Developing Second Language Pragmatic Competence: A Cognitive Approach to Oral Interaction

This book investigates the most common challenges that learners of Japanese encounter in spoken interactions.

Through qualitative research with university students in Ireland, it highlights learners’ difficulties in navigating implicit meaning, sociocultural expectations and interactional norms. The author uses pragmatics theory to support and implement pedagogical applications to raise awareness in teaching environments of a wide range of indispensable communicative acts that learners need to use and interpret in real-life communication.

The book offers a fresh perspective, framing learners’ challenges through Relevance Theory, a cognitive approach to communication that has been underexplored in second language pragmatics research.

It will appeal to researchers in pragmatics, SLA, cognitive linguistics and Japanese pedagogy.