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The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students' email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. "International Journal of Applied Linguistics", 17(1), 60-80], requests tend to be more direct and they may not match with the degree of imposition or social distance involved. Students' lack of netiquette and the lack of physical presence on the Internet may influence their pragmatic behaviour. In addition to that, other studies [Barón, J., & Ortega, M. (2018). Investigating age differences in e-mail pragmatic performance. "System", 78, 148-178] point to age effects and further confirm the preference for direct pragmatic forms. Nevertheless, very few studies have adopted a multilingual perspective. For this reason, we have examined 250 email requests to faculty. Openings and requests produced in Catalan, Spanish or English were analysed. Our main goal was to confirm whether students' requests would devoid politeness markers and whether openings would show a lack of netiquette. We were also interested in identifying age and gender effects and in finding out if the pragmatic forms chosen would be in line with the politeness orientation of the language involved. Results are in line with previous studies but they also contradict them adding interesting information on the way multilingualism is displayed in email interaction.

Many languages make a T/V distinction when addressing an interlocutor, and Basque also has two main levels of formality: "zuka" (formal) and "hika" (informal). The peculiarity of the Basque informal form of address "hika" is that its verbal morphology varies depending on the addressee's gender. The use of "hika" has dramatically decreased in most parts of the Basque Country, and even in those areas where it is still widely spoken, the female form (noka) is on the verge of extinction. In this study, we seek to provide data to confirm this decreasing trend to examine the reasons behind such pronounced gender differences in usage. We used a questionnaire consisting of both numeric and narrative parts to elicit data, and 1,247 participants responded. The results corroborate the decreasing tendency found in other studies, and the loss of female forms is attributed to several factors including lack of prestige, transmission gap, and sexism.

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached from a purely syntactic standpoint. We claim that evidentiality and irony play a crucial role in the understanding of IQQs. Because of their special interpretative functions, as well as the fact that they do not appear to have a clear correlate in other languages, we believe IQQs pose a challenge to the second language student, which is why we further offer a step-by-step proposal to introduce IQQs in the Spanish as a second language class.

The objective of the study was to analyze the pragmatic competence of children with cochlear implants (CIs). The researchers explored whether children with CIs participated in communicative exchanges in a similar way to children with typical hearing (TH), as well as how the participation of children with CIs was regulated by the activity they performed. The sample consisted of 31 children with CIs (prelingually deaf, with a hearing age equal to or greater than 2 years) and 31 children with TH. The researchers used two activities to carry out the study: conversation and picture naming. The results showed that the children with CIs participated in longer communicative exchanges than their peers with TH and had greater difficulty providing adequate responses to their interlocutor. The type of linguistic activity and their hearing age influenced the responses of the children with CIs.

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.

This study explores college EFL learners' construction of identity through the analysis of their pragmatic choices in digital stories, in which they narrated their relationship with another person they had helped in the past. More specifically, such choices were examined following Relational Dialectics Theory in learners' enactments of "connection" with and "autonomy" from this person. A specific view of identity in language education, the notion of "relational work" in (im)politeness research, and a social semiotic framework were also employed in data analysis. Learners' pragmatic choices ranged from the selection of the topic of their narratives according to types of social bonds, to the use of specific semiotic resources to build identities in conflict episodes of their stories (i.e., positive identities for themselves and positive and negative identities for their relational partners). The construction of these identities paralleled relational parties' convergent and divergent moves towards connection and autonomy, revealing their relational work. Learners used different semiotic resources in resolution episodes, which enabled them to craft positive identities for themselves as experts, teachers, and learners as well as position their relational partner as a competent agent and shape the connection-autonomy dialectic as "superiority-equality".

This study investigates how previous exposure to a foreign language and culture influences student performance in online knowledge-building tasks. As knowledge-building tasks allow students to share and distribute their knowledge; this study examines whether foreign language and culture knowledge is also distributed amongst the group. The study was conducted in the Catalan region of Spain where the participating grade nine students were learning English as a foreign language and they were all bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish. The students were assessed to determine their previous exposure to the English language and culture, and they were divided into low-, medium-, and high-levels of English language exposure. The students wrote both a pre-test and a post-test before and after the study, and a one-way ANOVA was used to determine whether exposure to English influenced the performances on the tests. The analysis shows that the student scores increased at the same rate across the groups. This indicates that the students did not share their knowledge of the English language and culture with their peers in this online writing task; however, the students generally showed an increase in their comprehension and production of the foreign language. A further analysis of the posts in the forum indicates there were issues with pragmatic variability, which was likely due to the absence of participating native speakers of English.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the production of pragmatic markers (PMs) by multilingual students in a CLIL context. Previous studies have analyzed pragmatic competence in multilingual settings (e.g., Cenoz, 2003; Martín-Laguna & Alcón-Soler, 2015; Portolés, 2015; Safont & Portolés, 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous study has investigated the use of PMs across languages at the oral level in the multilingual classroom. As suggested by Nashaat-Sobhy (2017, p. 69), there is a need for studies that support or refute whether CLIL helps students communicate more appropriately. In an attempt to fill this gap, the overall aim of this research study is to explore how multilingual students use PMs across languages--namely Spanish, Catalan and English--in terms of frequency and type of PM. Participants were 19 Spanish students in an instructional context where three languages are in contact, namely English, Catalan and Spanish. They completed a language background questionnaire and comparable oral decision-making tasks carried out in pairs, one task in each of the target languages. The analysis explored the frequency and type of PMs (i.e. textual and interpersonal markers). Findings revealed significant differences in the frequency and type of both interpersonal and textual PMs across the three languages, shedding some light on the particular characteristics of the pragmatic competence of multilingual learners in a CLIL setting.

Email communication is pervasive in faculty interaction. As there exists status imbalance between students and professors in this type of context, emails are expected to cater for the uneven power relationships by means of using appropriate polite features. Previous research (e.g., Eslami, 2013; Salazar-Campillo & Codina-Espurz, in press) has pointed out the pragmatically deficient use of openings and closings in requestive emails sent by non-native students in educational contexts, revealing a lack of the expected deference and respect to the professor. In this paper, we firstly explore this topic further by looking at different groups of emails written by CLIL students to ascertain whether this variable affects students' pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic ability when writing their emails. Secondly, a proposal for the teaching of openings and closings is suggested, which aims to help second and/or foreign language learners behave in a more target-like manner thus avoiding pragmatic failure.

As academic language skills develop, young learners are able to rise to the challenge of increasingly complex communication in increasingly formal settings (Snow, 2014; Uccelli et al., 2015). Studies suggest that CLIL contexts may favour the development of academic language skills (Dalton-Puffer, 2007; Nikula, 2007; Marsh, 2008; Pasqual Peña, 2010) to a greater extent than non-CLIL contexts. However, research that attempts to test this assumption has so far tended to do so from a pragmalinguistic perspective (Lorenzo & Rodríguez, 2014; Lorenzo, 2017). This paper takes a sociopragmatic approach to exploring the differences between CLIL and non-CLIL contexts regarding how they facilitate the development of early academic language skills. That is, how the communicative intentions that underlie CLIL and non-CLIL classroom discourse may help or hinder the development of such skills. The data were collected by observing classroom discourse in CLIL and EFL primary-school lessons, in Spanish-based and Catalan-based linguistic models. The method followed was to apply a taxonomy of the sociopragmatic level of academic language (Henrichs, 2010) to determine the quality of the conversational style and intersubjective cooperation found in the discourse. The results indicate that CLIL classroom discourse is characterised by the sort of conversational style that facilitates the development of academic language skills. However, in terms of intersubjective cooperation the results are somewhat inconclusive. Based on these results, the study suggests raising awareness of the role of conversational style in classroom discourse so as to boost the quality of teacher-student interactions in primary-school CLIL contexts and, thus, contribute to an identified need for continuous improvement of CLIL pedagogies and teacher training (Lorenzo, 2007; de Graaff et al., 2007).

This study used a pre-test post-test research design to investigate the role of explicit strategy instruction on Spanish English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to write authentic email requests to faculty. Drawing on Taguchi's (2018) classification of pragmatics learning strategies, the instructional intervention followed a strategy-based approach to help learners understand the form-function-context mapping of email requests in the academic context. A total of 110 naturally occurring email requests for action addressed to three faculty members were collected at two different times: as a pre-test (i.e. before engaging learners in the instructional period), and as a post-test (i.e. after learners' participation in the treatment sessions). Learners' email messages were analysed considering both their appropriateness of use as well the frequency of utilization of different structural (i.e. subject line, openings and closings) and content components (i.e. request strategies and internal request modifiers). Results showed that strategy instruction helped learners write more appropriate email requests after the instructional period. The findings suggest that arming learners with a variety of strategic tools may lead to pragmatic development in actual language use.

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the majority of whom are non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. While such reality is widely acknowledged, few attempts have been made to teach pragmatic competence in EIL. Addressing this concern, the present study investigates the effects that a pedagogical intervention on EIL pragmatics has on the oral use of pragmatic markers (PMs): a key tool for successful communication in the current increasingly multicultural and multilingual society. Seventy-three Spanish EFL students were divided into an instructional (n = 34) and a control group (n = 39). The instructional group received 4 interventional sessions that included (1) awareness of the legitimacy of EIL, (2) meta-pragmatic awareness of pragmatic behavior across the world, (3) task-supported instruction on PMs, and (4) strategy-based instruction. Pragmatic competence was assessed by students' use of PMs in oral academic presentations. The results revealed that the instructional group had more significant changes in the frequency and variety of PMs used than the control one, as they widened the repertoire of PMs uttered in their academic presentations. These findings project the future of pragmatic instruction in EIL and provide directions for reorienting the EIL curriculum towards the integration of L2 pragmatics.

The present study deals with the effect of audio-visual material for second language (L2) pragmatic learning in the foreign language classroom. More specifically, it analyzes whether being exposed to captioned and non-captioned input in an experimental condition entailing no instruction on pragmatics might have any influence on the learners' pragmatic performance. To this aim, two intact classes (N = 31) of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1 level were exposed to videos with captions and without captions, respectively. Before and after watching the videos, all the students were asked to carry out a role-play task with situations like those in the videos. A mixed-methods approach was used to analyze the learners' performance in terms of types and number of strategies to perform speech acts (quantitative) and in terms of pragmatic appropriateness (qualitative). Findings show that both groups used more polite strategies after watching the videos, regardless of the captioned/non-captioned condition, which seems to confirm the contribution of audio-visual material for the learning of the L2 pragmatics in an incidental way. Concerning pragmatic appropriateness, we found that learners in the captioned condition produced more pragmalinguistically appropriate role-plays than learners in the non-captioned condition, thus suggesting a positive effect of captioned material on the learning of the L2 pragmatics. Such results are discussed in relation to the few previous similar studies in the field.

By using small focus group discussions, the present study aims to gain insight into students' perceptions about the impact of WhatsApp use in their learning process. More specifically, this study presents a cross-cultural analysis of British and Spanish university students' personal beliefs about the effectiveness of using WhatsApp to complete group tasks outside the classroom. In so doing, this research represents a step forward in technology-enhanced instruction insofar as it not only incorporates the voices of learners themselves, but also contrasts students' beliefs with their group interactions on WhatsApp. The exploration of these WhatsApp interactions makes it possible to argue that the use of WhatsApp does not seem to create a natural context for non-native language users to produce contextualise relevant utterances while interacting with native English speakers. Furthermore, the results show that the lack of pragmatic competence on the part of the participants prevents them from communicating effectively. These pragmatic failures, in turn, have a negative impact on their interpersonal relationships and make them develop negative opinions towards the use of WhatsApp as a learning tool.

This paper focuses on the teaching of pragmatics in English as a Foreign Language classroom and how the traditional way of teaching languages can be challenged. It also aims to highlight the importance of incorporating computer-assisted activities as well as other resources that can be introduced into the classrooms in order to teach pragmatics. Taking into account insights from Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, a teaching proposal is provided to see a great variety of activities and tools that teachers can use in order to keep their students motivated and engaged with language with the main focus on pragmatics. A series of lessons was developed to help 10 and 11-year-old English language learners achieve pragmatic fluency in apologizing. Fifteen students participated in an after-school action research test of the lessons. They enjoyed the learning activities and demonstrated newly-acquired skills. Results from this study reveal that action research is a valuable way to increase teachers' pedagogical knowledge of how pragmatics is learners in instructional settings.

The work at hand is part of a wider study the aim of which was to determine what kind of factors influence failures in pragmatic items of an online adaptive placement test taken by a group of 34 Spanish students in their first year at university. A preceding analysis (Carrió & Martín, 2016) showed the type of personal factors, such as lack of vocabulary, that caused the exam takers failures in the pragmatic part of the test according to their own perception. In this paper, we go deeper and analyze those specific items holding higher percentage of failures so that we can reach some conclusions about its content validity and also about the degree of relationship between these and the pragmatic categories dealt with in the most relevant research carried out in the field of pragmalinguistic testing and assessment.

Nowadays, there is widespread agreement that developing Translation Competence (TC) is the ultimate goal of translator training. Much research has been devoted to the analysis of TC and how it can be used in translation methodology in order to overcome the translation problems that may arise. However, one of the most important components of TC -- the bilingual sub-competence -- has received insufficient attention, which is mirrored in the scarcity of guidelines and teaching materials for developing such a sub-competence. The present article puts forward a framework of reference for analysing and developing "English for Translation and Interpreting" (ETI) materials and examines the only commercially available material of ETI in Spain.

The aim of the present study is twofold: first, it compares full-English-medium instruction (EMI) and semi-EMI learners on a series of motivational and emotional factors (the ought to, and the ideal L2 self-motivational orientations, attitudes towards English, and foreign language anxiety and enjoyment). Second, it investigates the relationship between these individual differences (IDs) and pragmatic marker (PM) use. No previous studies have investigated these phenomena among semi and full EMI learners, despite the recognized need for more research into the effects of IDs and pragmatic learning in EMI settings. Participants were second and third-year EMI students. A monologue and an interaction task were used to obtain oral data, and questionnaires were used to gather data on IDs. Results showed that EMI and semi-EMI groups did not differ according to motivational orientation. However, there were significant differences between learner's motivations depending on the year of study, where third year learners were more ought to self-motivated than second-year learners. Other findings revealed that both strong ought to L2 self-oriented learners as well as learners who enjoyed EMI demonstrated an increased frequency of PM use and that learners with positive attitudes towards English reported stronger ideal L2 selves.

Content and language integrated learning has become a common practice in European higher education. In this paper, I aim to describe how this integrated teaching practice comes as a result of a paradigmatic and pedagogical evolution. For this purpose, the main linguistic paradigms will be revisited diachronically, followed by a revision of the main pedagogical trends in teaching English as a second language. This theoretical overview culminates in a predominantly constructivist practice that is more pragmatic and contextualized than ever before. From a language teacher's standpoint and in language university classrooms, content and language integrated learning comes to solve the forever present decontextualization.

This article explores the illusory transparency phenomenon in childhood and tests two accounts of the phenomenon: the construal and the naïve (pragmatic) accounts. One hundred nine children between 8 and 13 years old participated in an adapted task of illusory transparency. Children read a story in which a character wrote an ambiguous message to another (addressee) that could be interpreted as sarcastic, which was dependent on information known only to the writer (privileged knowledge). The reader of the message could be the addressee or an accidental reader. We asked children about the intention of the writer to be sarcastic and whether the reader interpreted it as sarcastic. Also, we asked explicitly whether the reader could have had access to the privileged knowledge. The results showed illusory transparency of intention in children, as had been shown in adults. Moreover, while attribution of sarcastic intention increased with age, the magnitude of the illusory transparency did not. The results from an explicit measure support the pragmatic account: Children attributed more capacity of knowledge to the addressee than to the accidental reader. However, the implicit (traditional) measure suggests the implication of construal operations. We propose that these results are due to the fact that information processing operates in two different ways, consistent with each approach. The developmental results are discussed.

Considering the acquisition of past tense uses by L2 Spanish advanced learners with closely related L1s (French, Portuguese), this study attempts to identify factors associated with variability, such as negative transfer or interface integration. We report data on the acquisition, by adult L1 French and Portuguese learners at B2 and C1 CEFR levels, of Spanish tense-aspect morphology: simple and compound past (SP, CP), imperfect (IMP), progressive (PROG), and pluperfect (PLP) forms, and from a control group of European Spanish speakers' use and interpretation of these tenses. Data were collected through a film oral retell and two written interpretation tasks; the second written task (a follow-up task), was performed only by L1 French speakers. In the oral task, comparing both L1 backgrounds, negative transfer is more pervasive for the Portuguese groups. However, in the interpretation tasks, the French speakers showed greater difficulties, linked not only to L1 transfer but also to nonprototypical tense/aspect associations and pragmatically based temporal reference. The data suggest, in relation to Lardiere's (2008, 2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, that both feature reassembly and interface integration are sources of variability in the acquisition of L2 interpretable features that are also present in the L1.

The benefits of instruction on learners' production and awareness of speech acts is well documented (see Alcon and Martinez-Flor, 2008, for a review of pragmatics in instructional contexts). However, few studies examine the influence that instruction may have on the cognitive processes involved in speech act production (Felix-Brasdefer, 2008). In order to address this research gap, and taking into account the discussion in research on the concept of attention and related terms such as awareness (see Al-Hejin, 2004, for a review of the role of attention and awareness in second language acquisition research) this paper reports on the benefits of instruction on learners' attention and awareness during the performance of refusals. Thus, based on a pedagogical proposal for teaching refusals at the discourse level, we focus on the benefits that this pedagogical proposal can have on the information attended to during the planning and execution of refusals. Secondly, we explore whether instruction makes a difference in learners' awareness of refusals. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)

In this paper we present the coreferential tagging of part of the EPEC Corpus of Basque. Although coreference is a pragmatic linguistic phenomenon highly dependent on the situational context, it shows some language-specific patterns that vary according to the features of each language. Due to the fact that Basque is not an Indo-European language, it differs considerably in grammar from the languages spoken in surrounding areas. We will explain these features and the decisions made in each case. After describing the criteria defined for coreferential tagging in Basque, the annotation process will be explained. Our annotation is based on a morphologically and syntactically annotated corpus that provides us with a manageable environment, in which the specific structures that are part of a reference chain can be more easily identified. A part of the corpus was tagged by two annotators who marked up the same text independently, and by another annotator that acted as judge, solving problems in case of disagreement. All this process has been automatized as a result of previous studies carried out in this field. The automatic detection of mentions (Soraluze et al., in: Proceedings of Konvens, 2012) has provided us with a better working environment, and given us the possibility to build a first significant corpus for a later computational treatment of automatic coreferential resolution.

Nominal and pronominal address forms, which play a central role in the construction of interpersonal relations (cf. Bargiela et al. 2002; Clyne et al. 2009), have been the focus of attention in different linguistics subfields for several decades now. Less attention, however, has been paid to these forms from a variational pragmatics (Schneider and Barron 2008) perspective, particularly in Spanish. Using a corpus of role play interactions, we examine the impact of region and gender on nominal address usage among male and female university students from Quito (Ecuador), Santiago (Chile) and Seville (Spain). We look at how these forms are employed in rapport management (Spencer-Oatey 2008 [2000]) in two situations: giving advice and making a direct complaint (Boxer 1993). Building on work on nominal forms (cf. Leech 1999; McCarthy and O'Keeffe 2003), we examine similarities and differences in their use across the three varieties of Spanish. Among the findings recorded was a larger repertoire of nominal forms in the Santiago and Quito data sets relative to the Seville corpus, with the highest frequency of use in Santiago. We suggest that address usage in the dyadic contexts examined is connected to the expression of affect and involvement, with Chileans (Santiago) and Ecuadorians (Quito) displaying more affect than Spaniards (Seville). Contrary to early research suggesting that women employ more affiliative language than men (cf. Lakoff 1975), overall, males in the present study were found to use address forms more frequently than females across the three locations.

The study deals with the effect of instruction and study abroad (SA) on pragmatic knowledge. More specifically, the focus is on gains in explicit knowledge of request mitigators, and whether learners draw on this knowledge when they perform email requests. Email requests produced by 60 Spanish students staying abroad (30 treatment/30 control group) were analysed as regards the frequency of internal mitigators on four separate occasions. Findings from the present study show that as length of SA increases participants compare explicit knowledge gained from pragmatic instruction with what happens in real email communication. As a result, although individual variation is observed, we notice a general pattern towards a decrease in the use of request mitigators and towards accepted patterns of email interaction in the community in which students find themselves.

Introduction: Having spent twenty years of business and professional development from the emergence of speech and hearing teacher traveling, it seems appropriate to reflect on the role he has been playing this figure in order to apprehend the things considered to improve the approach to adopt towards to promote the quality of its educational activities. This study aims to contribute to the understanding of the educational work of these professionals doing a tour of the methodological approaches that support it, while analyzing the organization and teaching strategies that perform and the types of resources and materials used. Method: The object-problem of this study will conduct an analysis of the situation faced by mobile professionals for hearing and speech and deepen the study of the methodology and resources that characterize the action being carried out. The research now presented is within the ambit interpretive approach or paradigm, and that the nature of the offense under investigation, for the very purpose of the research activity, for how to address the analysis and interpretation of data and qualitative methodology from which we use for making information. Results: The results show that the methodology developed by teachers of speech and hearing itinerant has a high penetration of clinical intervention models and therapeutic, with a strong presence of activities and resources focused on fonoarticulatorios components. Discussion and conclusions: The main focus of its activities are focused on reproductive repetitive procedures in which the predominant action of the teacher, not working the contents of other areas or activities are generally assigned to regular classrooms.

This paper reviews a selection of doctoral theses on language learning and teaching completed in Spain between 2008 and 2010. A total of 16 theses have been identified as representative--in terms of the topics under investigation and the methodology employed--of the doctoral research undertaken in Spain. Current topics include the development of speaking skills, motivation, learner autonomy, pragmatics, learning context, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), language learning by immigrant populations and, especially, classroom teaching. A variety of research methods were employed in the theses under review, and while most of them focus on adult learners, some also consider children. The interest of researchers in these topics is consistent with the challenges faced by language teachers in Spain, as well as with the new realities of teaching in this country, with its recently-arrived immigrant population, the expansion of CLIL programmes and the use of new technologies.

This article draws on interactional pragmatics and a cross-cultural approach (UK, France, Spain) to investigate the negotiation of individual and group identities in two different speech events, parliamentary debates and editorial meetings. The cross-cultural examination of the use of linguistic resources for signalling "social role, boundaries and bonds" (Chilton, P., "Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice". London: Routledge, 2004, p. 48) serves to explore how speakers use language strategically to position themselves and others, renegotiate or resist positioning, offer rallying points and forge "defensible alignments" (Goffman, E., "Forms of Talk". Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981, p. 325). In the case of personal deixis, it shows that both quantitative and qualitative methods can be used to pinpoint cultural specificities--for example, a more frequent use of explicit performatives in the Spanish and, particularly, the French data to hedge commitment to propositions, and, in English-language parliamentary debate, a use of truth hedging signalling strong commitment for coercive interactive positioning. In the case of indeterminacy of reference, in, for example, the use of "asides", in the English-language editorial meeting humour was used to bond participants in the pursuit of common goals; cultural allusion and references in Latin and English were used in the Spanish parliament for positioning; verbal wit and virtuosity were particularly important in the community of practice of the French parliament. (Contains 2 tables, 13 extracts, and 3 notes.)

With its focus on the use of language forms in cultural context, the study of pragmatics can be a valuable component in a program that prepares students to learn both language and culture in study abroad. The goal of the present study is to propose a model for pragmatic instruction in study abroad that fosters both intercultural competence and language skills, is informed by research and practice, and takes advantage of the affordances that an immersion environment and new technologies offer. The article provides an overview of the pertinent research, discusses the pedagogical implications of an ethnographic research project on the acquisition of Spanish pragmatics in study abroad, and presents a model for pragmatic instruction in the study abroad context. (Contains 6 notes, 5 tables, and 3 figures.)

This study addresses the development of the request strategies used in two service encounter scenarios by 31 nonnative speakers of Spanish spending 4 months living and studying in Valencia, Spain. The main method of data collection was an open role-play in which participants interacted with a Spanish native speaker. Results show that while there were some aspects of the learners' request production that changed after the study abroad experience, there were other aspects that remained unaffected. Knowing which aspects from the nonnative speakers' request production are acquired and which ones are not after a student has been immersed in the target culture for 4 months is relevant to informing second language acquisition, specifically the field of interlanguage pragmatics in the study abroad setting. (Contains 1 note and 3 tables.)

The use of multimedia technologies in language teaching and learning has become very popular in the last few years. In the case of countries like Spain, multimedia language schools have experienced a great boom and a dramatic fall in the last 10 years. This study applies marketing research techniques to the study of Catalan learners' preferences regarding different types of language schools, with a particular focus on schools that use multimedia technologies, as opposed to other methods used by language learners. The study uses a k-means cluster analysis to identify four different groups of potential learners, and it later applies a factor analysis in order to determine the main constraints in learners' choices regarding their preferred language schools. This analysis reveals that learners' answers are organized around the following three factors: "Accessibility", "Teaching Quality", and "Pragmatism". Finally, it is concluded that multimedia language schools are perceived in a rather positive way, but are also regarded as in need of more "Teaching Quality" and "Pragmatism". (Contains 5 figures and 8 tables.)

To prepare learners for successful communication is nowadays one of the main goals of teaching practices of lecturers of English as a Second (ESL) or Foreign (EFL) language in the University setting. Consequently, language teaching needs to focus not only on linguistic or strategic aspects of the target language, but also on the development of the learner's pragmatic competence, which refers to the ability of employing target-language linguistic resources in an appropriate way for a particular context. Given this necessity, instruction in pragmatics has recently motivated a lot of research (Rose & Kasper, 2001; Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003; Martínez-Flor, Usó-Juan & Fernández-Guerra, 2003; Alcón & Martínez-Flor, 2005). Additionally, this need is stronger in the foreign language setting, since the opportunities to be in contact with authentic language use outside the classroom are very limited (Rose, 1999). In an attempt to contribute to this area of research, in this paper we present a comprehensive pedagogical framework, called the 6Rs Approach, aimed at providing EFL lecturers with a pedagogical tool that may help them to integrate pragmatics in their teaching syllabi. This guiding framework, which has been elaborated on previous approaches and techniques from the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), focuses on requests and suggestions as two speech acts that may intrinsically threaten the hearer's face and, therefore, need to be performed in an appropriate way for their successful completion.

The present study examines pragmatic production of monolingual (L1 Castilian) and bilingual (L1 Catalan, L2 Castilian) learners of English in a foreign language learning context, that of the Valencian Community in Spain. We particularly focused on proficiency-level effects and on the role of the task type in the use of request acts peripheral modification devices. We ascertained participants' degree of bilingual competence by means of a bilingualism test, which was designed on the basis of previous research (Li Wei, 2000). Additionally, a level placement test was distributed to our participants, and their performance was assessed on the basis of the ACTFL proficiency guidelines. Data for our analysis were collected by means of an open discourse completion test and a role-play task. Results from our analysis point to differences between bilinguals' and monolinguals' use of peripheral modification devices. More specifically our study shows that (1) L3 learners of English employed request modifiers more frequently and appropriately than L2 English learners, (2) intermediate learners performed better than beginner learners both in the oral and written task, and (3) the written task allowed for a wider use of peripheral modification devices although results also show that internal modification devices were highly employed in the oral task. Findings from our study seem to call for further research on the pragmatic competence of third language learners of English thereby considering other speech acts or pragmatic aspects and also by analysing subjects from different linguistic backgrounds. (Contains 6 tables and 8 figures.)

This article presents the results of an exploratory empirical study into the perception of conventionally indirect requests in British English and Peninsular Spanish, given the high incidence of the pragmatic category over others in its encoding of politeness in both related and unrelated languages (cf. Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). More specifically, the article focuses on the similarities and differences between Britons and Spaniards with regard to the speaker's assumed expectations of compliance in choosing from the conventionally indirect spectrum. In other words, the focus is on how (un)certain the speaker was that the addressee would comply with the request when s/he chose a particular conventionally indirect request. The data for this study were collected via an open role play, post-performance interviews and questionnaires. The results obtained show that, in comparable situations, the Spaniards were generally more certain that the addressee would comply with the request than the Britons. It is argued that conventional indirectness appears to reflect different social meanings in English and Spanish and that such differences should be taken into account when analysing the realization patterns of pragmatic categories in language.

Background: Children with genetic conditions are at increased risk for mental health and neurodevelopmental problems, often accompanied by significant parental distress. Genetic and family factors can impact children and parents' mental health. Early parenting interventions, like the Incredible Years® programs, have demonstrated to improve parental distress and children's mental health. The recent version for young children with language delays or autism spectrum disorder (IY-ASLD®) has shown to be feasible and effective to support parents in their children's developmental trajectories. The effectiveness of treatments for children with genetic conditions and neurodevelopmental problems is largely unexplored, leaving significant gaps in evidence-based options. Clinicians lack guidance, especially when patients exhibit language or social communication impairments but do not meet diagnostic criteria for a full-blown autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We aim to fill this gap, providing evidence on the feasibility and effectiveness of the IY-ASLD® intervention for such patients. Methods: We designed a prospective multicenter pragmatic randomized controlled trial including approximately 68 children aged 3 to 7 years, recruited from three tertiary care reference hospitals. Inclusion criteria will necessitate genetic confirmation of a neurodevelopmental disorder along with language, communication, or socialization difficulties. Individuals with an ASD diagnosis will be excluded. All subjects are included in a territorial register for rare conditions (ReMin, Registre de Malalties Minoritàries de Catalunya). Families will randomly be assigned to the intervention or the control group. The intervention will be held online by clinical psychologists and child and adolescent psychiatrists. Discussion: Our group has recently piloted the online implementation of the IY-ASLD® intervention for the first time in Spain, for parents of children with language delays, socialization difficulties, or ASD, but not genetically determined. Our multicenter research consortium is well-positioned to recruit patients with rare conditions and implement efficient treatment pathways within the National Health System. Given the geographical dispersion of families affected by rare conditions, the online format offers logistical advantages and improved therapy access, enhancing homogeneity across all patients. The results of this study will inform clinicians and policymakers about evidence-based treatment options for this vulnerable and overlooked group of young children. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT06125093. Date of registration: first submitted 2023–10-23; first posted 2023–11-09. URL of trial registry record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: One of the most challenging linguistic areas in people with Williams Syndrome throughout their evolutionary stage is the development of pragmatic skills. The research conducted so far highlights specific problems concerning adaptation to the linguistic context and interlocutors, language comprehension, as well as other aspects interfering with verbal communication. However, until now, most scientific evidence has been based on personal assessments of this group. In a complementary manner, the goal of this study was to discover the level of pragmatic skills of people with Williams Syndrome from the point of view of the families. The sample consisted of 34 families belonging to the Williams Syndrome Association of Spain. The assessment instrument was the pragmatic awareness questionnaire, which includes 26 items related to different aspects that are part of the pragmatic area on a Likert-type scale. Results: The results indicate that, families consider there to be a regular to low level in all the areas assessed. The strong points seem to lie in the paralinguistic aspects, while the weakest factors are those related to the understanding of figurative language. Conclusions: Therefore, it is necessary to continue insisting on the importance of language intervention in this group throughout its development to improve its level of linguistic competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The concept of multimodal metaphor has generated a growing body of literature over the past decades. However, a systemic review of the domain seems to be lacking in relevant literature. This study, therefore, is an attempt to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the field of multimodal metaphor during 1977-2022, with a focus on 397 relevant publications retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) with the visualization tool VOSviewer. Some major quantitative findings are: (i) the number of publications in multimodal research began to surge in 2010 upon the seminal work of Forceville's (2009); (ii) USA, China and Spain are the most productive countries; (iii) journals in the field of advertising, communication and linguistics are important sources of publications; and (iv) eleven clusters of keywords are identified, such as "visual metaphor", "persuasion", "pictures", "impact", "multimodal metaphor", "model", etc., representing crucial areas of interests. We also identified, by qualitative observations, three research trends in multimodal metaphor, driven by cognitive linguistic theory, the theory of pragmatics and visual/multimodal rhetoric theory, respectively. Various theoretical perspectives may shed light on possible further research on multimodal metaphor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]