Taguchi undertakes an ambitious and well-articulated task: the longitudinal study of the pragmatic development of 48 Japanese university students studying English at a bilingual university in Japan. Using thrice-administered speaking and listening tests, eight participant interviews, field notes, and classroom observations, Taguchi investigates both the “pattern and rate of development . . . across different pragmatic functions and attributes” (p. i) and the resources available to learners in this context and their effects on individual learner development.
Taguchi situates her study squarely in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) and devotes the first chapter to the complexity of learners’ development of pragmatic competence and to the argument that this facet of SLA should be studied longitudinally. The approach is comprehensive and includes a focus on issues such as processing, production, and fluency as components of competence as well as a multifaceted view of linguistic knowledge that includes “functional knowledge, knowledge of discourse and knowledge of pragmatic conventions” (p. 7). The real-world situation of the study is located at Akita International University, a liberal arts university with the aim of developing Japanese citizens with English proficiency through using English as the language of instruction. First-year students in the English for Academic Purposes program—the learner population of the study—took between 14 and 16 hr of class per week and kept journals on their encounters with native speakers of English.
The second chapter reviews longitudinal studies in ILP that meet certain criteria such as a focus on the development of specific pragmatic features, lack of instructional intervention on those features, age—adolescent or adult—of learners, and systematic longitudinal documentation of learner development. Taguchi notes that studies of pragmatic comprehension are few, and she discusses the factors that complicate the understanding of nonconventional implicatures. The upshot is that “form-function-context mappings are not internalized in a linear manner” (p. 54), nor are they learned quickly. Taguchi argues for studies of “longitudinal development of pragmatic comprehension and production combined” (p. 64) because this area is particularly underresearched.
The third chapter uses a multidimensional theoretical framework to encompass all of the factors Taguchi identifies to motivate the complex data-collection methods of the study. Using independently developed corpora of both spoken English and spoken and written academic English, Taguchi developed test items with conventional and nonconventional implicatures, tested her items on native speakers, and developed a pragmatic speaking test and other instruments. These were administered three times over one year and were analyzed along with class observations and student and instructor interviews.
Chapter 4 shows that, as predicted, learners were slower to comprehend nonconventional implicatures than conventional ones but nevertheless made progress over time. Among conventional implicatures, indirect refusals seem particularly accessible to these learners, and their comprehension may have been made easier by pragmatic transfer from Japanese. With respect to pragmatic production, there was gain over time in all areas. Similarly, in the area of requests, there was a difference in results between low-imposition and high-imposition requests: Learner control of appropriate high-imposition request forms emerged later than that of low-imposition requests. Learner interview data show that even when students know alternative, more polite forms of making requests, concern for getting the message across clearly may lead them to deprioritize finding a more polite form.
Individual case histories form the core of the fifth chapter; these include learner profiles composed of test scores, interview data, and observations. From the socially sensitive student who delights at having her usage corrected in an e-mail by her instructor to the pragmalinguistically limited yet academically engaged student, Taguchi builds profiles that show how the interaction of learner background, personality, learning style, and opportunities for English conversation in context function to shape the trajectory of pragmatic development for each of the eight students. The final chapter reiterates the findings and argues for dynamic systems theory as providing an appropriate description of the complex interactions present in the observed pragmalinguistic development.
The volume represents a complex, painstakingly designed and executed study, whose careful and detailed analysis sets a high standard for ILP research. The volume should be of interest to SLA researchers, teachers of English to speakers of other languages, practitioners and researchers, and others interested in the complex interactions that shape the course of pragmatic development in a second language.
