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Part of
Recent Developments in Hispanic Linguistics: Studies in structure, variation, and bilingualism
Edited by Michael Gradoville and Sean McKinnon
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 41] 2024
► pp. 245–267

Chapter 10
Pragmatic competence in virtual environments

The use of consciousness-raising affordances

ORCID logo | Northern Arizona University
Virtual environments (VE) can mimic the dimensions that native speakers take into account in authentic social interactions and are one of the instructional conditions that can promote pragmatic competence. I present the results of a study examining the relationship between self-regulated behaviors in a VE and gains in pragmatic competence. The VE was designed to promote knowledge of Spanish request parameters and employed consciousness-raising (CR) features. Third-year learners of Spanish (N = 24) explored the VE by approaching avatars and requesting various objects/favors to solve the task. Specifically, I focus on affordances identified to predict pragmatic gains in the CR condition (Collentine & Collentine, 2023) to study the extent to which CR features in VEs interact with and account for gains in pragmatic abilities.
Keywords: pragmatic competence, second language learning, Spanish, CALL, consciousness-raising, affordances
Article outline
  • 1.Background
    • 1.1Developing pragmatic competence
    • 1.2Acquisition of requests and L2 pragmatic development
    • 1.3Understanding the design principles that promote pragmatic competence
    • 1.4Active cognitive processing and CR activities in L2 pragmatics
    • 1.5Pragmatics instruction using CALL
    • 1.6Using VEs in pragmatics instruction
    • 1.7The use of affordances in CALL
    • 1.8Research questions
  • 2.Method and materials
    • 2.1Procedure
    • 2.2Analysis
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 October 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.41.10col
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