Do Language Learners Recognize Pragmatic Violations? Pragmatic Versus Grammatical Awareness in Instructed L2 Learning"

Bardovi-Harlig
1. These authors take both a functional/pragmatic perspective, as they are interested in ELLs’ SL pragmatic competence, and a sociolinguistic perspective, as they consider the authors’ sociocultural contexts (ESL or EFL). This article was an interesting amalgamation of social approaches.
2. The article addresses transition theory. It is interested in learning how learners’ contexts affect their attitudes towards pragmatic acceptability.
3. I find it interesting that the authors suggest awareness-raising in the pedagogy section, since they did not directly test awareness-raising! My literature search ofr the paper for this class, and my experience teaching, suggest to me that awareness-raising seems like an easy answer for many language teachers. It allows them to continue teaching without switching to a more methodologically sound but perhaps more cutting-edge and radical teaching method. Overall, though, I liked this article. It had a large N and tested something I had not really considered testing before.