At a time when publishers’ catalogues are flooded with handbooks, The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pragmatics deserves credit in its own right. By exploring questions of great nuance, it represents a major contribution to our understanding of L2 pragmatics.
Compared with Naoko Taguchi’s two previous works on the subject (Taguchi & Roever 2017 and Culpeper & Mackey & Taguchi 2018), this latest volume, edited in 2019 by the same scholar, is both broader and deeper in addressing current debates and future agendas. The handbook further illustrates the S(econd)L(anguage)A(cquisition)–Pragmatics interface by offering a state-of-the-art review on three major issues: construct (What is the multiplicity of pragmatic competence?), development (What mechanisms drive the development of pragmatic competence?), and instruction (What is the role of instruction for pragmatic development?). As such, this wide-ranging volume provides a highly accessible entry point to the long-standing relationship between pragmatics and SLA.
Arranged thematically in six parts (‘Constructs and units of analysis’, ‘Theoretical approaches’, ‘Methodological approaches’, ‘Pedagogical approaches’, ‘Contextual and individual considerations’, and ‘L2 pragmatics in the global era’), the 32 chapters identify common patterns and generalizations that emerge from existing findings, and critically appraise the limitations in the literature. To accommodate conceptual diversity, the editor makes an effort to synthesize available research findings across diverse contexts and heterogeneous situations. In contesting some notions and rejecting other models, the handbook puts forward divergent ideas of what it means to be pragmatically competent in an L2, how compatible theories when combined with pragmatic features can not only provide post hoc explanations in empirical studies but also guide them and assess the applicability to L2 pragmatics research, and why the innovative activities meant to raise L2 pragmatic awareness and practice must be field-tested before they are implemented in classrooms and integrated into curricula.
As one of the 45 authors rightly mentions (Jane Jackson, Chapter 31: ‘Intercultural competence and L2 pragmatics’), although the new millennium has witnessed a proliferation of L2 pragmatics research and teaching informed by SLA theories, this field is still dominated by European and North American voices. The field would benefit if more input came from scholars in other parts of the world. It is gratifying to note that this volume includes the many voices of Asian scholars whose work on the shifting conceptions of intercultural pragmatics contributes uniquely to some of the basic questions in L2 pragmatic acquisition and development research, namely, what is learned, how it is learned, and particularly why something is learned or not learned.
Despite the overlaps (for example, the notion of identity is discussed in Chapters 11, 29, 30, 32), special attention has been paid to the issues and phenomena that have been understudied or underplayed. Here, I mention three of the more prominent ones.
First, the volume cautions that ‘target language (TL) norm’ is not equivalent with ‘native speaker norm’ (219, 402, 423). Benchmarking against native speakers’ pragmatic norms is particularly controversial when determining the degree of appropriateness in pragmatic performance. For example, Chapter 27 investigates studies on how L2 learners acquired the pragmatic means to communicate appropriately and effectively in a new workplace. It calls for a stronger connection between research in workplace discourse and training materials. Chapter 28 appraises and problematizes individual learner research in L2 pragmatics in terms of what we know about and what we need to know. Both chapters argue that establishing pragmatic norms against native speakers raises debates on English as a lingua franca and World Englishes. Given the multilingual reality of our globalized world and the growing number of multilingual learners in multilingual contexts, linguistic features and pragmatic appropriateness should be examined from the perspective of World Englishes and English as a lingua franca, which differs from traditional notions of pragmatic competence. We should reconceptualize the ‘classic’ perspective, break the codified norms we usually hold for L1 and L2, and establish new paradigms with a more robust theoretical background.
Secondly, as L2 pragmatics has evolved into an increasingly diversified and interdisciplinary discipline, there is an urgent need to situate L2 pragmatics among academic disciplines, and suggest fertile grounds to study problems of language learning and use in dynamic social contexts. It is imperative to expand the research in terms of methodological approaches and designs, and include greater diversity of contexts and languages to enable comparison. One such fruitful area is how learners develop pragmatic competence in foreign languages other than English (305, 311), especially the less commonly-taught languages. Another way is to adapt to various instructional contexts such as formal classroom settings, study-abroad programs and technology-facilitated environments with their own norms of behavior. These can surely yield substantial fruits to the study of ‘multilingual pragmatics’. This issue is especially addressed in Part VI, ‘L2 pragmatics in the global era’. The four chapters discuss, in turn, intralingual regional pragmatic variation by focusing on L2 users’ awareness and use of such regional pragmatic features (Chapter 29), heritage learner pragmatics in terms of contextuality, hybridity, bidirectionality and learner agency (Chapter 30), the notion of pragmatic competence in relation to L2 interactions and the broader construct of intercultural competence (Chapter 31), and whether multilingual implicature interpretation depends to the same degree and on the same non-verbal cognitive mechanisms as in monolinguals (Chapter 32). The authors agree on the need for a more systematic examination of pragmatics in the changing pragmatic landscape.
Finally, since L2 pragmatics research has shifted its focus unequivocally from ‘pragmatics-within-individuals’ to ‘pragmatics-in-interaction-in-context’ (Culpeper et al. 2018: 6), traditional tools for the study of L2 pragmatics such as discourse completion tests that are based on predetermined speech act categories and task-oriented questionnaires or closed role plays that are heavily context-bound exercises to limit the learners’ freedom of expression are not useful in capturing the interactivity involved in real-world tasks (Romero-Trillo 2018; see Chapter 13, ‘Data collection methods in L2 pragmatics research’, for a thorough overview). In order to further document L2 pragmatic socialization in various languages, communities and contexts, researchers should be aware of the limitations of traditional SLA approaches and adopt alternative approaches to SLA by developing appropriate means and techniques of eliciting data. Relevant to this is how technology can best be leveraged to remove the hurdles in operationalizing pragmatic competence. Technology-assisted instruments, such as the support of corpora and a large computerized dataset, can be manipulated to measure different aspects of L2 pragmatic performance. By using mixed methods (see Chapter 14, which explores how a sequential-mixed methods approach can be taken to generate hypotheses and empirically test them in L2 pragmatics research, and also Chapter 23, ‘Study abroad settings’, and Chapter 28, ‘Individual learner considerations in SLA and L2 pragmatics’, for additional ideas), corpus-based approaches (see Chapter 16, ‘Corpus linguistics approaches to L2 pragmatics research’, for a detailed account, and also Chapter 3, ‘Implicature comprehension in L2 pragmatics research’, Chapter 11, ‘Identity and agency in L2 pragmatics’, and Chapter 20, ‘Assessment in L2 pragmatics’) and experimental pragmatics (see Chapter 18, ‘Psychological approaches to L2 pragmatics research’), researchers can capitalize on the advantage of investigating L2 pragmatics qualitatively and quantitatively in discourse contexts that are ‘naturally occurring or intentionally simulating naturally occurring contexts’ (247).
Written by leading scholars in the field, the contributions have sought to demonstrate why pragmatics is a profitable arena for SLA research and how SLA provides theoretical frameworks and empirical methods to address the constructs and changes within pragmatic systems. While production studies generally outnumber interpretation or comprehension studies in the large body of L2 pragmatics research, the contributions in this volume have managed to balance input-based and output-based approaches, awareness and assessment issues, grammatical and prosodic choices, and well-established and newly-emerging domains.
It would seem more productive, however, if the handbook could give attention to research literature dealing with the learning of pragmatics in an FL context as opposed to an L2 context. As the editor makes clear in her introduction, ‘L2’ is used as a cover term in this volume for ‘foreign language’, ‘target language’, and ‘additional language’ referring to any additional language(s) that learners acquire, including a foreign language (FL) in a formal classroom setting and target language in the context where the language is spoken (11). Despite the fact that the distinction between L2 and FL has become blurry in the current era of globalization, differences should be observed on the role and effect of pragmatic transfer when learners make such efforts in FL compared to L2 situations, instead of taking second language learners as a monolithic group. Given the intricacies involved, the picture would be more holistic if the reports cover both success stories and lessons gained.
Besides, corresponding variations should be recognized regarding the distance between L1 and L2, L2 learners’ sensitivity to contextual constraints, and form of modality in pragmatic transfer. In its comprehensive discussion of and thoughtful commentary on current literature, the assumption that pragmatic transfer happens in all linguistic categories and that oral production can easily be reproduced in the written modality is a bit simple and overgeneralized. Such a reductionist stance is arguably questionable, if not potentially harmful. Evidence must be provided to eliminate (or enhance) the distinction by tapping into empirical findings.
As L2 pragmatics enters its fifth decade, ecologically-oriented researchers are compelled to search for solutions to issues with strong theoretical and pedagogical implications ‘in the context of doing good in the lives of real people’ (156). Although it might sound a little too optimistic, readers would feel inspired to join such an endeavor in resolving the frequently-visited controversies, often-neglected territories and overarching challenges.
