This book examines the topic of communication strategies, the ways in which people seek to express themselves or understand what someone else is saying or writing. Typically, the term has referred to the strategies that non-native speakers use to address the linguistic and pragmatic problems encountered in interactions with native and non-native speakers of the language in question. Studies adopting a psycholinguistic perspective are well represented and updated in this volume. Other chapters re-examine communication strategies from a sociolinguistic perspective, exploring the strategies non-native speakers and their conversational partners use to create shared meanings in ongoing discourse. These studies reveal how communication strategies can serve to construct participants' identities and social relationships. Finally, the book incorporates a number of chapters which cover strategy-like behaviour in other related areas, such as language pathology, child bilingualism, normal native adult interaction, and mother tongue education. These studies add fresh dimensions to the study of communication strategies, showing how the concept can usefully be extended beyond the realm of second language acquisition and use, and pointing out the commonalities in many domains of language behaviour.

This book examines the topic of communication strategies, the ways in which people seek to express themselves or understand what someone else is saying or writing. Typically, the term has referred to the strategies that non-native speakers use to address the linguistic and pragmatic problems encountered in interactions with native and non-native speakers of the language in question. Studies adopting a psycholinguistic perspective are well represented and updated in this volume. Other chapters re-examine communication strategies from a sociolinguistic perspective, exploring the strategies non-native speakers and their conversational partners use to create shared meanings in ongoing discourse. These studies reveal how communication strategies can serve to construct participants' identities and social relationships. Finally, the book incorporates a number of chapters which cover strategy-like behaviour in other related areas, such as language pathology, child bilingualism, normal native adult interaction, and mother tongue education. These studies add fresh dimensions to the study of communication strategies, showing how the concept can usefully be extended beyond the realm of second language acquisition and use, and pointing out the commonalities in many domains of language behaviour.

Misunderstanding is a pervasive phenomenon in social life, sometimes with serious consequences for people's life chances. Misunderstandings are especially hazardous in high-stakes events such as job interviews or in the legal system. In unequal power encounters, unsuccessful communication is regularly attributed to the less powerful participant, especially when those participants are members of an ethnic minority group. But even when communicative events are not prestructured by participants' differential positions in social hierarchies, misunderstandings occur at different levels of interactional and social engagement. Misunderstanding in Social Life examines such problematic talk in ordinary conversation and different institutional settings, including socializing events and story tellings, education and assessment activities, and interviews in TV news broadcasts, employment agencies, legal settings, and language testing. The analyzed interactions are located in a variety of sociocultural environments and conducted in a range of languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, such language varieties as Aboriginal Australian English and Maori New Zealand English, and nonnative varieties. The original studies included in this volume adopt a variety of theoretical perspectives, including discourse-pragmatic approaches, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, social constructionism, tropological and narrative analysis. They represent multiple views of misunderstanding as a multilayered discourse event.

This book addresses the acquisition of pragmatics in second and foreign language classrooms, offering two state-of-the-art survey chapters, and eleven chapters reporting the results of empirical research. All chapters have been 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 US, 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 and language teachers alike.

This is a collection of contributed essays on topics in interlanguage pragmatics, which is the study of how non-native speakers and listeners use their deficient communicative competence to cope with a variety of communicative tasks. This volume will be the first comprehensive study of this important linguistic topic.

Pragmatics & Language Learning Volume 12examines the organization of second language and multilingual speakers' talk and pragmatic knowledge across a range of naturalistic and experimental activities. Based on data collected on Danish, English, Hawai'i Creole, Indonesian, and Japanese as target languages, the contributions explore the nexus of pragmatic knowledge, interaction, and L2 learning outside and inside of educational settings.

Talk-in-interaction: Multilingual perspectives (edited by Gabriele Kasper & Hanh Thi Nguyen) offers original studies of interaction in a range of languages and language varieties, including Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Swahili, Thai, and Vietnamese; monolingual and bilingual interactions, and activities designed for second or foreign language learning. Conducted from the perspectives of conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, the chapters examine ordinary conversation and institutional activities in face-to-face, telephone, and computer-mediated environments. PRAGMATICS & INTERACTION, a refereed series sponsored by the University of Hawai'i National Foreign Language Resource Center, publishes research on topics in pragmatics and discourse as social interaction from a wide variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. P&I welcomes particularly studies on languages spoken in the Asian-Pacific region.