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Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these aspects in mind, this paper focuses on the pragmatic awareness of multilingual learners while they are performing a collaborative writing task in three different languages, namely those of Catalan, Spanish, and English. The corpus consists of recordings from 30 university students' oral interactions while working in pairs to write three email request messages. In an attempt to provide a holistic and ecological account of learners' performance, pragmatic-related episodes were identified by considering Brown and Levinson's politeness features (1987) and Leech's (1983) approach to pragmatic competence. Results are in line with previous studies tackling multilingual learners of English and they provide us with interesting insights about the mechanisms that multilingual students activate when planning and performing pragmatic production tasks during collaborative work. Las investigaciones llevadas a cabo en torno a la conciencia pragmática de los estudiantes de lenguas se han centrado principalmente en la lengua meta. Tal y como exponen algunos académicos, se debería también adoptar una perspectiva multilingüe en el análisis de la conciencia pragmática. De hecho, las pruebas existentes nos señalan las peculiaridades que caracterizan la comprensión y la conciencia pragmática multilingüe. Teniendo en cuenta estos aspectos, este artículo se centra en la conciencia pragmática de estudiantes multilingües al momento de realizar una tarea colaborativa en tres lenguas diferentes, concretamente catalán, castellano e inglés. El corpus analizado consiste en las grabaciones orales de 30 estudiantes universitarios que, en parejas, redactaron conjuntamente tres correos electrónicos donde se formula una petición. Los episodios pragmáticos fueron identificados siguiendo las características de cortesía propuestas por Brown y Levinson (1987) al igual que el enfoque adoptado por Leech (1983) hacia la competencia pragmática en un intento de dotar de una visión más holística y ecológica al estudio. Los resultados coinciden con investigaciones previas que abordan estudiantes multilingües de inglés y nos proveen de un nuevo entendimiento sobre los mecanismos que dichos estudiantes activan al momento de planificar y realizar tareas con un componente pragmático y colaborativo. Multilingual speakers can find similarities and differences between the languages they know. This is of great help when they are learning words or sentences in a new language. But to learn a language means more than just grammar and vocabulary. In everyday life, we make decisions about what, when and how to say things depending on where we are and who we are talking to. This capacity, known as pragmatic competence, comes naturally when socialising and helps us to be polite. Societies have their own rules of politeness and we must pay attention to them when learning languages. For this reason, we studied Spanish-Catalan bilinguals who were learning English at a university level to observe if they were aware of the politeness rules for each of the three languages. In pairs, learners wrote one email in every language asking for favours to their professors. We discovered that these learners were able to collaboratively decide on the best sentences to ask politely and sound formal based on their cultural ideas about the kind of relationship that exists between a student and a professor. We also observed that when having difficulties to sound polite in English, these multilingual learners activated their knowledge of Spanish to successfully find an answer to the problem. We would recommend language experts to create activities that help learners develop their awareness of politeness when speaking or writing, and take advantage of all the languages learners know so they can continue learning new additional ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Pragmalingüística is the property of Facultad de Filosofia y Letras, Universidad de Cadiz and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we study the use of the verbs “poder” and “conseguir” among basic level learners of Portuguese as a foreign language. These verbs in context are discussed from a semantic-pragmatic perspective, in the light of modal theories such as those of Kratzer (1977; 1981; 1991; 2008; 2012) and others, as well as the classical notions of “accomplishment” and “achievement”, according to Vendler (1957; 1967), Dowty (1979), Abusch (1985) and Smith (1997). Since the Brazilian-Portuguese (BP) and South American Spanish language pairs differ in several aspects, the objective is to verify weather or not non-facilitative transfer from Spanish to Portuguese occurs, according to Cabrelli et al. (2020). By analyzing the occurrences of these verbs in oral speech during classroom moments, the study suggests the possibility of adopting practices to raise awareness of these differences between BP and Spanish so that learners can use these forms appropriately according to their context of use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Apuntes Universitarios: Revista de Investigación is the property of Universidad Peruana Union Filiar Tarapoto and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Due to the development of communicative methods, foreign language teaching has added to educational planning and didactic material the pragmatic competence as an essential component of the communicative competence. For such a new methodological guidance pragmatic strategies and pragmatic tactics are essential for the interaction, because they guide the pragmatic inferences that are generated during the conversation. Nevertheless, despite including many linguistic resources with high potential pragmatic value, handbooks do not give them the prominence they deserve. This piece of work shows how a teacher can reorganize the contents of any handbook from a pragmatic perspective in order to exploit the grammatical resources as tactics at the service of pragmatic strategies, contributing this way to the development of the students' communicative competence. In particular, this piece of work presents an analysis of a SFL handbook to extract all possible pragmatic contents and a didactic proposal to teach the use of bueno as a discourse marker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the difficulties of the humour teaching-learning process within the educational context of teaching Spanish as a foreign language (SFL). This aspect is essential in the full progress of the pragmatic competence and it is a fundamental component of the communicative competence that the student of a foreign language (FL) or a second language (L2) must be able to develop. Therefore, we will analize what are the problems that underlie the didactic units which have been developed in order to determine the main keys to reach a satisfactory humoristic didactic unit. Moreover, a stand-up comedy didactic unit will be proposed and the results that this didactic unit has obtained in the SFL class will be commented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of GIST: Education & Learning Research Journal is the property of Institucion Universitaria Colombo Americana (UNICA) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)