Being pragmatically competent in an L2 is an essential component of communicative competence and critical for successful social interaction, establishing communication, maintaining rapport, and avoiding stereotyping of a language community. However, little attention is paid to this area in most language learning settings and when L2 pragmatics is included in textbooks and classroom activities, it is mostly anecdotal and superficial. Developing pragmatic competence implies the learning of the norms and principles that affect the behavior of participants in a culture (i.e., sociopragmatics) and the ability to choose the language to realize those norms (i.e., pragmalinguistics). Although learning to be pragmatically appropriate in the L2 without instruction is possible (although difficult), research shows that instruction helps development (Plonsky & Zhueng, 2019). This presentation advocates that technology-mediated tasks are an excellent and effective pedagogic tool to promote L2 pragmatic development. The presentation will introduce key concepts in technology-mediated tasks. It will then showcase tech-mediated contexts that have been used to teach and research the development of L2 pragmatics and summarize what we know so far about learning L2 pragmatics when mediated by technologies and by tasks. Several tools and tasks will then be proposed for the implementation of L2 pragmatics in several L2 learning environments and pedagogic choices will be discussed. Finally, lines of new research to advance the field will be suggested.
It is popular to use video games for language learning. In the history of the games for learning movement (dating from around the turn of the 21st Century) there has been a persistent problem, in my view, about both what the “content” to be learned in a game is and what a game has to do with it in the first place. By and large, the paradigm changing affordances of game technology are lost when we bring traditional school-based—and in my view, wrongheaded—views about language and content to games. I will take up this issue hopefully for the last time in my career.