Two Exciting Events with Professor Naoko Taguchi – Friday, April 7, 2017

Please join us for two events with Dr. Naoko Taguchi on Friday, April 7! 

12:00-2:00 pm: Lunch and Workshop (ICC 108)

Teaching Pragmatics: What, Why & How

This hands-on workshop is open to graduate students and faculty across the Faculty of Language and Linguistics. Professor Taguchi will explain fundamental concepts in second language pragmatics and their application in language teaching. Workshop attendees are requested to bring the syllabus and textbook of a language course they have recently taught. Lunch will be served. To reserve your spot, please register for the event no later than March 31. To register, simply click on the following link: Lunch and Workshop with Professor Taguchi 

3:30-5:00pm: Research presentation (Poulton Hall 230)  

Theories of Pragmatics and L2 Comprehension of Indirect Meaning

Although classroom teaching largely focuses on comprehension of direct and literal meaning, the ability to make inferences of non-literal meaning is equally important in a second language (L2) as indirect meanings abound in our everyday communication. Dr. Taguchi’s presentation focuses on theoretical foundations and empirical findings in L2 comprehension of indirectness. She will compare and contrast 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 will also present her past and current work on L2 comprehension of implicature, sarcasm, and intercultural communication. She will discuss whether existing findings lend support to the theoretical paradigms, as well as what consistencies and inconsistencies have emerged in the literature. She will conclude her talk with directions for future research.

Naoko Taguchi is 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.