Evidence of Accommodation to L2 Pragmatic Norms in Peer Review Tasks of Japanese Learners of English

Page No.: 
245
Writer(s): 
Virginia LoCastro, Universidad de las Americas, Puebla, Mexico

This paper reports on a project examining written peer reviews by Japanese
learners of English and is a partial replication of a study conducted by Johnson
(1992) on compliments and politeness in peer reviews of native English speaker
writers. In addition, this project focuses on the effect of instruction. The literature
on the teaching of L2 pragmatiC norms, particularly in a foreign language
environment, lacks information on the effect of instruction in academic writing
skills on the learners' production, a lack which this study attempts to remedy.
The first aim is to assess the learners' use of the speech acts of complimenting,
agreeing and disagreeing, and making corrections, as well as the complimenting
discourse strategies the learners used when correcting their peers' texts. The
second aim is to assess the effects of writing instruction administered within
the learners' Intensive English Program. The effect of instruction is examined
specifically with regards to the use of the syntactico-semantic device "I think."

PDF: