TESOL QUARTERLY Vol. 43, No. 1, March 2009

In This Issue Ⅲ Pragmatics has received a great deal of attention lately Nowadays, TESOL researchers and practitioners are treating pragmatics as not an optional or extrinsic consideration in language competence but as very much integrated with form and fundamental to proficiency This is especially true in the context of multilingual communication in globalization processes As communities localize Global English with their own variation of the form and a history of communication in these varieties, it is unrealistic to ask them to suppress their Englishes and adopt the British or American norms when they interact across communities Multilingual speakers maintain their own variety but adopt effective interpersonal and discourse strategies to negotiate their differences as they communicate with each other Research in multilingual environments shows that speakers of English as an additional language are not resorting to a common variety or form but adopting effective sociolinguistic strategies to make sense to each other Therefore many scholars are proposing a greater role for pragmatics in lingua franca communication And yet, pragmatics remains an ignored area in courses on teacher development and applied linguistics Camilla Vásquez and Donna Sharpless report on a nationwide survey of master’s-level TESOL programs to determine where and how pragmatics is covered in the TESOL curriculum; how resources are used to teach graduate TESOL students about pragmatics; and what attitudes, beliefs, and opinions about pragmatics are held by TESOL graduate program directors and faculty Surveying 94 master’s TESOL programs in the United States, the authors find that though pragmatics does find a place in these programs, faculty members’ beliefs vary greatly about whether pragmatics should be addressed in a dedicated course or throughout the curriculum Programs also vary in the types of courses in which pragmatics receives the most emphasis, in the kinds of topics covered, and the types of textbooks and materials used in different courses Where pragmatics receives primary coverage in courses such as “Sociolinguistics,” “Introduction to Linguistics,” or “Second Language Acquisition,” the authors find that most textbooks used in such courses give very little attention to pragmatics, and it is likely to be treated on a more general or theoretical level, rather than addressing actual teaching applications Only a handful of programs surveyed mentioned that they cover pragmatics topics in their “Teaching Methods” courses The authors recommend that more findings from second language (L2) pragmatics research be translated into methods materials written for an audience of prospective language teachers TESOL QUARTERLY Vol 43, No 1, March 2009 In the next article, F Scott Walters contributes to the development of an effective test for pragmatic competence He argues that second language pragmatics testing based on speech-act theory raises test-validation issues owing to a lack of correspondence with empirical conversational data Walters argues that the assumption of form–function correspondence in speech-act theory does not capture the complexity of intentions and reception in a moment-by-moment negotiation of talk Therefore, speech act–based tests, such as discourse comprehension tests, may not capture certain aspects of actual pragmatic behavior and may elicit responses that not appear in natural conversation Furthermore, speech-act theory is rooted in a rationalistic approach to language study that assumes an ideal speaker endowed with reason An L2 test developer, approaching language use from a rationalistic perspective, makes assumptions regarding the speaker’s intentions behind his or her language use However, this approach is not open to the participants’ own complex construction and negotiation of meaning in talk-in-interaction On both counts, Walters argues that conversation analysis (CA) provides a more accurate account of language use It accommodates talk as interactional and allows for understanding the logic of participants in a more situated and inductive manner Therefore, Walters proposes that CA serves as a more empirically valid basis for test development His study explored this proposal by administering a pilot CA-informed test of listening comprehension to learners of English as second language and to a control group of native speakers of English The results provide some promising evidence on the usefulness of such an approach The next two articles relate form to semantics in language acquisition Stuart Webb and Eve Kagimoto investigate the effects of receptive and productive vocabulary tasks on learning collocation and meaning In their experiment, Japanese English as a foreign language students learned target words in three glossed sentences and in a cloze task To determine the effects of the treatments, four tests were used to measure receptive and productive knowledge of collocation and meaning The results showed that both tasks led to significant gains in knowledge with little difference between the size of the gains The findings indicate knowledge of collocation may be acquired at a rate similar to that of meaning, and that tasks which focus on collocation, as well as meaning, may be effective The authors make a special case for EFL contexts In that context, it may be enough to make learners aware of the importance of learning collocation and to teach them to notice words that regularly appear together in context This practice may in turn lead to incidental gains However, in an EFL context, in which incidental gains tend to be relatively small, it may be useful for teachers to not only make their learners aware of collocation, but also to teach it The authors recommend that commonly used tasks for teaching individual words such as glossed sentences and TESOL QUARTERLY cloze tasks can easily be altered to effectively teach collocation as well as meaning Joe Barcroft presents a contrarian position in a study that examines the relationship between semantic elaboration and L2 word learning in both intentional and incidental learning contexts In his research on Spanish-speaking adult learners of English, he found that target word recall was higher when explicit instructions to learn new words were provided and when synonym generation was not required Negative effects of synonym generation emerged in both the incidental and intentional learning conditions For an explanation, he resorts to the resourcedepletion hypothesis, which posits that increased semantic processing can exhaust processing resources that otherwise could be used to encode the formal component of the target words during incidental vocabulary learning He argues that limiting forced semantic elaboration during initial stages may help learners to reserve processing resources needed to encode and retain new L2 word forms when processing new words as input Barcroft’s study gives us pause and forces us to continue exploring the status and sequence of semantics and pragmatics in language learning Suresh Canagarajah Editor IN THIS ISSUE