Pragmatic awareness and engagement with language from a multilingual perspective

Resumen

The current study focuses on multilingual learners’ engagement with languages and the collaborative construction of their pragmatic awareness. The construct of Engagement with Language (Svalberg, 2009, 2012) was implemented as a framework for the measurement of learners’ engagement and the analysis of peer-interaction when addressing pragmatic-related aspects of the language. Seventy-six first-year university students took part in the composition of an email eliciting requests in Spanish, Catalan and English. Participants worked in dyads and their interaction was audio-recorded for the later transcription and identification of pragmatic-related episodes in selected cases. After the completion of the collaborative writing task, a post-task questionnaire was passed to assess learners’ perceptions of their engagement. Quantitative and qualitative analysis showed the positive effects of the collaborative writing task as seen in learners’ high levels of cognitive, affective and social engagement. Moreover, results revealed that these three dimensions mediated each other in a dynamic and complex way. Finally, the qualitative analysis of learners’ deliberations provided further evidence concerning multilingual learners’ use of their whole language repertoire when engaging in pragmatic-related discussion. These findings contribute to the understanding of how learners engage with the languages and how this engagement can offer collaborative opportunities for the development of learners’ multilingual pragmatic awareness.