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Part of
Task-Based Approaches to Teaching and Assessing Pragmatics
Edited by Naoko Taguchi and YouJin Kim
[Task-Based Language Teaching 10] 2018
► pp. 114–136

Chapter 5
Task modality effects on Spanish learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development

| Georgetown University
| Université du Québec à Montréal

Within the field of second language acquisition (SLA), we have witnessed a rise in research on task-based language teaching (TBLT) and its effects on L2 development (Kim, 2015). However, few studies have examined how TBLT could facilitate the development of interlanguage pragmatics (Taguchi & Kim, 2015), an issue which this volume aims to address. Moreover, whether task modality (i.e., oral versus written tasks) mediates development has yet to be investigated. The current study with learners of Spanish focused on the effects of using pedagogical tasks and on the manipulation of task modality on learners’ L2 pragmatic competence through the production of Spanish requests and speech act modifications. Two intermediate classes (n = 25) of Spanish completed either an oral or written story completion task. Drawing on oral and written Discourse Completion Tests, we found that tasks positively impacted learners’ production of L2 requests. However, significant differences between modality groupings were not identified.

Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Literature review
    • Interlanguage pragmatics
    • Previous research on instruction of pragmatics
    • Task-based language teaching research
      • Teaching pragmatics via tasks
      • Task modality
    • Purpose of the study
  • Methods
    • Instructional context
    • Participants
    • Instructional pragmatic targets
    • Instructional task
    • Assessment materials
  • Procedure
    • Data coding
    • Reliability and analysis
  • Results
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 15 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tblt.10.05rea
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