Tasks, Pragmatics and Multilingualism in the Classroom: A Portrait of Adolescent Writing in Multiple Languages

Sofía Martín-Laguna

Apr 2020 · Second Language Acquisition Book 140 · Multilingual Matters

About this ebook

This book reports on a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic markers in written discourse in a third language (English) by secondary students living in the bilingual (Spanish and Catalan) Valencian Community in Spain. It examines pragmatic transfer, specifically positive transfer, in multilingual students from a holistic perspective, taking into account their linguistic repertoire and using ecologically valid classroom writing tasks in a longitudinal study. It tackles the issue of task-based language teaching from a multilingual perspective by presenting a study which takes place in natural classroom contexts where real classroom tasks are used to explore the interaction between languages in multilinguals. The book combines a focus on multilingual language development and pragmatics and discusses the resources multilingual learners take to the classroom.

About the author

Sofía Martín-Laguna is an Assistant Professor at Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain, and a member of the LAELA (Applied Linguistics to the Teaching of the English Language) Research Group. Her research interests include interlanguage pragmatics, the acquisition of L3 pragmatics and the use of task-based approaches for teaching and learning pragmatics.