The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics

Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22
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Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp. 563-578
Abbreviation: KASELL
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Received 09 May 2022 Revised 18 Jun 2022 Accepted 30 Jun 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202206.563

Investigating the features of L2 Pragmatic Competence in Conversation from Role-Play Interaction
Soo Jung Youn ; Panjanit Chaipuapae
(1st author) Assistant Professor, English Education Department, Daegu National University of Education, Tel: 053) 620-1425 (sjyoun@dnue.ac.kr)
(co-author) Lecturer, Department of Foreign Languages, Faculty of Humanities, Kasetsart University Bangkok, Thailand (panjanit.c@ku.th)


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss what second language (L2) pragmatic competence in conversation entails by demonstrating varying interactional patterns of English L2 learners’ role-play performances. Data came from a role-play interaction corpus of adult English as a Second Language (ESL) learners with varying first languages. Using a conversation analytic approach, we demonstrate the turn-by-turn characteristics of role-play task performances of learners at different levels of pragmatic competence. The various example performances suggest that high-level learners utilized a range of resources, ranging from diverse grammatical resources to interactional resources, such as effective turn organizations and acknowledgement tokens to maintain the continuity of talk. The findings reveal that pragmatically appropriate conversation entails multi-dimensional components, including grammatical complexity and accuracy in a single response, as well as various interactional strategies, such as contextualizing an upcoming talk and repairing communication breakdown which are important for context-appropriate interactional achievement. We discuss concrete characteristics of pragmatically appropriate conversation, as well as suggestions for how a task-based approach could assist teaching pragmatics to L2 learners.

Keywords: L2 pragmatics, role-play task, interactional competence, conversation analysis
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