Two Events with Professor Naoko Taguchi

The German department, in conjunction with the FLL, was pleased to sponsor two events with Professor Naoko Taguchi on April 7, 2017. Dr. Taguchi hosted a hands-on workshop titled “Teaching Pragmatics: What, Why & How,” directed toward second language teachers (both faculty and graduate students), and looked at ways to incorporate second language pragmatics in teaching. She then gave a presentation as part of the Department of Linguistics Speaker Series, which focused on theoretical foundations and empirical findings in L2 comprehension of indirectness. She compared and contrasted three theories of pragmatics that explain the mechanisms and processes of indirectness comprehension: Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle, Sperber & Wilson’s (1986, 1995) Relevance Theory, and Kecskes’s (2014, 2016) socio-cognitive approach. Although all these theories place the speaker’s intention in the central focus of theoretical assumptions, they differ in their explanations about how the speaker’s intention is recognized and understood. Under each theoretical paradigm, Dr. Taguchi also presented her past and current work on L2 comprehension of implicature, sarcasm, and intercultural communication. She also discussed whether existing findings lend support to the theoretical paradigms, as well as what consistencies and inconsistencies have emerged in the literature.

Naoko Taguchi is an Associate Professor in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University where she teaches courses in Second Language Acquisition and Japanese language & culture. Her primary research area is pragmatics. Her current projects include technology-enhanced pragmatics teaching, intercultural pragmatics, pragmatics learning in a study abroad context, heritage learner pragmatics, and intercultural development in English-medium universities. She has written and edited several books, most recently Second Language Pragmatics (2017, Oxford University Press; co-authored with Carsten Roever). She is the co-editor of Journal of Multilingual Pragmatics and serves/has served on the editorial board for the Modern Language Journal, Language Teaching, Japanese SLA, Study Abroad Research in Second Language Education and International Education, and Studies of Chinese Language Teaching Journal. She was a research fellow at Waseda University in Tokyo (2012) and also taught in an international university in Japan and Qatar.