Cambridge Scholars Publishing Pragmatic Aspects of L2 Communication: From Awareness through Description to Assessment

Pragmatic aspects of communication are increasingly high on the agenda of applied linguists, in parallel with the recent advancements in the broader field of pragmatics research. As such, this volume brings together contributions addressing pragmatic aspects of L2 communication, taking into account the complementary perspectives of researchers, language practitioners and language learners. These studies were conducted with both qualitative and quantitative methods, and were set in various linguo-cultural contexts, spanning from Norway through Croatia and Italy to Canada and Colombia. The volume illustrates how pragmatic awareness and proficiency are crucial to communicative, interactional and, more generally, social competence. It also sheds light on how the results of pragmatic investigations can be fruitfully applied to language teaching and assessment in primary and tertiary education. Finally, it maintains an expanded perspective on pragmatic knowledge, as it examines both verbal and nonverbal components of communication, showing how they all contribute to the formulation and interpretation of meanings in context. The book will be of interest to language students, language teachers and scholars in applied pragmatics. About the Author Sara Gesuato is Associate Professor at Padua University, Italy, where she teaches English Language and Linguistics. Her research fields include pragmatics, genre analysis and corpus linguistics. Recently, she has been exploring pedagogical applications of the qualitative-quantitative analysis of speech acts. She has organised various conferences and published over 90 works. Giuliana Salvato is Associate Professor at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, where she teaches courses in linguistics and second language education. Her publications are in the fields of second language acquisition, gesture studies and multilingualism, and include the book Looking Beyond Words: Gesture in the Pedagogy of Second Languages in Multilingual Canada. Erik Castello is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Padua University, Italy. His research interests include (learner) corpus linguistics, pragmatics and the language of tourism. He has examined lexico-grammatical and pragmatic aspects of native and learner English, including the use of discourse markers, backchannels, adjectives and modality.