The Effect of Content Instruction in L2 on L1 Pragmatics

• Authors: Mehmet Kanik
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This study investigates whether content instruction in English has an impact on L1 pragmatics. In this study a discourse completion test with eight request situations in Turkish was given to three groups of Turkish students enrolled in undergraduate programs in a faculty of education in Turkey. One group of students received most of their education in English. The other two groups received their education in Turkish. An interesting finding is that the differences in the make-up of the situations were only observed in situations with high imposition. This shows that instruction in the foreign language has an impact on sociopragmatic interpretation in L1. Overall, the results reveal that instruction in foreign language has an impact on first language pragmatic use.

Keywords

EN

Language transfer; cross-linguistic influence; pragmatic transfer; L2 effect

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 93-110

Dates

published

2011-12-01

online

2012-01-02

Contributors

author

Mehmet Kanik

• The University of Houston

References

• Airey, J. (2004) Can you teach it in English? Aspects of the language choice debate in Swedish higher education. Retrieved 14 September 2010 from the World Wide Web:
• Al-Eryani, Abdullah A. 2007. "Refusal Strategies by Yemeni EFL learners." The Asian EFL Journal Quarterly 9 (2): 19-34.
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, House, Juliane and Kasper, Gabriele (eds.). 1989. Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.[WoS]
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana and Sheffer, Hadass. 1993. "The Metapragmatic Discourse of American-Israeli Families at Dinner." In Interlanguage Pragmatics, Kasper, Gabriele and Blum-Kulka, Shoshana (eds.), 196-223. Oxford: Oxford Univesity Press.
• Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Chang, Yuh-Fang. 2009. "How to say no: an analysis of cross-cultural difference and pragmatic transfer." Language Sciences 31: 477-493.[WoS][Crossref]
• Cenoz, Jasone. 2003. "The intercultural style hypothesis: L1 and L2 interaction in requesting behaviour." In Effects of the second language on the first, Vivian Cook (ed.), 62-80. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Coleman, James A. 2006. "English-medium teaching in European higher education." Language Teaching 39: 1-14.[Crossref]
• Cook, Vivian. 2003. "Introduction: The changing L1 in the L2 user's mind." In Effects of the second language on the first, Vivian Cook (ed.), 1-18. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Crystal, David. 2003. English as a global language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Gass, Susan. 1979. "Language transfer and universal grammatical relations." Language Learning 29 (2): 327-344.[Crossref]
• Graddol, David. 2000. The future of English? London: The British Council.
• Hassall, Tim. 2003. "Requests by Australian learners of Indonesian." Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1903-1928[Crossref]
• Hudson, Thom, Detmer, Emily and Brown, James D. 1995. Developing prototypic measures of cross-cultural pragmatics. Technical report # 7. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i Press.
• Jarvis, Scott. 2003. "Probing the effects of the L2 on the L1: A case study." In Effects of the Second Language on the First, Vivian Cook (ed.), 120-141. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Jarvis, Scott and Odlin, Terence. 2000. "Morphological type, spatial reference, and language transfer." SSLA 22: 535-556.
• Jia, Yuxin. 2007. "Pragmatic diversity, pragmatic transfer, and cultural identity." Intercultural Communication Studies 16 (2): 37-54.
• Kecskes, Istvan and Papp, Tunde. 2003. "How to demonstrate the conceptual effect of L2 on L1? Methods and techniques." In Effects of the Second Language on the First, Vivian Cook (ed.), 247-265. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
• Kecskes, Itsvan. 2000. "Conceptual fluency and the use of situation-bound utterances in L2." Links & Letters 7: 145-161.
• Lado, Robert. 1957. Linguistics across Cultures. Applied Linguistics for Languag Teachers. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
• Pavlenko, Aneta and Jarvis, Scott. 2002. "Bidirectional transfer." Applied Linguistics 23 (2): 190-214.[Crossref]
• Qu, Jing and Wang, Liying. (2005). Pragmatic transfer in compliment responses by Chinese learners of English. Sino-US English Teaching, 2, 12, 66-75.
• Rose, Kenneth R. 2000. "An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development." SSLA 22: 27-67.
• Sasaki, T. and Beamer, M. S. 2002. "Pragmatic transfer and length of residence in a target language". In JALT2002 Conference Proceedings, M.Swanson and K. Hill (eds.), 379-388. Tokyo: The Japan Association of Language Teaching.
• Seidlhofer, Barbara. 2005. "Key concepts in ELT English as a lingua franca." ELT Journal 59 (4): 339-341.
• Selinker, Larry. 1972 "Interlanguage" IRAL; International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching 10 (3): 209-231
• Silva, Rosangela S. 2000. "Pragmatics, bilingualism, and the native speaker." Language & Communication 20: 161-178.
• Tran, Giao Q. 2007. "The nature of pragmatic and discourse transfer in compliment responses in cross-cultural interaction". The Linguistics Journal 3 (3): 167-205.
• Wannaruk, Anchalae. 2008. "Pragmatic transfer in Thai EFL refusals". RELC Journal 39: 318-337.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10015-011-0017-x