Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

Discourse Analysis (Spring 2004)

Week 9 - PD Chapter 8 - Answers

1.What cause some of the major differences in pragmatic development? (PD)

In this class in certainly throughout your studies in this program we're constantly having our attention focused on learner variables. In the case of pragmatic competence while the variables might seem the same effect is somewhat different. In short will we really need to do is assess these variables not from an internal perspective but more from an external usage based perspective. Here are a few of the main variables that have been studied to date.

Age

Age is one of the most studied variables in second language learning and indeed in language learning in general, but little attention has been played to how age actually works in a pragmatic sense. The idea here is that when we are examining age factors in relation to pragmatic competence or pragmatic development and neurological perspective, as is the general perspective taken in second language acquisition studies, is not necessarily the most helpful. What we need to do is analyzed the situations that children need to speaking and what is expected of them in the situations. It should be clear that as we age the scope of of the world that we are expected to engage in and how we are expected to function within those situations change. In general, it can be said that our world expands as we get older and acquire more language. This doesn't mean that children get substantially different input necessarily than adults. It means that children are asked to respond in a very different way to the same input as adults and this is an important point to remember.

Gender

Gender effects are prevalent in all languages. The way in which these gender-based differences in language use manifest themselves, however, varies from language to language, based to a large extent on the norms of the society. Thus, in traditional Japanese society there was a large distinction held between the roles of men and women and this distinction reflects itself in the language that both are expected to use. The same disinction holds true in all human societies but in different ways and on different scales. Again thinking about age related distinctions pragmatics much for gender distinctions we have been language use are derived from the fact that women are expected to engage in different situations than men as well as behaving differently in the same situation. Since language is the most specific type of human behavior should therefore not be surprising that genders should behave differently. Exactly how each gender is expected to behave in certain situations varies from culture to culture and language to language.

Motivation

The research on motivation is interesting here for a couple of different reasons. The first basic research finding is that motivation plays an important role in the subsequent language learning process, and this includes pragmatic learning. This of course should not come as a surprise to us. Positive correlations between motivation and success have long been identified. So this is not really the most interesting issue. What is interesting here is how motivation seems to have this effect. But the studies on motivation and pragmatic competence reveal it is that learners with higher motivation seem to be able to notice is cultures in the target language better than people with low motivation. This is easily explained when we think about what motivation basically is. Motivation is thought of as a mental state, a kind of equation that we need to make determining how much energy we want to put into a certain issue or area. The key about motivation this way we see that motivation is indeed a mental state but it is a mental state which has a strong physical effect. Learning requires energy. The more energy we free up to be used in the learning process the more aware we can be. So, motivation gives us more energy. Noticing requires energy. If we choose to make distinction, as I think we should, between noticing an attention focus, then we can say that attention focus requires even more energy. Attention focus requires more energy because it requires processing so that things can be connected inside the brain. When the focus attention on something we are drawing on information that we already have to link to the new information so that the new information can be made instantly comprehensible. All this requires a great deal of energy. Motivation seems to beat heat to getting students to be able to do this. Intrinsic motivation obviously does this in a better way to an extrinsic or instrumental motivation because the latter are very much short-term. A wax and wane depending on the situation and the moment which means they're very unreliable. Every interesting thing that they mentioned in relation to the research on motivation and noticing was that proficiency levels didn't seem to have an effect on what code and couldn't be noticed. This observation taken in an experimental situation would make this question the validity of the input hypothesis. Input may not need to be completely comprehensible to be noticed or even processed. This is an important idea to think about.

Social and psychological distance

We have already studied about social psychological distance and how this effects language learning a general sense within the context of general second language acquisition. In pragmatic development this becomes different. The difference here again is not in the psychological modeling of distance but in the effects of distance. From a pragmatic perspective if a learner feels a high degree of distance between his or her own language/culture and language/culture of the target society than they are apt to make wrong decisions about that target language society. In addition to this they will often not be motivated to study or actually use the language. For these two reasons distance has a tremendous to affect on whether the learners will actually use the target language or want to use language and of course then ultimately how they're going to use the target language when forced, as often occurs in the classroom situation. Gnerally people think of distance as diminishing as the learner becomes more familiar with the target language and target language culture. The idea behind this is that familiarity makes things seem more normal. This is not always the case. Familiarity, as has been pointed out by Schumann, can often making seem less normal and cause greater social psychological distance (anomie). As teachers we need to be acutely aware of this particularly when we're following a pragmatic approach which forces students to engage the language and the target language culture through the language. Distance needs to be somehow limited from the very get go, and this limit of distance should also increase the possibility of positive transfer. Too much distance often kills transfer and I certainly think this occurs in Korea much to the detriment of Korean English language learners.

2. Why is social identity so important for pragmatic development? (PD)

We all carry our identities around with us everywhere we go. The matter what role were playing we always had these underlying different roles which we are used playing and can play the conglomeration of which make up the overall state of our identity. As we begin to learn a new language we have to develop new and different roles which correlate more to what we do with that language and how we do them. Should be remembered, however, that even though we have these new roles associated with the new language we still have our own identity of brewing underneath the roles which are floating on the surface of the pot if you remember the drawing I did on the board in class. Our identity, as a subsequent language learner, is never going to be quite the same as native speaker. Our identity is created by our culture or the cultures that we can engage in. when we enter a new cultural setting is almost always the case at some point or another that our identity is going to be in conflict with the identity that that culture is trying to inflict upon us based on their own and different norms. This often leads to problems with language learning and also at language use. We can summarize three different kinds of effects that identity has on pragmatic development.

-It affects how well we notice things in the TL.

-It affects how we evaluate things in the TL.

-It affects the language forms that we use in the TL.

To explain this quickly it should be obvious that our identity will limit what we can and cannot normally notice. Attention focus is based on needs and wants. Our needs and wants are based on what we are interested in, what we like or dislike. There's no way that we are ever going to be able to focus attention on everything that is around us.(Remember when we are being exposed to language we also need to be able to evaluate contextual clues outside of the language as well.) For all the input we get really ever be able to really process a small percentage of it as learners. What we actually due process going to be determined to a large extent by our identities. Because we only process small amounts of the available total data or input we wind up making the wrong evaluations about how different elements of the language are used to create meaning. We come up with the wrong assumptions about how the language actually works. And of course our output is going to be based on these assumptions. This means that our output will probably varies in some ways from that of the native speaker norms which we started off hearing. Because this is a normal process of language learning, there is no way we can avoid identity, then feedback becomes an essential mechanism for dealing with this in the classroom.