Studies of pragmatics reflect researchers’ views. This presentation provides a brief review on pragmatics studies in the fields of interlanguage and ELF, especially in Japanese contexts, comparing researchers’ interpretations of learners/users’ pragmatic behaviours. Based on pragmatics studies in ELF, a performative approach to language learning and teaching is also suggested.
Studies of pragmatics reflect researchers' views. In Selinker's (1972) theory of interlanguage (IL), learners' mental process of second language acquisition is centralised from a psycholinguistic perspective, assuming that there are rigid and monolithic speech communities, and features of the learner's native language is transferred to IL. While in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), which emerged in the late 1990s (e.g., Firth, 1996), plurilinguals' agency and their performance in ELF interaction in multilingual settings are focused from a sociocultural perspective, describing their contingent and dynamic practice to co-construct norms in situ (Seidlhofer, 2011). This presentation first provides a brief review on pragmatics studies in two distinctive, but mutually affected, fields of interlanguage and ELF, especially in Japanese contexts, comparing researchers' interpretations of learners/users' pragmatic use of language. The review indicates that studies of interlanguage pragmatics concern learners' progress of acquiring their linguistic and pragmatic competence towards the norms of native speakers of the target language (TL), where the 'deviant' use in IL is stigmatised as errors to be corrected, blindly internalising the ideology of TL's superiority over learners' idiosyncratic dialects. I shall call this pedagogic orientalism (cf. Said, 1978). While in the ELF framework, ELF users' pragmatic strategies for meaning making are valued as their exploitation of semiotic resources available to them. On the basis of existing studies on pragmatic strategies in ELF interactions, a pedagogical framework, a performative approach to language learning and teaching (Tsuchiya, forthcoming), is also suggested in this presentation, which includes three reference points: (1) performativity, which refers to practice of trans/languaging in ELF interactions (García & Wei, 2014; Swain, 2006), (2) creativity, which closely relates to lingual capability in Widdowson (2003), and (3) reflexivity, which involves learners/users' awareness of "what am I doing?" (Giddens, 2001).
