![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper examines the resulting qualitative transformation of two students' metapragmatic awareness following a semester abroad in southern France – one of whom had access to a concept-based pragmatics instruction programme (expert-mediation), while the other followed a standard semester programme. The larger study from which these cases are drawn was designed to address the many calls for pedagogical interventions to help students to engage in, interpret, and negotiate the complexities that surround them during study abroad. Through a thematic discourse analysis of pre- and post-programme language awareness interviews, both focal students exhibited development and growth in their metapragmatic awareness but each student's development was markedly different in nature. These case studies show that expert-mediation provided one learner with notably more systematic, reliable, and recontextualisable conceptual knowledge (in comparison to her non-expert-mediated counterpart) through which she could interpret the language use she encountered through everyday interactions abroad. Subsequent theoretical and pedagogical implications are also discussed.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy under the Chateaubriand Fellowship; and the Barbara F. Freed Dissertation Year Award. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments greatly improved the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. This course was an accelerated course, which covered the content of two semesters of Intermediate French in one semester.
2. The journal prompt purposefully avoided the term ‘pragmatic practices’ as students are often unfamiliar with this term. Nevertheless, the students wrote about a wide variety of pragmatic practices including lexical choices (e.g. slang, idioms, speech acts), pronoun selection, phonological contractions/reductions, codeswitching, and question formation (see Henery, Citation2014 for full journal prompt and specific examples).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ashlie Henery
Ashlie Henery is currently a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in the Department of Romance Languages, French Section and the Graduate School of Education, Educational Linguistics Division. She holds a PhD degree in second language acquisition from Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Her research focuses on language learning in the study abroad context, second language pragmatic development, and French language pedagogy from a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective.