Context, Individual Differences and Pragmatic Competence

Naoko Taguchi is an associate professor in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches courses on SLA, pragmatics, and Japanese language and culture. She is a Fulbright scholar, and the recipient of the 2004 MLJ-ACTFL Emma Birkmaier Outstanding Dissertation Award. She edited the volume Pragmatic Competence and is co-editing the volume Technology in Interlanguage Pragmatics Research and Teaching. She is currently on the editorial board of Japanese SLA.

• Chapter 1: Context, Individual Differences, and Pragmatic Development: An IntroductionChapter 2: Longitudinal Studies in Interlanguage PragmaticsChapter 3: Theoretical Framework, Research Questions, and MethodologyChapter 4: Patterns and Rate of Pragmatic DevelopmentChapter 5: Individual Differences in Pragmatic DevelopmentChapter 6: Summary and Conclusion

Taguchi brings impressive psycholinguistic rigor to the longitudinal study of pragmatics, with an innovative focus on the development of listening and speaking ability. While her Japanese EFL subjects became somewhat more like native speakers in the performance of low-imposition speech acts, a rich analysis of student interview data and journal entries revealed their limited gains in high-imposition speech acts to be partly the result of limited exposure to such pragmatic behavior.