Fostering EF/SL learners’ meta-pragmatic awareness of complaints and their interactive effects

Abstract

This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed or the socio-pragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many didactic materials do not address holistically. Integrating relevant findings about complaint behaviour from pragmatics and various neighbouring disciplines, these pedagogical steps combine distinct teaching approaches and include production tasks and guidelines for assessment. Moreover, these steps also comprise an account of some communicative effects of complaints from the cognitive framework of relevance theory with a view to fostering learners’ meta-psychological awareness.

Keywords:

• direct/indirect complaints
• teaching pragmatics
• meta-pragmatic awareness
• meta-psychological awareness
• relevance theory

Notes

1. Reference to the speaker and hearer is made through the third person singular feminine and masculine pronouns, respectively.

2. Edmondson and House (1981) differentiate ritual and substantive illocutions, wherewith speakers attempt to achieve some conversational outcome.

3. Solidarity systems are characterised by low distance and no power-difference, whilst deference ones by high distance, regardless of status differences (Scollon & Wong-Scollon, 1995).

4. For a discussion about their (dis)advantages, see Garcés-Conejos Blitvich (2006) and Cohen (2006).

5. See Padilla Cruz (2013) for details about these activities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Manuel Padilla Cruz

Manuel Padilla Cruz (PhD degree in English Language and Linguistics) is an associate professor at the Department of English Language of the University of Seville. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in English as an L2, pragmatics and pragmatics applied to SLT. His research falls mainly within the areas of cognitive pragmatics (relevance theory), social pragmatics (politeness theory) and interlanguage pragmatics. Apart from some manuals, he has co-edited four collections that address different topics in pragmatics and published papers in various international journals.