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Pragmatic competence is essential for communicative competence, yet under-researched in Saudi EFL contexts, particularly within the post-pandemic shift to digital instruction. This study investigates online learning as a transformative site for pragmatic development, examining Saudi EFL undergraduates’ pragmatic awareness within this digital context and the influence of gender, age, and GPA. A quantitative design utilized an online questionnaire with authentic scenarios. Data from 138 students, analyzed via t-tests and ANOVA, revealed that most students perceived the online environment as beneficial for developing pragmatic awareness. Participants demonstrated notable competence in specific digital interactions. While no significant differences were found based on gender or age, GPA emerged as a key factor. This study contributes to digital pragmatics research by empirically positioning the post-pandemic online classroom as a viable space for metapragmatic development, not merely a compensatory tool. It challenges demographic assumptions, highlighting academic profile as a primary differentiator in this new learning ecology. Pedagogically, it argues for intentionally leveraging online platforms to design targeted, authentic pragmatic practice for diverse learners.

This book deals with early multilingual acquisition from a holistic, dynamic, and multilingual perspective. It focuses on the analysis of pragmatic awareness and language attitudes of consecutive multilingual children in relation to other variables, such as the linguistic model or the age factor. This volume makes an important contribution to the field, providing evidence for the Dynamic Model of Multilingualism proposed by Herdina and Jessner.

The present study investigates the relationship between initial learner motivation, engagement, and pragmatic development within a self-access web-based instructional environment. Focused on the development of awareness and production of English email requests to faculty, the study involved 65 first-year English Studies students at a Spanish public university. Motivation was assessed qualitatively through open-ended responses which were classified as having Pragmatic orientation, Linguistic orientation, or No orientation. Engagement was captured multidimensionally via project-linked indices of behavioural, cognitive, and affective involvement. Findings reveal that initial motivation predicted greater overall engagement, including increased time invested and deeper cognitive processing. A distinct modality gap was identified: while engagement related positively to pragmatic gains, it exerted stronger effects on awareness than production. Most crucially, profile analyses revealed that sustained engagement can override initial motivational deficits. Learners who entered the module with no initial orientation but still engaged at a moderate level significantly outperformed unmotivated, disengaged peers and achieved gains comparable to those of more motivated students. These findings underscore the mediating role of engagement in pragmatic instruction and advocate for specific motivational and engagement assessments over general scales to better account for the effects of these individual differences in L2 pragmatic gains.

Despite the conspicuous momentum of research on L2 pragmatic competence, this construct is not adequately represented in in-service high school teachers’ professional development programs in Iran. This study investigated the impact of an awareness-raising workshop on in-service high school English language teachers’ (a) pragmatic awareness and (b) attitudes towards instructed pragmatics. The participants were divided into a control group (CG) ( N =21) and an experimental group (EG) ( N =24). The workshop intended for EG was held in four 3-h sessions over 2 weeks, rotating on pragmatic competence and the instruction of speech acts, implicature, and pragmatic routines. Pragmatic awareness was measured through a 12-item test, wherein the participants detected problems in the pre-given apology and request statements, and produced, in written form, their own speech acts. Moreover, attitudes were probed through a 30-item scale developed by the researchers on the basis of two focus-group interviews. The results showed that (a) CG and EG made significant gains in their pragmatic awareness from the pretest to the posttest, but EG’s gain was significantly greater, and (b) EG, but not CG, held more positive attitudes towards instructed pragmatics at the post-treatment phase. The study has implications for high school language teachers’ professional development programs.

This study investigates the levels and patterns of pragmatic awareness among Thai learners of French, comparing advanced and beginner groups with native French speakers. The research aims to assess sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic awareness, focusing on how factors such as power dynamics, social distance, and conventional language forms influence language use. Data was collected from sixty participants through a seven-point Likert scale and speech act analysis tasks evaluating the appropriateness of requests and suggestions across diverse social contexts. Quantitative analysis using analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed significant differences between Thai learners and native speakers, with native speakers exhibiting higher pragmatic awareness. However, differences between advanced and beginner Thai learners were minimal. Qualitative analysis highlighted Thai learners’ struggles with indirect speech acts and limited understanding of negative politeness strategies in French. Their perceptions of power and social distance were influenced by Thai cultural norms rooted in hierarchical society, affecting their pragmatic choices. The findings emphasize the need to integrate sociocultural factors and pragmatic competence into language instruction. This integration will better prepare learners to navigate intercultural communication challenges, moving beyond grammatical proficiency to foster effective and contextually appropriate language use.

Promoting the sustainable development of rural EFL students’ English ability is a vital issue in the general curriculum guidelines of Taiwan’s 12-Year Basic Education. This study aimed to investigate the effects of a Facebook project on developing rural EFL learners’ email literacy in English. There were two participant groups: (1) six university English majors and (2) 12 ninth-graders from a rural junior high school. The instruments included a multiple-choice awareness task (MCT), a written discourse completion task (WDCT), a perception questionnaire, interviews, and teaching journals. The university students first received a training session on email literacy, and then they taught the ninth-graders invitation email-writing through Facebook interactions for eight weeks. The results showed that after the project, the ninth-graders made significant improvements when completing the MCT. As for the quality of their emails, the ninth-graders not only scored significantly higher in the post-test but also made qualitative progress in their invitation emails. Furthermore, both participant groups had positive perceptions of this project and indicated the strengths and weaknesses of their participation. This paper concludes with pedagogical implications for English education in Taiwan.

Under the guidance of the analytical framework of speech act proposed by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), the utterances, produced by a Chinese advanced EFL learner under four different situations in which the speech act of request was realized, are analyzed so as to examine the advanced EFL learner’s pragmatic awareness and corresponding features of pragmatic strategies adopted in realization of the request speech act. The findings of the study suggest that the Chinese advanced EFL learner does have certain pragmatic awareness and adopts different pragmatic strategies to realize the request speech act in different situations; however, her pragmatic strategies are comparatively limited to certain ones, showing no variety, which are likely to be impacted by various factors.

Successful communication is influenced not only by language accuracy, but also by language appropriateness in various social contexts. Accordingly, second/foreign language (L2) learners’ pragmatic competence as well as how they develop the competence has attracted much attention in the research field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). The existing literature on Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence focuses on their awareness of contextually appropriate language and neglects their production of the language. This study investigated Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence in terms of both awareness and production. Three research instruments were employed to collect data: a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT), a written discourse completion task (WDCT), and a retrospective interview. Eight-five English major undergraduates from a university in China participated in the study. The results showed that Chinese EFL learners’ ability to identify and produce contextually appropriate utterances needed to be promoted, and their pragmatic awareness was found to be positively correlated with their production. Compared with the ranking of imposition, Chinese EFL learners were more aware of the interlocutor’s social power and tried to display the power distance in their language. However, they had difficulties in using appropriate strategies and linguistic features to achieve communicative intentions, and a very serious problem that they encountered was the intended meaning and force of different linguistic forms and strategies. The research findings provide evidence that Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence is still much influenced by Chinese language and culture, and some form of pragmatic instruction to raise their awareness or understanding of pragmatic features and force relation is crucial for the learning of L2 pragmatics.

The assessment of second language (L2) pragmatic competence typically involves questionnaires, such as discourse completion tasks. This article describes a novel approach to using questionnaires to assess L2 metapragmatic capacities while simultaneously promoting their development: engaging learners in cooperative interaction as they complete the task. Following dynamic assessment principles, cooperative interaction reveals both fully formed and emerging competencies (i.e. zone of proximal development) while at the same time furthering their continued growth. This study draws on data collected during a concept-based pedagogical enrichment program in which US university students of French were learning the concepts of social distance and power hierarchies as illustrated by the second-person pronouns tu and vous 'you'. The authors present a case study of one learner, Nikki, to show how support provided by a tutor around one questionnaire item (i.e. choosing tu or vous in an ambiguous situation) both assessed and promoted her developing conceptual knowledge about the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and how these are indexed through language. (Verlag, adapt.).

One of the controversies regarding teaching 'pragmatics' is whether the medium of instruction would make a difference in the development of learners' pragmatic awareness and pragmatic use in both second and foreign language contexts. The present study compared the impact of two types of teaching conditions: explicit teacher explanation and implicit foreign film watching, on the process of (meta) pragmatic learning (here, compliment) of 32 Iranian female elementary EFL learners. To examine the effect of each type of instruction, the data collected through a written discourse completion test (WDCT) were later analyzed by a paired samples t-test, and the analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). The results indicated that instruction of both types improved learners' awareness of compliments. Also both types of instruction were beneficial in terms of raising learners' (meta) pragmatic use. The findings provide insight into the facilitative impact of (meta) pragmatic instruction and present suggestions for EFL/ESL teachers and materials developers.