Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: Learning How To Do Things With Words in a Study Abroad Context (review)

Research in interlanguage pragmatics(ILP) as a subfield of second language acquisition (SLA)—largely being modeled on and adopting the research topics, theories, and methodology of cross-cultural pragmatics—has traditionally been focused on politeness issues and the investigation of nonnative speaker comprehension and production (pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic) of speech acts, such as requests, apologies, refusals, complaints, compliments, and compliment responses. Moreover, unlike other subfields of SLA, ILP has predominately been concerned with L2 use of pragmatic knowledge rather than its development, and pragmatic competence has been treated and investigated as an independent component of a learner’s grammar. Recently, a number of publications by leading scholars in the field have recognized a lack of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies which explore truly acquisitional and developmental issues and have called for an expanded research agenda.

Anne Barron’s book comes as a timely contribution to this discussion since it addresses two important issues: the development of L2 pragmatic competence and the effects and influence of the year abroad, that is, the question of how a prolonged period of studying in a country in which the target language is spoken affects L2 proficiency in general, and pragmatic competence in particular. The book reports on a longitudinal study designed to investigate the development of the L2 pragmatic competence of thirty-three Irish learners of German as a foreign language who were observed over a period of ten months they spent studying in various parts of Germany.

Adopting a speech-act based approach, the study is focused on L2 learner production of requests, offers, and refusals of offers and aims to determine (i) if there is evidence of changes in learners’ L2 pragmatic competence toward or away from the L2 norm over the time spent in the target speech community, (ii) if there is an increase or decrease of pragmatic transfer, and (iii) what implications potential changes in L2 pragmatic competence may have for our understanding of L2 pragmatic development.

Ch. 1 (1–5) introduces the setting, objectives, and implications of the study and emphasizes that apart from aiming to contribute to a better understanding of IL pragmatic development, this research is also relevant for policy decisions with respect to the year abroad and for the teaching of German as a foreign language.

Ch. 2, ‘A pragmatic approach’ (7–34), outlines the theoretical and terminological framework in which the study is situated and deals with key concepts in the field of (learner) pragmatics, such as pragmatic competence and speech acts, politeness theories, discourse analysis, and cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics. Ch. 3 (35–78) discusses acquisitional issues in learner pragmatics and addresses topics such as pragmatic transfer, the interrelationship of grammatical and pragmatic competence, and input. Both chapters present an excellent, well-written, and accessible overview of the field, its achievements, and open questions, and also review existing longitudinal and cross-sectional studies on developmental issues and the year abroad.

Ch. 4 (79–154) describes the research design and discusses the data collection instruments used (both production and metapragmatic data were elicited by means of discourse completion tasks, metapragmatic assessment, role-playing, and retrospective interviews), the informants, the types of speech acts investigated, and the criteria that were applied to evaluate and analyze the data. This chapter provides a well informed, critical, and balanced discussion of central issues of research methodology in ILP and acknowledges the importance of data triangulation, which is often neglected in empirical studies.

Ch. 5 (155–235) presents the data analysis, and Ch. 6 (237–66) the conclusion. The book ends with an extensive and highly informative appendix (321–83) and an author and subject index.

To sum up, this volume is an important contribution to research in ILP. It is a very carefully designed and conducted study, clear and convincing in its structure, terminology, and argumentation, which everyone with an...