Gabriele Kasper

This book examines the topic of communication strategies, the ways in which people seek to express themselves or understand what someone else is saying or writing. Typically, the term has referred to the strategies that non-native speakers use to address the linguistic and pragmatic problems encountered in interactions with native and non-native speakers of the language in question. Studies adopting a psycholinguistic perspective are well represented and updated in this volume. Other chapters re-examine communication strategies from a sociolinguistic perspective, exploring the strategies non-native speakers and their conversational partners use to create shared meanings in ongoing discourse. These studies reveal how communication strategies can serve to construct participants' identities and social relationships. Finally, the book incorporates a number of chapters which cover strategy-like behaviour in other related areas, such as language pathology, child bilingualism, normal native adult interaction, and mother tongue education. These studies add fresh dimensions to the study of communication strategies, showing how the concept can usefully be extended beyond the realm of second language acquisition and use, and pointing out the commonalities in many domains of language behaviour.

Misunderstanding is a pervasive phenomenon in social life, sometimes with serious consequences for people's life chances. Misunderstandings are especially hazardous in high-stakes events such as job interviews or in the legal system. In unequal power encounters, unsuccessful communication is regularly attributed to the less powerful participant, especially when those participants are members of an ethnic minority group. But even when communicative events are not prestructured by participants' differential positions in social hierarchies, misunderstandings occur at different levels of interactional and social engagement. Misunderstanding in Social Life examines such problematic talk in ordinary conversation and different institutional settings, including socializing events and story tellings, education and assessment activities, and interviews in TV news broadcasts, employment agencies, legal settings, and language testing. The analyzed interactions are located in a variety of sociocultural environments and conducted in a range of languages, including English, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, such language varieties as Aboriginal Australian English and Maori New Zealand English, and nonnative varieties.The original studies included in this volume adopt a variety of theoretical perspectives, including discourse-pragmatic approaches, conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, social constructionism, tropological and narrative analysis. They represent multiple views of misunderstanding as a multilayered discourse event.

This volume offers the first book-length treatment of second and foreign language learners' acquisition of pragmatics. It provides an up-to-date account of research findings and covers such central topics as the theoretical and empirical approaches to L2 pragmatic development, the relationship of pragmatic and grammatical development, the role of different learning contexts, the effect of instruction, and individual differences. Comprehensive discussion of developmental interlanguage pragmatics, presenting an up-to-date account of research findingsKey source for researchers and graduate students working in applied linguistics, second language studies, pragmatics, discourse, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics