English language learners’ spoken interaction: What a multimodal perspective reveals about pragmatic competence

Abstract

Broadly speaking, pragmatic competence can be defined as the ability to communicate appropriately in a social context. Learning how to use pragmatic features adequately in a particular setting is paramount for language users in order to achieve communicative purposes effectively. However, since communication involves the interplay of various semiotic modes such as spoken language, gestures, facial expression, head movement or gaze, researchers examining face-to-face interaction should go a step further to explore pragmatic competence from a multimodal perspective, which leads them to focus on multimodal pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to show how a multimodal approach can shed some light in the study of interlanguage pragmatics. We conducted a microanalysis of the performance of learners of English as an additional language at two different proficiency levels, who produced complaint sequences. Results suggest that spoken language is just one of the resources that learners use during the interaction, which is not always prevalent in all the moves in which the complaint is structured, the different roles, and the proficiency levels under examination. This confirms that the centrality of the linguistic mode in the analysis of this speech act will lead to a biased understanding of the interlanguage pragmatic competence.