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Technology-enhanced language learning and pragmatics: Insights from digital game-based pragmatics instruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2023

Naoko Taguchi
Naoko Taguchi*
Affiliation:
Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, USA
*
Email: naoko.taguchi@nau.edu
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Abstract

Learning pragmatics involves learning linguistic forms and their communicative functions as well as the context where the form-function relationships are realized. Given its socially grounded, context-sensitive nature, pragmatics may be best learned in a technology-enhanced environment that provides direct access to contextualized communicative practice. Technology can help produce rich multimodal input, opportunities for interaction with consequences, and experience-based learning, which are all important elements of pragmatics learning. This lecture highlights these benefits of technology-enhanced pragmatics learning using a digital game as a sample platform. We created a digital game to teach request-making in English by having participants experience interpersonal consequences of their request as feedback (observing their interlocutor's reactions to their choice of request-making forms). Using the digital game with Chinese learners of English, a series of studies were conducted to investigate a variety of topics, such as the effects of different feedback conditions on learning outcomes, role of metapragmatic knowledge in learning, and transfer of request-making knowledge to a novel speech act. This lecture presents findings from these studies and concludes with future research directions on technology-enhanced pragmatics learning.

Type
Plenary Speech
Information
Language Teaching , Volume 57 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , pp. 57 - 67
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Delivered as Keynote Lecture at the International Symposium of Applied Linguistics Prince Sultan University, Riyadh, November 6 2022.

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