An Introduction to Discourse Analysis - Journal Article Review [3]

Reviewing Articles under the Issue of Making Sense of Discourse and Developing Discourse Competence 

Topic Title  : Learning to Say What You Mean in a Second Language: A Study of the Speech Act Performance of Learners of Hebrew as a Second Language

Researcher  : Shoshana Blum-Kulka

Source          : Applied Linguistics, III(1), 29-59

Oxford University Press

doi:10.1093/applin/iii.1.29

Objectives    : Investigate the acquisition of knowledge about the performance of indirect speech acts in a second language for three purposes:

1) to provide techniques for assessment of advanced levels of communicative competence in a second language

2) to try and develop a model for a comparative cross-cultural analysis of speech-act performance across languages

3) to show the difficulties in the acquisition of complex forms of linguistic and social interference in a second language

Problem      : Are there universals of indirect speech act performance?

Theory      : The emphasis in second language teaching and learning theories has shifted in recent years from a 'grammatical' or 'structural' approach to a 'communicative' one (Widdowson 1978, Canale and Swain 1980). The same shift is also apparent in studies of first language acquisition (Halliday 1975, Ervin-Tripp and MitcheJl-Kernan 1977). This shift reflects the generally shared assumption that effective communication depends on more than knowing the rules of lexicon, grammar, and phonology of the language or languages spoken in one's speech community. Hymes (1964) introduced the notion of 'communicative competence' to cover the kinds of knowledge a fluent speaker of a language must possess in order to produce and understand contextually appropriate and comprehensible utterances in that language. Studies in sociolinguistics (Labov 1972, Ervin-Tripp 1976) have since demonstrated that the kinds of knowledge required for effective communication involve processing of social as weii as linguistic knowledge. Studies in child discourse (Ervin-Tripp 1977, Dore 1977) have shown that the social rules of language use are acquired together with the formal properties of language already in early childhood. Studies within the framework of the ethnography of communication have emphasized the differences between cultures in social rules of language use and pointed to cultural differences in interactional styles as a possible source of misunderstanding between speakers from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds (Gumperz and Tannen 1979).

Method        : Mixed-method (quantitative method and qualitative method) 

Results         :

The speech events depicted by the dialogues in the test can be divided into: (1) standard, institutionalized situations that proved to have fairly common scripts of linguistic behaviour;15 (2) non-standard situations that did not prove to have such scripts. A further division of the dialogues is between: (1) dialogues that required completion by the use of a direct or indirect directive type; (2) dialogues that required completion by any other speech act.

a) Variation

Learners, as well as native speakers, proved to be sensitive to the setting and interpersonal relationships suggested by each dialogue, and modified their responses accordingly. This sensitivity is probably non-language-specific. The fact that learners' preference of strategy varied from dialogue to dialogue in the realization of one act (directives) is thus attributed to a general non language-specific sensitivity to contextual constraints.

b) Range

The range of speech act forms used by each learner includes both direct, explicit forms and conventional indirect forms. The mere fact that learners use indirect as well as direct forms can be interpreted as indicating pragmatic competence. In most items on the test the dialogue could have been completed by an explicit, direct form. Moreover, the number of strategies used by each learner is nearly the same as that used by each native speaker (mean for learners 5.45, for native speakers 5.09).17 This result is interesting, especially in light of the fact that the preference for a certain strategy in a given context by native speakers as a group is systematically different from that of learners. The point is, that learners do not seem to have difficulty in acquiring direct as well as indirect strategies in the target language (partly due to a general pragmatic competence, partly probably due to similarities in form between the two languages) but their actual use of these strategies differs systematically from that of native speakers. This difference in use should be kept in mind also in considering contextual appropriateness.

c) Contextual appropriateness

Native speakers and learners agreed to a great extent on the communicative function of the utterance required in each given context. (The mean of contextually appropriate answers for native speakers was 97 %. for learners 89%.) This result, besides indicating the learners' level of reading comprehension (the fact that they understand the dialogues is important in showing that the interpretations given by learners to the dialogues do not differ substantially from those of native speakers. The learners' level of proficiency in Hebrew and their general pragmatic competence seems to have enabled them to agree with native speakers on the kind of linguistic behaviour expected in each of the situations presented in the test.

d) Cross-culturally shared conversational rules

In one case, learners agreed with native speakers not only on the communicative intent required by the context, but also on the actual realization of the act. This case (016, see Appendix A) tested the cross-cultural validity of a conversational rule that is based on the violation of Grice's maxim of relation (Grice 1975: 47). The second speaker in 016 begins his answer to a question 'Is he not nice?' by another question- 'Not nice? I think he is .. .'. This dialogue was constructed on the basis of the observation that when a speaker questions a proposition stated by the previous speaker, he is often signaling disagreement with that proposition. The disagreement can be related either to the truth value of the original proposition or to the strength with which the previous claim had been made. According to this analysis 016 can be completed either with phrases like 'Not nice? I think he's great' (truth value) or by phrases like 'Not nice? I think he's a swine' (strength). The results indicate that the first interpretation is the most common one: 90% of native speakers, 85% of the learners and 8% of the native speakers of English completed 016 with emphatic statements emphasizing their disagreement (like 'He's great'). The agreement between native speakers and learners in this case shows that the ability to draw conversational implications is probably part of the pragmatic competence transferred to the target language.

Conclusion     :

The basic theoretical claim argued in this paper (stated in Sections 2.3. and 2.3.1) can be summarized as follows: conventional indirect speech acts represent a special case of interdependence between conventions of language and conventions about the use of language. The nature of this interdependence varies systematically across languages and cultures. As a result:

(a) learning to realize indirect speech acts in a second language necessarily

involves learning new strategies for realizing indirect acts as well as new social

attitudes about the use of these and other strategies in context;

(b) second language learners might fail to realize indirect speech acts in the

target language in terms both of communicative effectiveness and social

appropriateness.

The evidence to support the first part of this claim (a) is based on theoretical considerations. The analysis of some indirect speech act forms in Hebrew and English presented in section 2.3.1 is meant to show the difficulties involved in trying to establish equivalence even between seemingly similar strategies in two languages. It is argued that languages might possess language-specific conventional procedures for the realization of any given act, and that the potential illocutionary force of both shared and non-shared procedures is subject to pragmatic, grammatical and social constraints.

The evidence for the second part of the claim (b) comes from the empirical study. The study was designed to elicit speech act forms from learners and native speakers by a test that allowed for comparison between the two groups. It was hypothesized that such a comparison would yield evidence for:

(1) the learner's non-language-specific pragmatic competence; (2) the nature

of the learner's violations of social appropriateness norms in the target language; (3) the nature of the learner's failures in realizing speech acts in pragmatically effective ways.

It has been argued that certain aspects of the learner's performance (such as range of forms used by each learner, variety in choice of forms, and contextual appropriateness) can be interpreted as indicating the activation of a non-language-specific pragmatic competence (hypothesis 1 ).

The results supporting hypotheses 2 and 3 can be summarized by considering the effects that the speech act realization of second language learners might have on communication with native speakers. The speech act realization of second language learners might deviate from native usage on three levels of acceptability:

a) Social acceptability

b) Linguistic acceptability

c) Pragmatic acceptability

Comments: 
The writing of this research is well-structured. Moreover, the researcher explains the results and discussions clearly. For me, all the points are important, therefore, I couldn't just take a part of the results and conclusions to write the summary briefly.