting English/ beginning (16) DCT
1991 Kiswahili int.-adv. (16)
Svanes request various/ beginning DCT
1992 Norwegian intermed.
adv.
Kerekes assessment of various/ low (28) rating scale
1992 assertiveness English intermed. (59)
high (19)
NS Engl. (34)
Robinson refusal Japanese/ intermed. (6) DCT
1992 English adv. (6) verbal
protocol
Trosborg apology Danish/ high beginn. (NR) roleplay
1995 request English intermed. (NR)
complaint adv. (NR)
NS Danish (NR)
NS Engl. (NR)
Houck & refusal Japanese/ lower (4) roleplay
Gass English higher (4)
1996
Koike comprehension English/ year 1 (46) video-
1996 of illocutionary Spanish year 2 (34) prompted
force adv. (34) response
rating scale
Maeshiba apology Japanese/ interm. (30) DCT
et al. English adv. (30) rating scale
1996 NS Japan. (30)
NS Engl. (30)
Takahashi transferability of Japanese/ low (65) rating scale
1996 request English high (77)
strategies
84 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

Hill 1997 request Japanese/ low (20) DCT

English intermed. (20)
advanced (20)
NS Engl. (20)
Hassall request English/ low (6) roleplay
1997 Bahasa middle (15) rating scale
Indonesia high (2)
NS BI (18)
Bardovi- pragmatic vs. diverse low intermediate judgment
Harlig & grammatical (15 lgs.)/ESL - low advanced task
Dörnyei awareness (173) high beginners
1998 Hungarian/ - intermediate
EFL (370) near-native
Italian/EFL
(112)
Hungarian
EFL teachers
(25)
NS Am. Engl.
ESL teachers
(28)
Rose 1998 request Cantonese/ P2 (20) cartoon
apology English P4 (14) oral
compliment P6 (19) production
response NS Cantonese task
(15 per grade)
DCT = Discourse Completion Task

The great majority of these cross-sectional studies have examined the use of speech
act realization strategies by learners at different proficiency levels. One exception
is Olshtain and Blum-Kulka (1985), who traced learners’ approximation of target
pragmatic norms (in a study whose overall focus was not developmental) by
comparing learners who had resided in Israel for different lengths of time. While
the studied learner populations are most commonly adults, Rose (1998) compared
the speech act realization strategies of pre-adolescent students (age 7, 9, and 11) at
different grade levels.

Typically, the cross-sectional research has been rather narrowly focused on

one or more speech acts, investigated by means of elicited data. While most
studies investigated development in (or proficiency effects on) L2 speech act
production, some studies examined learners’ metapragmatic assessment and
comprehension of speech acts. An early effort to consider nonnative speakers’
assessment of pragmatic appropriacy from a developmental perspective was
Olshtain and Blum-Kulka (1985). Rating-scale assessments of request and apology
realizations indicated that learners of Hebrew were more likely to accept L2
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 85

pragmatic norms the longer they had resided in the target community. While these
nonnative speakers initially based their appropriateness assessments on their L1,
they became more tolerant of directness and positive politeness as they had spent
more time in Israel.

There have been a number of more recent studies of the development of

pragmatic awareness. In her study of assertiveness and supportiveness in troubles
talk, Kerekes (1992) found that, with increasing proficiency, ESL learners’
perceptions of qualifiers (e.g., I think, sort of) became more native-like.
Proficiency interacted with gender, however: As a group, female, but not male,
subjects perceived qualifiers in the same way as native speakers and high-
proficiency learners. In Kerekes’ study, the material to be rated were audiotaped
native speaker dialogues. Koike (1996) used videotaped dialogue prompts
produced by native speakers of different varieties of Spanish and investigated the
listening comprehension of, and responses to suggestions by, Anglo learners of
Spanish and bilingual Spanish-English Chicano students. After watching each of
the seven prompts, students had to compose a response to the Spanish speaker,
identify the illocutionary act, write down what they remembered the speaker’s last
utterance to be (the speech act under study), and rate the speaker for various
personal attributes on a five point scale (a blend of a Likert scale and semantic
differential). There was no statistical difference between the low comprehension
and response scores of the first and second year students, whereas the advanced
students performed significantly better on both accounts. One of the successful
comprehension strategies employed by the advanced students seemed to be their
attention to routine formulae such as ¿Por qué no?, which they correctly identified
as illocutionary-force-indicating devices. Curiously, the second year students
performed worse than the first year students on most items; unfortunately, Koike
does not comment on this rather surprising pattern. The advanced students and the
lower proficiency students also rated the Spanish speakers differently, an interesting
finding which seems to indicate, as Koike surmises, “that people’s opinions of a
speaker change when they understand the linguistic intent of the speaker’s
message” (1996:271).

Another study using videotaped scenarios is Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei’s

(1998) study of pragmatic and grammatical awareness in different EFL and ESL
populations. Each of the scenarios, featuring a female and a male student engaged
in typical interactions at the university, ended with a request, suggestion, apology,
or refusal. Because this study probed into learners’ abilities to distinguish
appropriate-inappropriate and correct-incorrect utterances, the students in the
scenarios were highly proficient Hungarian nonnative speakers of English. The
target utterance (the second pair part in each dialogue) was marked on the screen
and appeared on the answer sheet. Respondents were asked to first assess whether
the target utterance was appropriate/correct. If the judgment was negative, they
were further asked to estimate the severity of the problem. There were clear
effects for learning context (EFL/ESL), proficiency, and learner versus teacher
status. The ESL learners scored significantly higher on pragmatic appropriateness
86 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

judgments than did the two groups of EFL learners, students in Hungary and Italian
primary-school teachers in Hungary. Conversely, the EFL groups rated
grammatical errors significantly higher than did the ESL learners. In addition, the
low-proficiency Hungarian students gave lower ratings to both grammatical and
pragmatic errors in comparison with the high-proficiency group; however, the
high-proficiency students demonstrated a much greater increase in grammatical
awareness than in pragmatic awareness. While the high-proficiency ESL group
also noticed more pragmatic inappropriacies when compared with their low-
proficiency colleagues, the recognition of grammatical errors deteriorated with
increased proficiency in the ESL group. Both EFL and ESL teachers recognized
more grammatical errors than pragmatic problems. (In fact, each of the nonnative
EFL teachers spotted one hundred percent of the grammatical errors whereas the
native English speaking ESL teachers, as a group, missed 2.4 percent of the
grammar errors.) However, the ESL teachers (as well as the ESL students)
assessed the pragmatic errors as more serious. The relationship of
pragmalinguistic1 and grammatical awareness, its development, and the impact of
the learning environment on both clearly merits further attention. Bardovi-Harlig
and Dörnyei’s (1998) exemplary pioneering study has opened a venue for much
future research on these important issues.

In contrast to the above assessment studies, most of the cross-sectional

studies have examined learners’ production of speech acts. An impressively stable
result of these studies is that learners have access to the same range of speech act
realization strategies, or conventions of means (Clark 1979), as native speakers,
irrespective of proficiency level. On the other hand, learners differ from native
speakers in the way they implement strategies linguistically by choosing
conventions of form (Clark 1979) and by selecting conventions of means and form
according to social and discourse context. Thus, studies on apologizing by Danish
EFL learners (Trosborg 1987; 1995), Japanese ESL learners (Maeshiba, et al.
1996) and Cantonese-speaking EFL learners (Rose 1998) found that learners,
irrespective of proficiency level, can use the full range of Blum-Kulka, et al.’s
(1989) taxonomy of apology strategies:

1. Offering an illocutionary force indicator, or apologetic formula (I’m

sorry);
2. Assuming responsibility for the offense (I deleted your file);
3. Downgrading responsibility (there must be a virus in your software) or the
severity of the offense (fortunately you have a hard copy);
4. Offering repair (I’ll ask Tom to retrieve it for you);
5. Offering redress such as expressing concern for the offended party (I hope
the file wasn’t important);
6. Appeasing the offended party (I’ll install your new software for you);
7. Promising forbearance (I’ll be more careful the next time).

Likewise, nonnative speakers at all proficiency levels use the super strategies of
requesting, including direct requests (check your email), conventionally indirect
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 87

requests (could you check your email?), and nonconventionally indirect requests
(did you get my email?), as well as most of the substrategies within these
categories. (See Blum-Kulka, et al. 1989 for a taxonomy of request strategies.)
This range is documented in studies of request strategies by Japanese ESL learners
and EFL learners (Hill 1997, Takahashi 1996, Takahashi and DuFon 1989), second
language learners of Norwegian with a variety of L1 backgrounds (Svanes 1992),
Danish learners of English (Trosborg 1995), speakers of Australian English
learning Bahasa Indonesia as a foreign language (Hassall 1997), and Cantonese-
speaking EFL students (Rose 1998). In similar ways, Japanese learners of English
had access to the same types of refusal strategies as do native speakers (Houck and
Gass 1996, Robinson 1992, Takahashi and Beebe 1987)2 and Cantonese EFL
students offered the same types of compliment responses as do English native
speakers, regardless of proficiency (Rose 1998).

The accessibility of conventions of means, irrespective of learners’ stage of

L2 development, ethnolinguistic background, and learning context (second versus
foreign language; e.g., Takahashi and Beebe 1987) documented in the cross-
sectional studies, is corroborated by the much larger number of single-moment
investigations, that is, studies with a focus on second language use rather than
learning. (See Rose [1998] for the distinction between cross-sectional and single-
moment studies in interlanguage pragmatics.) The single-moment studies
demonstrate that the realization strategies for the major speech acts examined to
date are stable across learners, as they are across native-speaker populations
(Kasper 1998, Kasper and Schmidt 1996). An in-depth explanation of speech act
realization strategies as candidate universals is beyond the scope of this paper;
however, we briefly want to suggest the following hypothesis: The conceptual
properties (‘rules,’ ‘conditions’)3 (e.g., Leech 1983, Searle 1969) are the main
socio-cognitive resources for realization strategies that speakers can draw on.
Consequently, speakers engaging in the ‘same’ communicative action will rely on
the same strategies to perform such action.4 Adult L2 learners (or even pre-
adolescent children, as Rose [1998] has demonstrated) possess such universal
pragmatic knowledge and will use it in second language contexts, their linguistic
proficiency permitting. Apparently, the learners in the cross-sectional studies were
beyond the threshold of L2 grammatical knowledge required for implementing the
full range of speech act realization strategies. Two facts suggest that this was
indeed the case. One is that the majority of cross-sectional studies compared
intermediate and advanced learners to the exclusion of beginners; another is that,
since all studies used as their method of data collection some form of elicitation,
participants even in the lowest proficiency groups must have had a command of the
target language good enough to fill in a discourse completion or rating
questionnaire or engage in a roleplay. Thus, if beginning learners do not use
certain speech act realization strategies because they are still below the required
threshold of linguistic competence, the methods of data collection employed in the
cross-sectional studies did not allow this proficiency effect to show up.
88 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

In contrast to the conventions of means, learners at different proficiency

levels use qualitatively and quantitatively different conventions of form to
implement speech act strategies and select different strategies in comparable
contexts. Scarcella (1979) designed three role-play situations to investigate the
politeness strategies of beginning and advanced ESL learners, comparing them to
native speakers of English. She found (among other things) that her subjects
appeared to acquire politeness forms before acquiring the rules for their appropriate
use. Trosborg (1987) used role-plays to compare the apologies of native speakers
of English, native speakers of Danish, and three levels of Danish EFL learners.
She found that the use of modality markers (e.g., downtoners, hedges, intensifiers)
increased with proficiency across learner groups to a level closer to that of native
speakers. Since the use of modality markers for native speakers of Danish was
more than double that of native speakers of English, these results seem to indicate a
clear developmental pattern (as opposed to pragmatic transfer). Both Scarcella
(1979) and Trosborg (1987) noted that learners’ repertoires of pragmatic routines
and other linguistic means of speech act realization expand as their proficiencies
increase. However, it is not clear from their studies whether the greater variety of
linguistic material is simply a reflection of expanded vocabulary and syntactic
structures, or whether the more advanced learners have developed a better
command of the pragmalinguistic potential of lexical and syntactic devices.
Detailed form-function and function-form analyses that could throw light on this
problem are unfortunately in short supply in interlanguage pragmatics.

Takahashi and DuFon (1989) report that with increasing proficiency, the
Japanese learners of English in their study moved from a preference for more
indirect requestive strategies to more direct, target-like conventions. A similar
development is reported by Olshtain and Blum-Kulka (1985), who looked at the
perception of directness and positive politeness by NNS of Hebrew. In this study,
however, learners’ increasingly target-like perceptions of directness and positive
politeness was associated with their length of residence in the target community
rather than their L2 proficiency. In a study using production questionnaires, Blum-
Kulka and Olshtain (1986) noted that learners’ use of supportive moves in request
performance followed a bell-shaped developmental curve, starting out with an
under-use of supportive moves, followed by over-suppliance, and finally
approximating a target-like distribution. This pattern reflected increasing L2
proficiency. In a role-play study based on the same data as her earlier apology
study, Trosborg (1995) examined the requests, complaints, and apologies of three
groups of Danish learners of English: secondary school grade nine, high school and
commercial school, and university students. No proficiency tests were
administered, but it was assumed that the three education levels also represented
proficiency levels. Among the findings were a closer approximation of native-like
request strategies with increased proficiency, which included higher frequencies of
adjuncts to main strategies (e.g., upgraders, downgraders, supportive moves).
Only slight differences were obtained across groups for main apology and
complaint strategies, with a higher incidence of opting out among the lower
proficiency groups.
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 89

Several recent studies have charted developmental patterns in L2 learners’

speech act strategies that move in the direction of native speaker use or that resist
convergence to target norms. Hill (1997) examined the request strategies used by
Japanese EFL learners at three proficiency levels. He found that learners at all
proficiency levels overused direct requests and underused nonconventionally-
indirect requests (hints). With increasing proficiency, they decreased the direct
strategies—mainly their use of imperatives—and showed little change in the hinting
strategies. At the same time, they increased the use of conventionally-indirect
requests almost up to native speaker level. However, the global trend towards
native speaker use of conventionally-indirect requests concealed a number of
microstrategic patterns that did not converge towards native speaker norms. ‘Want’
strategies (I want to/I would like to), hardly ever used by the British English native
speaker controls, were overused from the beginning and remained on the increase
as proficiency improved. The increase of ability strategies (can/could you) seen
from low to intermediate did not continue at the advanced level; permission
strategies (may I), though slightly on the rise, remained greatly underused; but
willingness strategies (would you), while stable from low to intermediate, sharply
increased at advanced level. The approximation of native speaker use of
conventionally-indirect requests was thus an effect of overuse of the want and
willingness strategies, a movement away from native speaker norms with increasing
proficiency. One important lesson to be learned from Hill’s study is that conflating
individual strategies into macrocategories may be deceiving unless the pattern
displayed at macro level reproduces the patterns of the subsumed strategies.

Hassall (1997) examined Australian English speakers’ requests in Bahasa

Indonesia as a foreign language, elicited through interactive roleplays. Although
the primary goal of the study was to contrast native and nonnative speakers of
Bahasa Indonesia, comparison of the learners at different proficiency levels resulted
in several observations about pragmatic development. In the same vein as Hill
(1997), Hassall found very different patterns of microstrategies hidden under
learners’ target-like use of macro strategies. Elided imperatives (menu
makannannya itu ‘the menu’), for example, were consistently used direct requests
in the native speaker performance; yet only the high proficiency learners used this
strategy. Hassall suspects a U-shaped learning pattern at work because, due to its
syntactic simplicity, elided imperatives are available to beginning learners (as
demonstrated by Ellis 1992) even though they did not show up in Hassall’s own
sample. Consistent with some previous studies (e.g., Trosborg 1995) but at odds
with others (e.g., Hill 1997), Hassall found that ‘want’ statements (saya mau ‘I
want’) emerged early and declined in the use of higher proficiency learners,
consistent with target language use. The same pattern emerged for statement hints
(e.g., saya tidak ada pena ‘I don’t have a pen’), suggesting that lower proficiency
learners may opt for nonconventional indirectness because they lack convention-
alized requesting routines rather than because of a strategic preference for
indirectness. Hassall interprets the general results of his study—that learners have
access to the same request strategies as native speakers but implement and distribute
them differently—as lending support to Bialystok’s (1993) two-dimensional model
90 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

of pragmatic learning. According to Bialystok, adult learners can rely on already

existing pragmatic representations but need to achieve control over appropriate L2
form-function matches. But Hassall also contends that acquiring new pragmatic
knowledge is a major task for L2 learners, including, in the case of his study, 1)
the appropriate contextual distribution of several direct request strategies, 2) the
main L2 forms of internal modification, and 3) the selection of prefacing moves
prior to direct questions.

As data collection procedures, Hill (1997) used a written production task

while Hassall (1997) employed interactive roleplay. A compromise method of
sorts, featuring oral but noninteractive discourse, was used by Rose (1998). In this
study, he charted the development of EFL and Cantonese requests, apologies, and
compliment responses by Cantonese-speaking primary school students at three
grade levels using a cartoon oral-production task. In order to tease out
maturational effects from pragmatic development, Rose elicited data from students
at all three grade levels in their native Cantonese and in English as a foreign
language by dividing intact classes into L1 and L2 respondents. There was a
distinct movement from direct to conventionally indirect strategies, a progressive
decline in opting out of requesting, and a higher frequency of supportive moves,
apology adjuncts, and compliment-response adjuncts in the performance of the
oldest group. However, there was little evidence of situational variation, indicating
that students had more control over pragmalinguistic than sociopragmatic aspects of
speech act performance.

Compared to the earlier work, one great plus of the cross-sectional speech
act studies conducted within the last few years is their considerably improved
methodology. It is now standard procedure to develop the instrument for the main
investigation on the basis of preliminary studies in order to choose relevant
contexts, control and vary context variables, and select appropriate linguistic
material in the case of comprehension and assessment studies (e.g., Takahashi 1995
for one example). While much needs to be done in order to further develop valid
and reliable research methods in interlanguage pragmatics, the general direction
towards more sophisticated designs and procedures promises well for future cross-
sectional studies based on elicited data.

LONGITUDINAL STUDIES

Compared to the cross-sectional studies, longitudinal interlanguage

pragmatic research spans a much wider range. First, the pragmatic features that
are examined include not only speech acts but also pragmatic routines, discourse
markers, pragmatic fluency, and conversational ability—features which require
study in a full discourse context. Second, most studies examine learners at the
beginning stages of pragmatic development. Third, the settings of data collection
include second language classrooms; in fact, there are now more within-classroom
than outside-classroom studies. Fourth, an increasing number of the classroom
studies are interventionist, investigating the effect of instruction on pragmatic
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 91

learning. Methodologically, all of the above are reflected in a larger variety of

research approaches and data types. In this section, we will review investigations
examining pragmatic learning outside and inside of classrooms, leaving
interventionist research for later discussion. Table 2 summarizes the non-
interventionist longitudinal studies on pragmatic development.

Table 2: Longitudinal interlanguage pragmatic studies

Study Focus L1/L2 (n) Proficiency Data

Schmidt request Japanese/ESL beginning authentic
1983 (1) discourse
Schmidt & conversational English/ beginning diary,
Frota 1986 ability Portuguese (1) conversations
Bouton implicature various/ advanced multiple
1992, 1994 comprehension ESL (30) choice
Ellis 1992, request Portuguese (1) beginning authentic
1997 Punjabi (1)/ classroom
ESL discourse
Sawyer pragmatic various/ beginning socioling.
1992 particle ne JSL (11) interview
Bardovi- suggestion various/ advanced authentic
Harlig & rejection ESL (16) discourse
Hartford
1993
Siegal 1994 communicative English (3) intermediate- multiple
competence Hungarian (1)/ advanced
JSL
Kanagy & routines Am.English/ beginning authentic
Igarashi JFL (19) classroom
1997 discourse
Cohen 1997 pragmatic Am. beginning diary
competence English/JFL
(1)

Schmidt’s (1983) three-year longitudinal study of the acquisition of English

by Wes, a Japanese adult who relocated to Hawai’i, is among the earliest studies of
pragmatic development in a second language. Wes’ early directives relied on a
limited range of unanalyzed request formulas, frequent use of requestive markers
such as please, the association of the verb morpheme -ing with requestive force
(sitting for ‘let’s sit’), and an apparent transfer of Japanese sociopragmatic and
pragmalinguistic norms. At the end of the observation period, some of the request
formula had been reanalyzed and were used productively by Wes—his use of
imperatives had increased and his requests were more elaborated. However, some
non-native features remained, such as the overextension of can I in can I brought
cigarettes (for ‘can you bring me cigarettes’). In another study, Schmidt and Frota
92 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

(1986) followed Schmidt’s acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese during a five-month

stay in Brazil, relying on Schmidt’s own language-learning journal as well as tape-
recordings of four unstructured conversations in Portuguese between the two co-
authors, recorded at approximately one-month intervals. The focus of the study is
the various effects of instruction, interaction, and correction in SLA (and ultimately
an argument for noticing), with the emphasis on the acquisition of grammatical
morphemes. There is, however, some discussion of Schmidt’s conversational
abilities, which evidenced less use of repetition over time and a failure to acquire
the pragmalinguistic abilities to answer Portuguese questions in the affirmative, due
partly to the inappropriacy of a simple sim (yes) and the fact that affirmative
responses often require correct marking of verbs for person and number. Both
Wes’s and Schmidt’s data suggest that early pragmatic and morphosyntactic
development interact, an issue that requires considerable further study.

Based on a two-year study examining the requests of two beginning ESL

learners (aged 10 and 11) in a classroom setting, Ellis (1992; 1997) proposed three
stages through which learners’ ability to produce requests evolves. Early learners’
utterances conveyed requestive intent through highly context-dependent, minimalist
realizations, expressing the intended reference and illocution but showing no
relational or social goals. For example, learners used statements such as me no
blue for ‘I don’t have a blue crayon,’ or direct formulaic requests such as leave it,
give me. In the next stage, requests were mainly performed by means of
unanalyzed routines (can I have, have you got) and illocutionary force was
indicated by lexical cues (please, maybe). Towards the end of the observation
period, the prepackaged routines were gradually unpacked and became increasingly
available for productive use. For instance, ability questions as requests were now
used as flexible sentence frames, shifting in perspective between speaker (can I take
book with me) and hearer focus (can you pass me my pencil). Relational goals
(politeness) were beginning to be overtly marked, albeit with a restricted range of
strategies, such as modifying requests externally by giving reasons and internally
by the lexical downgrader please. These three tentative stages of pragmatic
development are congruent with early grammatical development and the important
role of formulaic speech in beginners’ interlanguage (cf. Ellis 1994). Over time,
the two learners’ use of direct requests decreased, while conventionally-indirect
requests increased, a pattern also found in L1 pragmatic development and cross-
sectional interlanguage pragmatic studies (Hassall 1997, Hill 1997). Ellis also
comments that the learners’ range of request strategies achieved at the end of the
observation period remained considerably more restricted than that of adult native
speakers’, suggesting, among other possible reasons, more limited input
opportunities in the classroom setting.

Turning from beginning to advanced ESL learners, Bardovi-Harlig and

Hartford (1993) conducted a longitudinal study of the development of suggestions
and rejections by sixteen adult nonnative speakers of English in academic advising
sessions. Even though the NNS students were increasingly successful in their
interaction with their advisers over time, they did not learn how to mitigate their
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 93

suggestions and rejections appropriately. The differential control that students

achieved over sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic ability appeared to reflect their
opportunities for feedback and input. Advisers provided feedback on the
appropriateness of speech acts but not on that of realization strategies and forms
(Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford 1993). In a later study, Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford
(1996) proposed that the persisting inappropriacy of conventions of form may be
due to a lack of input by peers in the same institutional roles.

The only longitudinal investigation addressing pragmatic comprehension

rather than production is Bouton’s (1992; 1994) work on advanced nonnative
speakers’ abilities to interpret implicature in English. He found that over a four-
and-a-half year period, 30 nonnative-speaking subjects from his earlier study (of an
original 436, Bouton 1988) had significantly higher scores on a test for interpreting
implicature. Although this shows that learners can develop the ability to interpret
implicature, it does not—nor did it intend to—address the process of that
development.

There is now a steadily increasing body of literature on pragmatic

development in Japanese as a second or foreign language, most of it focusing on
beginning learners. The earliest work, Sawyer’s (1992) one-year study of the
acquisition of the affective particle ne by adult JSL learners, revealed late
emergence of ne relative to grammatical particles and a progression from use in
formulaic utterances with high saliency and input frequency (soo desu ne) to limited
more productive use. Ohta (1994) showed that teachers in an JFL setting used
fewer types of affective particles with a lower frequency than native speakers in
non-classroom conversation. To the extent that the teachers instructing Sawyers’
JSL students displayed similar patterns, the late emergence of ne may be related to
paucity of input in the classroom.

Kanagy and Igarashi (1997) examined English-speaking children’s

acquisition of pragmatic routines in a JFL immersion kindergarten, noting “a
reduction in initial reliance on routine, elicited patterns at week four in favor of an
increase over time in spontaneous, original L2 productions...by week eleven”
(1997:256ff). This pattern is congruous with the ones observed in the studies of
early pragmatic development by ESL learners (Ellis 1992; 1997, Schmidt 1983). A
very different JFL study is reported by Cohen (1997), who kept a diary during his
participation in a semester long course of first year accelerated Japanese. While
Cohen did acquire some ability to perform such speech acts as requests,
expressions of gratitude, and apologies, his pragmatic ability by the end of the
course lagged far behind his expectations and prior language learning experience.
Considering the teacher’s structural, rote memorization approach, and the very
limited learning opportunities outside the classroom, it comes as no surprise that
although Cohen’s classroom performance according to the syllabus was very
successful, his ability to use the target language effectively in communication
remained low.
94 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

One of the many interesting insights reported by Cohen is his resistance to

certain target sociolinguistic practices, such as using honorifics when speaking
about a higher status person to an equal or lower status interlocutor. The issue of
resistance is more fully explored in the most comprehensive study of pragmatic and
sociolinguistic development in L2 Japanese to date. Siegal (1994; 1996) followed
the pragmatic development over an eighteen-month period of four “white western
upper-middle-class women between the ages of 21 and 45 of intermediate to
advanced Japanese language proficiency studying Japanese” (1996:359) in Japan.
Siegal draws on subjectivity theory and a wide range of qualitative data, including
language learning journals, learner interviews, and audio-taped interactions.
Among the most significant findings of this study are the mutual influences of
language attitudes and proficiency: As learners gained the necessary proficiency in
Japanese to understand and potentially make use of the normative Japanese female
style, they consciously chose to resist what was to them a socially unacceptable
self-image. Siegal’s extensive data base and thick description provide important
insights into the role of learner subjectivity in pragmatic development. More such
work needs to be carried out to further our understanding of this important
dimension of L2 pragmatic learning.

Because most of the longitudinal studies rely on data collected in authentic

settings of language use, they have the potential to shed light on the relationship
between social and institutional contexts and pragmatic development, and many of
the studies reviewed here adopt this perspective. While the interaction of pragmatic
and grammatical learning can be examined through different kinds of research
approaches, longitudinal studies of socially-situated authentic data provide
privileged access to the interaction of social contexts and L2 pragmatic learning.

TRANSFER AND PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT

Pragmatic transfer has been attested in many of the nondevelopmental

studies comparing interlanguage performance with corresponding L1 and L2 data
(Maeshiba, et al. 1996, Takahashi 1996 for review). Here, we will consider
research addressing the relationship of pragmatic transfer and development.
Takahashi and Beebe (1987) advanced the hypothesis that L2 proficiency is
positively correlated with pragmatic transfer. While their own study on refusals
performed by Japanese learners of English at two different proficiency levels did
not demonstrate the predicted proficiency effect, several studies found that learners’
limited L2 knowledge prevented them from transferring complex L1 conventions of
means and form (Blum-Kulka 1982; 1991, Olshtain and Cohen 1989). Cohen
(1997) reported that he intended to adhere to implementations of the Quantity and
Manner maxims common in mainstream North American culture, which would
have amounted to talking more and being more specific than appropriate in
Japanese. But since his low degree of L2 knowledge and control prevented the plan
from being implemented, Japanese conversational norms were involuntarily
observed. None of the cited studies, however, examined the performance of
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 95

learners at different proficiency levels; therefore, they do not provide conclusive

evidence for the positive correlation hypothesis.

Maeshiba, et al. (1996) specifically examined the positive correlation

hypothesis in two groups of Japanese ESL learners and found that the intermediate
learners transferred more apology strategies from Japanese to English than the
advanced group. However, Hill (1997) found evidence for negative
pragmalinguistic transfer in his more advanced group with the syntactically
complex I would like you to VP strategy; such transfer was absent in the lower
proficiency learners. One possible explanation for the different findings by Hill
(1997) and Maeshiba, et al. (1996) is that apology strategies in Japanese and
English vary less in terms of syntactic complexity than request strategies do. How
exactly the grammatical complexity of speech act strategies in L1 and L2 and
pragmalinguistic transfer interrelate developmentally has not been studied thus far.

While the phenomenon of pragmatic transfer is well documented, the

conditions of transfer and especially its interaction with other factors is less clearly
understood. Reminiscent of Kellerman’s psychotypology (1983), studies by
Olshtain (1983) and Robinson (1992) suggest that learners may be more prone to
transfer their pragmatic L1 knowledge when they hold a universalist view as
opposed to a relativist perspective on pragmatic norms. To date, only one
interlanguage pragmatic study has been carried out with an explicit focus on
transferability. Takahashi (1995; 1996) reported that Japanese learners of English
found several indirect request strategies differentially transferable and their
transferability perceptions interacted with the degree of imposition implied by the
requestive goal. While Takahashi had found a proficiency effect in her 1993 study
with ESL learners in Honolulu, she found no main effect for proficiency in her
1996 study with EFL students in Japan, suggesting that the EFL classroom did not
provide learners much opportunity for developing pragmalinguistic awareness in
L2.

Some studies demonstrate that (negative) pragmatic transfer diminishes

with length of residence in the target community rather than with proficiency (e.g.,
Blum-Kulka and Olshtain 1986, Olshtain and Blum-Kulka 1985). Learners in an
ESL context produced more target-like refusals (Takahashi and Beebe 1987) and
assessed the politeness of request strategies more like L2 judges (Kitao 1990) than
EFL learners. Kondo (1997), however, examining Japanese learners’ apology
performance before and after one year of homestay in the US, presents a more
complex picture: While these learners approximated or even outperformed native
speakers of American English in their use of the apology strategies such as lack of
intent, explanation, and repair offer, they also increased their use of admission of
fact and concern for hearer, following, and in fact overshooting, the native
Japanese norm. Kondo cites the positive correlation hypothesis as an explanation of
the increased negative transfer.

INSTRUCTED LEARNING OF L2 PRAGMATICS

96 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

Several studies have examined the input and interaction opportunities for
pragmatic learning in language classrooms. Compared to language use outside the
classroom, studies of teacher-fronted classroom discourse have demonstrated a
narrower range of speech acts (Long, et al. 1976), a lack of politeness marking
(Lörscher and Schulze 1988), shorter and less complex openings and closings
(Kasper 1989, Lörscher 1986), monopolization of discourse organization and
management by the teacher (Ellis 1990, Lörscher 1986), and consequently a limited
range of discourse markers (Kasper 1989) and a much reduced use of affective
particles in teacher talk (Ohta 1994). However, while in a more student-centered
form of classroom organization students will perform more types of speech acts
(Long, et al. 1976), they do not necessarily use more adequate conventions of
means and form. In ESL classes, Porter (1986) observed that NNS-NNS
interaction in small groups did not supply relevant input on socially appropriate
expressions of opinions and (dis)agreement, a finding that points to possible
restrictions of task-based language learning as far as the development of pragmatic
competence goes. On the other hand, Poole (1992) and Lim (1996), adopting a
language-socialization perspective, demonstrated how cultural information is
conveyed implicitly through teacher-student interaction in second and foreign
language classrooms.

A topic attracting increasing attention is the teachability of pragmatic

information and the most effective approaches to instruction in L2 pragmatics. So
far, studies have addressed such learning goals as the following:

• the comprehension of different types of implicature by advanced ESL

learners (Bouton 1994) and high intermediate EFL students (Kubota 1995),
• complimenting and responding to compliments (by intermediate-advanced
EFL/ESL, Billmyer 1990),
• apologizing (by advanced EFL, Olshtain and Cohen 1990),
• discourse management and a variety of initiating and responding speech acts
(by high-intermediate EFL, House and Kasper 1981),
• pragmatic fluency (by advanced EFL, House 1996),
• routine formulae and conversational management (by intermediate EFL,
Wildner-Bassett 1984, and by beginning GSL, Wildner-Bassett 1994),
• complaints and refusals (by advanced ESL, Morrow 1996),
• and pragmatic routines (by beginning JFL, Tateyama, et al. 1997).

Results are encouraging, suggesting that most pragmatic features are indeed
teachable. Instruction in pragmatic information is generally facilitative and
necessary when input is lacking or less salient (e.g., for some types of implicature,
Bouton 1994). Explicit instruction yields better results than implicit teaching;
however, while explicit teaching is helpful for consciousness raising, it may be less
effective for some aspects of skill development. House (1996) found that
conversational responses were the only component of pragmatic fluency that did not
improve through consciousness raising and conversational practice. This limitation
of instructed pragmatic learning can be explained in terms of Bialystok’s (e.g.,
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 97

1993) notion of control of processing. Fluent and appropriate conversational

responses require high degrees of processing control in utterance comprehension
and production, and such complex skills may be difficult to develop through the
few occasions for practice available in foreign language classroom learning.

CONCLUSION

The reviewed literature suggests two main lines of inquiry for future
research. Research of a predominantly cognitive/linguistic orientation will address
the relationship of grammatical and pragmatic development, including the question
of how learners acquire the pragmatic meanings of grammatical and lexical
material. Such issues call for more systematic and detailed linguistic and
pragmalinguistic analysis than has been seen in most interlanguage pragmatics
research to date. In order to understand the cognitive and interactional processes at
work in pragmatic development, research has to examine how principles of second
language learning and instruction apply to pragmatics. For instance, while the
general requirement of ‘noticing’ (e.g., Schmidt 1993; 1995) is directly applicable
(since it refers to a cognitive activity that is neutral vis-à-vis the noticed object),
and a ‘focus on form’ (Doughty and Williams 1998) can be extended to conventions
of means and form (the pragmalinguistic end of pragmatics), it is much less clear
how a focus on form and such instructional techniques as recasting might be
translated to sociopragmatic information.

Research with a mainly sociocultural focus will explore the relationships

amoung cultural values, learner subjectivity, and pragmatic learning. There is
mounting evidence that divergence from native norms does not always stem from
pragmatic or linguistic incompetence but may be a more or less deliberate choice on
the part of the learner not to participate in target practices. The interrelation
between individual differences and pragmatic development is virtually uncharted
territory except for some promising pointers in Schmidt’s (1983) early study and
recent work by Peirce (1995) and Siegal (1996). Whether investigated in the
traditional context of attitude and motivation research or in contemporary theories
of identity and subjectivity, there is a vast field to explore, not least in light of
Schumann’s (1997) recent proposal of a neurobiology of affect and its relationship
to L2 learning. Importantly, in order to avoid simplistic generalizations of context-
free ‘attitudes’ and pragmatic development, such studies should start out with an
assumption that learners’ communicative actions, much like anybody else’s, are
embedded in local contexts and that learners’ willingness to converge to, or
insistence on diverging from, target practices is subject to change across contexts of
interaction. Particularly intriguing are the questions of whether and how
acculturation and dis-identification processes change over time (in what types of
encounters, with what variables contributing to either change) and how both
processes interact with pragmatic development.
98 GABRIELE KASPER AND KENNETH R. ROSE

NOTES

1. The term pragmalinguistic refers to knowing that the linguistic form conveys
the right pragmatic purpose. This term is usually complementary to
sociopragmatic, which refers to knowing that a linguistic form has specific social
conditions for appropriate use.

2. Houck and Gass (1996:53) note that, in addition to the refusal strategies
commonly identified in the literature, their learners also used such strategies as
confirmations, requests for clarification/information, and agreement. The first two
strategies are speech act-independent repair strategies, particularly well-known in
SLA from studies on interactional modification; the third strategy is by definition
not a refusal. Houck and Gass thus do not provide evidence for hitherto uncovered
learner-specific refusal strategies.

3. The category of speech act itself is contested among scholars (e.g., Levinson
1983 for a critique) and obviously this is not the place to enter into a debate about
this fundamental issue in pragmatic theory. Let it suffice to point to the linguistic
fact that every known language has illocutionary verbs or expressions denoting
emic categories of communicative action. Consequently, at the very least, the
metapragmatic practices of speech communities define an explanandum that
pragmatic theory has to address.

4. It is important to distinguish the abstract, socio-cognitively constrained

strategies of communicative action from the following performance issues: 1) their
(linguistic or nonlinguistic) implementation, 2) speakers’ rights and obligations in
using such strategies as well as in performing the communicative act itself, 3) the
contexts in which different strategies are seen as appropriate, and 4) the cultural
meanings attributed to the communicative act and its realization strategies by
community members. The latter issues are demonstrably ethnolinguistically
specific whereas the former is not.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bouton, L. F. (ed.) 1997. Pragmatics and language learning monograph series,

Volume 8. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Pragmatics and language learning monograph series is the only series
of publications (in the US and internationally) entirely devoted to cross-
cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. This volume includes selected
papers from the 1996 Pragmatics and Language Learning conference.
While all volumes in this series include contributions on various aspects of
 PRAGMATICS AND SLA 99

interlanguage pragmatics, most papers in the 1997 collection address issues

of pragmatic development, instruction, and research methodology.

Gass, S. M. and J. Neu (eds.) 1996. Speech acts across cultures. Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
This book includes cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatic studies on
speech act production and comprehension, some of which address
developmental issues. Three chapters specifically discuss topics of
research methodology, and the data-based studies illustrate a wide variety
of approaches. As in many edited volumes, chapters are somewhat uneven
in quality, but they will still be profitable for the critical reader.

Kasper, G. (ed.) 1996. The development of pragmatic competence. [Special issue of

Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 18.2]

This Special Issue of SSLA includes two review articles, one on

interlanguage pragmatics research with a focus on learning, the other on
L2 learners’ speech act production. It also features three important data-
based studies on pragmatic development, examining input opportunities,
transferability, and the possibilities and limitations of instruction. The
three studies also exemplify different research approaches.

Kasper, G. and S. Blum-Kulka (eds.) 1993. Interlanguage pragmatics. New York:

Oxford University Press.

This book includes two chapters discussing theoretical models that might
account for pragmatic learning (or aspects of it), Bialystok’s
analysis/control model and Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis. The reported
data-based studies focus on L2 pragmatic knowledge and performance
rather than learning. However, some of the addressed issues are also
pertinent to L2 pragmatic development, such as pragmatic transfer, the
function of indirectness in L2 discourse, the relationship between
performance and assessment, and the emergence of intercultural styles.
Studies illustrate a variety of data types and offer ample opportunity for
research-methodological critique.

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