AZCALL 2020
Virtual Conference
The Relationship between Affordances in a Virtual Environment, Instructional Techniques, and Gains in Spanish L2 Learners’ Pragmatic Competence
Joseph Collentine & Karina Collentine; Northern Arizona University
Biographies
Joe Collentine is a Professor of Spanish. His research interests include CALL, corpus linguistics, and the acquisition of morphosyntactic complexity.
Karina Collentine is the Associate Dean of the Graduate College and Professor of Spanish. Her research interests include using virtual worlds to teach pragmatics to second language learners of Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
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Abstract
Language instruction struggles to provide learning conditions that promote pragmatic competence, as it is difficult to replicate the numerous contextual cues that NSs consider when producing pragmatically-correct utterances. L2 pragmatics research centers on determining when pragmatics is teachable and how (Koike & Pearson, 2005; Roever, 2009; Takimoto, 2009). Explicit approaches appear to be most effective, suggesting that pragmatic development necessitates a considerable amount of metalinguistic awareness (Félix-Brasdefer, 2008). We have much to learn about the instructional conditions (e.g., methodological approaches, learning affordances) promoting pragmatic competence (Ishihara & Cohen, 2010). Research indicates the following as effective features: tasks situated in real-world contexts (Long & Crookes, 1993), video providing situational cues (e.g., pragmatic appropriateness based on body-language feedback; Vinther & Jensen, 2008), and consciousness-raising activities entailing active learning (Shively, 2014). Pragmatic instruction couched within TBLT and a virtual environment (VE) provide many of these features and show promising results (Author, 2020; Holden & Sykes, 2013).
The authors present the results of a study examining the relationship between affordances in a VE, instructional techniques, and gains in learners’ pragmatic competence. Specifically, we focus on the process (using tracking-technology data) and the product (using pre-test/post-test assessments) of the learning conditions. The VE was designed to promote knowledge of Spanish request parameters (i.e., power, distance, and degree of imposition) employing consciousness-raising (CR), structured-input (SI), and TBLT features. The participants (N = 52) were third-year learners of Spanish at a US university. A series of regression analyses studied the interaction of (i) VE features with which learners interacted (e.g., which affordances were used and how often), (ii) their exposure to the requests in the VE, and (iii) pragmatic gains. The analysis suggests that TBLT-based VEs entailing CR techniques can yield significant gains in L2 pragmatic knowledge.
