Multilingual pragmatic awareness in collaborative writing

Abstract

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.

ABSTRACT

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.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

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.

Keywords:

• Pragmatic awareness
• pragmatic competence
• collaborative writing
• multilingualism
• politeness

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Conciencia pragmática
• competencia pragmática
• escritura colaborativa
• multilingüismo
• cortesía

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions during the revision process and the editor who provided invaluable comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

As members of the LAELA (Lingüística Aplicada a l’Ensenyament de la Llengua Anglesa) research group at Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain), we would like to acknowledge that this study is part of the research project PID2020-117959GB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. Additional funding has been granted by Generalitat Valenciana (AICO/2021/310), Universitat Jaume I (UJI-B2019-23), Projectes d’Innovació Educativa de la Unitat de Suport Educatiu (46142/22) and Ministerio de Universidades (FPU17/01781).

Notes on contributors

Ignacio Martinez-Buffa

Ignacio Martinez-Buffa is a PhD student in Applied Linguistics at University Jaume I in Castelló (Spain). His research interests include: third language acquisition, engagement pragmatic awareness and pragmatic development.

Pilar Safont

Pilar Safont is a Full Professor of Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism at the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló (Spain). Her research interests involve the development of pragmatic competence by third language learners of English as well as factors influencing third language use and early multilingualism.