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Strategies for learning and performing L2speech acts

ANDREW D. COHEN

Abstract

This article presents a taxonomy of language learner strategies which

are o¤ered in support of learners in their e¤orts to obtain knowledge

about speech acts and to perform them more e¤ectively. Relevant language

learner strategy literature and speech act literature are reviewed. After de-

fining language learning and use strategies, the article makes the case for

enhancing learner strategies in developing speech act ability. Next, as a

lead up to the presentation of the taxonomy of strategies, the issue of where

learners are to find empirical sources for speech act material is addressed,

with attention given to the current concerns for naturally-occurring data.

This is followed by a review of literature on e¤orts to teach pragmatics.

The article concludes with a discussion of suggested avenues for validating

the strategy taxonomy.

1. Introduction

The goal of this article is to provide a taxonomy for learner strategiesin developing speech ability in a second language (L2).1 In an e¤ort to

provide a foundation for this taxonomy, the paper reviews both relevant

language learner strategy literature and speech act literature. The article

starts by distinguishing language learning strategies from language use

strategies in general, and then o¤ers a rationale for applying this strategy

distinction to L2 learners’ e¤orts to learn about and perform complex

speech behavior, in the form of speech acts. As a preface to the presenta-

tion of the taxonomy of strategies, attention is given to empirical sourcesfor data on speech acts which learners can draw on in order to develop

pragmatic ability, followed by a look at inroads into speech act instruc-

tion. After the taxonomy is presented, suggestions for research to validate

Intercultural Pragmatics 2-3 (2005), 275–301 1612-295X/05/0002–02756 Walter de Gruyter

these strategies are o¤ered, as the entries in the taxonomy are viewed very

much as researchable hypotheses.

2. Language learner strategies and pragmatics

In order to consider strategies that learners might benefit from utilizing

in their learning and use of speech acts, it is necessary to situate this en-deavor within the larger context of language learner strategies and then

make the connection to pragmatics. Until the 1970’s and the seminal

work by Rubin (1975), the focus of language instruction was primarily

on the teacher because it was assumed that if teachers did a competent

job of teaching, learners would learn what they needed to. Rubin’s work

marked the advent of a strategy approach to language learning and lan-

guage use. Although definitions of language learner strategies have varied

over the years, there is some consensus among experts that language

learner strategies are conscious or semi-conscious thoughts and behaviors

deployed by learners, often with the intention of enhancing their knowl-

edge and understanding of an L2 (Cohen 2005).

Language learning strategies include cognitive strategies for identifying,

distinguishing, grouping, practicing, and committing material to memory.

So, for example, in the case of the speech act of requesting, learners need

to identify those language structures that make requests more polite and

perhaps group them accordingly in terms of the use of modal auxiliaries,the use of the past progressive (e.g., ‘‘I was wondering if . . .’’), and the

like. Likewise, language learning strategies include the metacognitive

strategies for planning what to do, checking how it is going, and then

evaluating how it went; the a¤ective strategies for regulating attitudes,

motivation, and emotional reactions to L2 learning, such as through self-

encouragement and reduction of anxiety; and the social strategies for en-

hancing learning, such as cooperating with other learners and seeking

opportunities to interact with native speakers. Advocates of strategy in-struction for learners would posit that if learners have a well-functioning

strategy repertoire, these strategies will enhance the learning of an L2,

whether in teacher-led instructional settings, or in one of the alternative

options, such as self-access, web-based instructional settings, and other

forms of independent language learning.

In contrast to language learning strategies, language use strategies come

into play once the language material is already accessible, even in some

preliminary form. Whereas language learning strategies would be usedwith an explicit goal of improving learners’ knowledge of a given lan-

guage, language use strategies focus primarily on helping students utilize

the language that they already have learned (see Cohen 1998). They

276 Andrew D. Cohen

also include strategies with a cognitive, metacognitive, social, or a¤ective

function, but this time the purpose is to use the material that has now

been learned to some extent. What is now added to the strategy repertoire

are the following types of strategies:

� Retrieval strategies—for calling up information about the language al-

ready stored in memory (Glahn 1980) (e.g., retrieving the correct verb

in its appropriate conditional tense for making a polite request or re-

trieving the meaning of a particular adjective when it is heard or read,

for example, in a letter, in what appears to be a complimentary tone).� Rehearsal strategies—for practicing L2 structures that have already

been learned to some extent (Weinstein & Mayer 1986) (e.g., rehears-ing the subjunctive form for several Spanish verbs in preparation for

using them in a request in Spanish to a teacher or boss to be excused

for the day).� Communication strategies—for steering the conversation away from

problematic areas, for expressing meaning in creative ways (e.g., by

paraphrasing a word or concept, coining words, using facial expres-

sions or gestures), for creating more time for them to think, and for

negotiating the di‰cult parts of the communication. In addition, com-munication strategies include compensating for gaps by literal transla-

tion from the first language (L1) or switching to another language.

Finally, communication strategies include conversational interaction

strategies (e.g., asking for help, clarification, or confirmation) and strat-

egies for maintaining the floor, which are both for learners who are

experiencing gaps in their knowledge and for those who are not (e.g.,

using fillers and other hesitation devices) (see Dornyei & Scott 1997;

Dornyei & Kormos 1998).� Cover strategies2—for not looking foolish (e.g., using a memorized

and partially understood phrase in an utterance in order to keep the

action going or laughing at a joke that was not understood at all).

We note that there is inevitably overlap between language learning and

language use strategies. What starts as a language learning strategy at,

say, the initial exposure to a speech act, such as refusal, may quickly be-

come a language use strategy since the initial learning phase may be brief.

Furthermore, new learning is likely to take place as learners make use of

what they have learned, however partially.

Research on L2 strategy use has demonstrated that learners di¤er

in how they use strategies. A study by Vandergrift (2003), for example,reported on the strategies of two French L2 learners, Rose and Nina,

when confronted with the task of listening to an announcement about

how to win a ski weekend in a drawing. Although both listeners engaged

Strategies for learning and performing L2 speech acts 277

in translation from their L1 to some degree, Rose appeared to use an in-

e¤ective strategy for the task, namely, bottom-up processing exclusively.

In contrast, Nina used a more e¤ective strategy, which was to engage in

top-down processing by using her world knowledge and text knowledge

to interpret what she heard. Her strategy was to develop a frame of refer-

ence from which she could interpret new input. Numerous other studies

have appeared which describe learners like Nina, who most likely havethe requisite ability to do better at L2 learning than their performance

would suggest. It is studies like these that have prompted learner strategy

experts to devise interventions for enhancing strategy use by L2 learners.

There have, for example, been studies involving explicit strategy instruc-

tion for learners in listening (Rubin 1990), speaking (Dornyei 1995; Co-

hen et al. 1998; Nakatani 2005), and the literacy skills of reading and

writing (Macaro 2001). These studies and others have demonstrated that

learners who consciously make use of language strategies produce betterresults in their language performance than students who are less strategic.

If we take a closer look at the actual language tasks employed in the

studies which have determined that explicit strategy instruction can have

an impact, we notice that they have tended to be relatively straight-

forward tasks, rather than those which involve complex speech acts. For

example, in the Cohen et al. (1998) study, respondents had to describe

themselves to someone who was going to meet them in an airport, retell

a simple fable, and describe their favorite city. It is posited for the pur-poses of this article that if the language tasks involve complex speech

acts, then successful completion of them might call for more specialized

speech act performance strategies. While speech acts may be delivered in

a direct way, they may also be negotiated in an indirect manner, involv-

ing a host of complex variables, as the interactive discourse unfolds.

So, for example, a daughter might use the strategy of a relatively direct

request to borrow a car from her parents over the weekend (‘‘Hey, dad,

can I take your old car this weekend?’’), or she could choose a more indi-rect request strategy (‘‘Hey, dad. How was your business trip to Chicago?

I was wondering if you’re going to be using your old car this weekend.

Something important has come up and . . .’’). Depending on the language

and culture, it may be strategic for the speaker to adjust the delivery of

the speech act according to the age, relative status, or gender of the ad-

dressee. The speaker would also need to know what it means to borrow a

car in that particular context—that is, how big an imposition it is likely to

be in that culture (e.g., whether a car is a daily necessity or a luxury) and inthat specific context (e.g., borrowing a new and relatively valuable car vs.

an older ‘‘spare’’ car). In some cases, it may be crucial to avoid suggesting

the borrowing of the car altogether, but rather just to indicate the need for

278 Andrew D. Cohen

transportation and to leave it to the addressee to determine whether to of-

fer a car or not. In the above example, there is undoubtedly some family

history involved, such as whether the father trusts his daughter to drive

even the older car safely. Issues of family personalities and relationships

are also likely to play a part in the phrasing of the daughter’s request and

in the father’s response to this request. And it could take a number of turns

to resolve itself, whether the interaction ends amicably or in conflict.Research has demonstrated that e¤ective speech act performance en-

tails not only strategically selecting and making use of the pragmalinguis-

tic forms that are appropriate for the given speech act, such as in making

a request (‘‘Can I take . . . ?’’ vs. ‘‘I was wondering if . . .’’), but also per-

forming the speech act (in this case, a request for a car) in the right place

at the right time, given the sociopragmatic norms for that speech com-

munity and for that family unit in the given situation. So, whereas native

speakers of English, and in this case, a daughter, would most likely softenthe request through syntactic mitigation (e.g., ‘‘I was wondering if . . .’’),

nonnative speakers may well have learned this syntactic structure but

would not necessarily have su‰cient pragmalinguistic control over its use

in their requests to know whether or when to use it (Bardovi-Harlig 2003).

So the challenge is to support learners in being more systematic in their

strategies for learning and using complex speech acts. A recent concern

for greater rigor in defining and doing research on language learner strat-

egies would suggest not viewing the strategies that learners use for speechact performance as separate thoughts and behaviors, but rather as strat-

egy chains or clusters (Macaro 2004). In the case of strategy chains, the

learner is selecting and deploying the strategies in sequence. Let us say

that a male learner wishes to ask his female boss for a raise. A strategy

chain would involve a series of social strategies in sequence. First, he

might use two supportive moves, such as first trying to minimize the im-

position (e.g., ‘‘Could I just have a minute of your time?’’) and then doing

his best to ground the request by way of justification for making it (‘‘Youknow, I’ve been working 12-hour days these last few weeks . . .’’). Third in

the sequence would be the head act in the form of a query serving as an in-

direct request (‘‘Would it be possible to consider giving me a slight raise?’’).

In the case of strategy clusters, the learner deploys the strategies simultane-

ously, in an overlapping manner. So, a strategy cluster deployed in request-

ing a raise could include at least the following learner strategies: retrieving

from memory some possible language structures for making that request,

choosing from that material forms that are at the level of politeness due toa boss, making sure that the request is sensitive to the norms for male-to-

female talk in that speech community and situation, and using a monitor-

ing strategy to see how well these two strategies are working.


From initial research exploring the strategies that L2 learners of Japa-

nese use in performing speech acts, it would appear that learners do make

e¤orts to use various combinations of strategies—perhaps some learners

more than others (Robinson 1992; Cohen & Olshtain 1993; Widjaja

1997; Cohen & Ishihara 2005). However, given gaps in their knowledge

about sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic norms for the given speech

community, even if they apply a host of strategy chains and clusters tothe performance of L2 speech acts, the results are still likely to partially

reflect negative transfer from the norms that they use for speech act be-

havior in their local L1 or other language community. Again, given the

limits on their interlanguage pragmatic knowledge, they may generalize

L2 speech act patterns from a situation for which they are appropriate to

a situation for which they are not, producing a deviant result. And ac-

cording to the research evidence, it can take many years for L2 speakers

to have their performance reflect the norms of speech act behavior fora given speech community (see Olshtain & Blum-Kulka 1985; Barron

2003).

This daunting challenge, then, would appear to provide justification for

making an e¤ort to at least enhance learners’ strategies for acquiring the

necessary knowledge base in the pragmatics of the L2 and for performing

speech acts appropriately in the given speech community. These strategies

have a potentially beneficial role to play in helping L2 learners to reduce

the likelihood of pragmatic failure in their performance of speech acts.The issue of where the learners obtain their knowledge of how to perform

speech acts will be taken up in the next section.

3. Sources for information about speech acts

It is a given that native speakers of a language within a given speech

community share knowledge about the norms for the performance ofspeech acts. As Kasper and Rose put it, ‘‘speakers’ choices . . . are gov-

erned by social conventions which can be flexed to di¤erent, contextually

varying degrees but only entirely set aside at the peril of losing claims to

face, insider status, or sanity. These constraints are partly universal,

partly activity- and genre-specific, and have to be worked out by language

learners and other novices’’ (Kasper & Rose 2002: 2–3). So the first ques-

tion, which will be taken up in this section, is how we obtain information

about speech acts that can be passed on to learners. The follow-up ques-tion then is how to expose L2 learners to this information so that they can

‘‘work it out’’ (in Kasper and Rose’s terms), which is an issue that will be

considered in the next section of the paper.

280 Andrew D. Cohen

There is a growing consensus that instructional material on pragmatics

should be research-based, rather than dependent on the instructor’s or cur-

riculum writer’s intuition. Native speakers’ intuitions about their own

pragmatic use of language may not always be accurate since they often per-

form speech acts without paying much attention to how they do it (Boxer

& Pickering 1995; Rose & Kasper 2001; Schmidt 1993). Therefore, it is all

the more important to make use of findings from empirical studies in or-der to better inform the speech act material that is used in L2 instruction.

As was first demonstrated by Wolfson (1981) with the collection of

data on complimenting, there are obvious advantages to obtaining in-

structional material through natural data (from corpora, if possible)

rather than through, say, measures involving production questionnaires,3

especially of the discourse completion task (DCT) variety, since such

questionnaires may reflect what natives think they do rather than what

they do in real interactions. One of the recent studies that support thisview is that of Golato (2003), who compared compliment response data

from naturally-occurring settings (analyzed through conversation analy-

sis) with data collected by means of a DCT. Her source for conversation

analysis was responses to compliments in German L1 among friends and

family from a corpus consisting of 6 hours of telephone and 25 hours of

face-to-face conversations. The DCT consisted of a one-line context de-

scription (with the situations similar to those in her corpus) followed by

a compliment and four lines on which to write one or more responses.She administered her DCT to 30 respondents, some of whom were sub-

jects in her conversation analysis study. While the most frequent types of

responses in the DCTs involved the response strategies of ‘‘questioning

the compliment assertion,’’ ‘‘commenting on the object,’’ or ‘‘providing

an account,’’ Golato did not find these to be the most frequent response

strategies in the naturalistic data. Furthermore, in naturalistic data, ja

was used alone, whereas in the DCT some background or a shift of refer-

ent was provided, and more combinations of strategies were used. Golatofelt that the DCT respondents were attempting to compensate for the ab-

sence of an interlocutor by expanding their responses. Her conclusion was

that the DCT that she constructed for her study did not provide reliable

examples of what speakers were actually doing when interacting with

co-participants.

Over the last decade researchers have begun to amass corpora of

pragmatic data that can be drawn on to better understand how native

speakers of a language actually realize speech acts in numerous contexts.So, for example, as part of a Language in the Workplace project at Vic-

toria University of Wellington, Holmes and her colleagues have collected

over 2,000 interactions in English (mostly L1) in the workplace in New


Zealand (Holmes 2003a, 2003b). Extensive analysis of their corpus has

yielded insights into what is necessary for fitting in and becoming an

integrated member of the workplace, with the focus being specifically on

small talk, humor, whinges, complaints, and refusals. The findings are

that speech acts may be highly indirect and dependent on both the per-

sonalities of the interlocutors and on their actual relationship with others

in the workplace, sometimes established over long periods of time.There have been various other e¤orts to describe pragmatic behavior

by means of corpus data as well. For example, Koester (2002) reports on

a corpus of speech acts in English, consisting of 66 conversations between

colleagues at work, recorded in eight di¤erent o‰ces in a variety of loca-

tions in the US and Britain, with participants giving instructions, making

arrangements, briefing others, or engaged in joint problem solving. She

found that speech acts such as giving advice and giving directives were

not usually performed directly and that it was necessary to look beyondthe individual utterance to see how particular communicative acts un-

folded within a conversational sequence. As with Holmes, Koester viewed

corpora as valuable sources of material for the teaching of functional lan-

guage. Another study involved analysis of two complaints taken from

Japanese corpus data that the investigator had collected (Kumagai

2004), with the focus on how the repetition of utterances within such con-

versations functioned for the complainer as a conversational strategy to

express emotions, intensify the reproach, hold the floor and control thetopic, and manipulate the development of the conversation. The recipient

of the complaint was found to use repetition for other purposes, namely,

for repeating an apology, stalling or diverting the complaint, reorienting

the conversation to a solution, and closing the conversation.

In addition, there have been studies which have compared L1 corpus

data with data elicited in more structured contexts. For example, Ko-

bayashi and Rinnert (2003) compared samples of role-play performance

by high- and low-proficiency Japanese EFL students with naturally-occurring L1 request data in Japanese and English. They also looked

at how level of EFL proficiency a¤ects students’ choice of strategies

for coping with high imposition request situations. They looked at the

length of request sequences, the presence of pre-request negotiation,

supportive moves, the position of grounders, build-ups to requests, head

act shift (e.g., from direct strategies in low imposition requests to conven-

tionally indirect strategies for high imposition requests), pervasive want-

statements as head acts (in NNS data, not in L1 data), and strategies foracknowledgement (by the requester once the request has been accepted).

Their main finding was that negative transfer does not necessarily take

place. They found that some aspects were more easily transferred than

282 Andrew D. Cohen

others. They provided some di¤erences between Japanese and English re-

questing behavior that they felt would probably need to be taught.

There have also been recent studies focusing not on production of

speech acts but on the ability to perceive which of a series of utterances

would be the most appropriate in the given speech act situation. A study

of this kind involving requests was conducted with Korean foreign-

language learners (Byon 2004). The thirty subjects listened to a sequenceof three audio-taped request speech act situations, each followed by four

taped choices of alternative request interactions with two-to-four turns

each (played three times each). They were asked to judge the most appro-

priate request according to: 1) the referential content of the message, 2)

the social meaning (e.g., politeness through the appropriateness of honor-

ific elements), and 3) pragmatic meaning (e.g., directness). They were also

asked to provide the reason for their choice. Among the findings with

regard to learner perceptions were a series of reasons for incorrect re-sponses, which included di‰culty in perceiving the speech level and the

use or nonuse of honorifics. The researcher attributed much of the di‰-

culty to L1 sociopragmatic transfer, given the American egalitarian value

system and directness in American English.

Although there might be great value in gathering language in its natu-

ral setting, as the Golato (2003) study would suggest, it is unrealistic to

assume that there will be su‰cient learner-friendly corpora of natural

data available to provide learners with the speech act information theymight need for the host of L2 situations that they might encounter, espe-

cially with regard to numerous speech acts, such as apologies and

complaints, that are not found in naturally occurring data so frequently.

Hence, creatively-fashioned and administered role-play situations and

written DCTs constructed so as to simulate actual discourse situations

(e.g., through multiple-rejoinder situations) still have an important contri-

bution to make. Of course, the caveat is that they may not reflect exactly

what people say in extended discourse and fully contextualized discourse,but rather represent somewhat idealized, but hopefully still appropriate,

behavior for that situation. This is not surprising if the instructions are

to think through what it would be appropriate to say in such a situation.

The respondent may purposely search for an archetypal response. Since

there is a range of what native speakers might do in a given situation any-

way, as long as the elicitation yields data that could reflect appropriate

native-speaker performance, such data can make a contribution, often

more so than the intuitively-derived pragmatic material found in text-books (to be discussed in the next section below).

If time and resources permit in the data collection phase, e¤orts can

be made to enhance the quality of production questionnaire data by


employing various types of formats for collecting oral data (see Kasper

2000). One such format calls for the interviewer reading each situation

aloud to the respondents, who are to respond verbally on audiotape, as

was the case in a study of Egyptian Arabic and American English refusals

(see Nelson et al. 2002) and in the case of the much earlier study of apol-

ogies for which Hebrew L1, English L1, and English L2 data were col-

lected (Cohen & Olshtain 1981). In addition, the notion of a multiple-rejoinder DCT has been promoted, in an e¤ort to ensure that there will

be three-to-four turns, so as to approximate a discourse more than when

there is simply one turn as in the Golato (2003) study (see Cohen &

Shively 2002/3; Paige et al. 2004).

The next section will look at the issue of how best to expose L2 learners

to information about speech acts so that they can apply strategies to en-

hance their control of it.

4. E¤orts to teach pragmatic behavior

The research literature would suggest that e¤orts to explicitly teach prag-

matics are coming more into vogue (e.g., Rose & Kasper 2001). There

are, in fact, edited volumes reflecting practical e¤orts to teach pragmatics,

replete with lesson plans (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor 2003;

Tatsuki 2005). In addition, websites that provide self-access speech actmaterials for L2 learners have appeared, such as one developed at the

University of Minnesota for the learning of five speech acts in Japanese

(http://www.iles.umn.edu/IntrotoSpeechActs/).

Given the disparity between what native and nonnative speakers do

pragmatically, the question has arisen as to the kinds of instruction about

pragmatics that would serve to close the gap. One way for learners to ac-

quire more appropriate pragmatic language behavior would be through

regular classroom instruction (assuming the learners are currently takingclasses). There is, in fact, some evidence that instruction alone—without

an intervention explicitly focused on speech acts—can have an impact.

For instance, a study of 160 EFL learners (Safont Jorda 2003) found that

EFL learners improved over the course of a semester in their ability to

modify their requests, even though they were not explicitly taught how to

do so. The researcher found that, while in pretesting the learners used few

modification devices in a DCT, at posttesting the learners began to use

strategies like attention getters, grounding for their requests, and ‘‘please.’’Nonetheless, it would appear that explicit instruction in pragmatic be-

havior has generally made more sizeable inroads into this area of learner

performance than has just participation in regular instruction. For one

284 Andrew D. Cohen

thing, the students’ L2 textbooks have not necessarily provided much fo-

cus on these areas (see Vellenga 2004), and even if they have provided

some coverage, the information provided may not reflect natural data

(see Kakiuchi 20054). Secondly, teachers may find it useful to have access

to curricular materials which have L2 pragmatics as an explicit focus,

since this area has traditionally been underrepresented in teacher develop-

ment programs. Thirdly, an explicit approach to pragmatics instructionseems to have an edge over a more implicit approach. For example, Tros-

berg (2003) reports on several studies involving both implicit and explicit

teaching of pragmatics for students of business language (e.g., handling of

customers’ complaints). The results of her study were that those learners

explicitly taught pragmatic routines (e.g., a ‘‘recipe’’ for how a sales per-

son could respond to a customer’s complaint) had a slight advantage over

those taught inductively. What she found particularly striking was how

easy it was to teach pragmatic routines and how dramatic the changeswere in the way the complaints were handled after very little teaching

over a short time.

A second study involving both explicit and implicit teaching of

pragmatic routines to beginning learners of Japanese L2 also seemed to

slightly favor the explicit treatment (Tateyama 2001). One group received

explicit metapragmatic information while the second group did not. The

participants engaged in role-play and multiple-choice tasks and provided

retrospective verbal report. While there were no di¤erences between thetwo groups in the multiple-choice and role-play tasks, close examination

of the errors in the multiple-choice tasks indicated that the participants in

the explicit group were more successful in choosing the correct answers in

items which required higher formality of the linguistic expressions. The

participants were found to benefit from explicit teaching about how fac-

tors such as the degree of indebtedness in thanking situations, the severity

of the o¤ense in the di¤erent apology situations, age and social status,

and the in-group/out-group distinction may influence the choice of rou-tine formulas.

A third intervention to enhance pragmatic performance involved the

development of English request strategies by Japanese EFL learners (Ta-

kahashi 2001). The study used four input conditions: 1) explicit teaching

of requests, 2) having learners compare their utterances to those of native

speakers, 3) having learners compare the utterances of other EFL learners

to those of natives, and 4) having learners read transcripts of interactions

and answer comprehension questions about the content. An open-endedDCT and a measure of confidence in selecting request forms were admin-

istered on a pre-post basis. The learners were also asked to provide imme-

diate retrospective verbal report data about their conscious decisions


during their request performance. The degree of input enhancement was

found to influence the acquisition of request forms, with the first condi-

tion, ‘‘explicit teaching,’’ having the strongest impact, and then the sec-

ond, third, and fourth conditions in that order. Explicit instruction helped

develop both proficiency and confidence to a greater extent than the other

three conditions. The third and fourth conditions both failed to draw the

learners’ attention to the target forms in the input.A fourth study, which entailed providing intermediate ESL learners

with explicit pragmatics instruction in complimenting and responding to

compliments, had several features not so prevalent in other studies—

namely, an interim measure and a delayed posttest, one year after the

instruction (Ishihara 2004). As the instruction progressed, learners pro-

duced longer written DCT complimenting dialogues on appropriate

topics, approximated native speakers in their use of the syntactic struc-

tures associated with compliments, and utilized newly learned responsestrategies. One year after instruction, although a few response strategies

were marginally employed, a subset of the learners still demonstrated

their retention of central skills. The researcher reported that the instruc-

tion contributed to the learners’ understanding of the culturally-specific

nature of complimenting and awareness of gender, relative status, and ap-

propriate topics. In addition, after the instruction, the learners reported a

higher level of confidence in complimenting interactions and enhanced

motivation for learning other speech acts.Aside from looking at the production of speech acts, studies have also

focused on enhancing the perception and interpretation of speech acts.

For example, one study involving Persian advanced EFL students con-

sisted of two 30-minute intervention sessions comprised of explicit meta-

pragmatic instruction on the speech acts of requesting, apologizing, and

complaining (Eslami-Rasekh et al. 2004). Teacher-fronted discussions,

cooperative grouping, role plays, and other pragmatically oriented tasks

were used to promote the learning of the intended speech acts. A multiple-choice pragmatic comprehension test was used both as a pretest and

posttest to measure the e¤ect of instruction on the pragmatic comprehen-

sion of the students. The results of the data analysis revealed that the EFL

students’ perception of speech acts improved significantly, despite the lim-

ited intervention. The study was reminiscent of the Olshtain and Cohen

(1990) study in terms of the duration of the intervention, since that study

had only three sessions of 20 minutes each focused on EFL apologies. The

di¤erence in the latter study was that it entailed speech act production.In addition to those studies which have produced results which are gen-

erally in support of explicit instruction in speech act performance, there

have been those with less favorable results over time. For example, a

286 Andrew D. Cohen

study was conducted to enhance the politeness and indirectness of non-

native English-speaking law students’ requests (Salazar Campillo 2003).

The researcher administered a pretest of requesting with a DCT, provided

a session where she first taught request strategies (from the most indirect

to the most direct) and then focused on lexical downgraders, and then

gave a posttest. Three weeks later she gave another, delayed posttest. Al-

though she found a qualitative increase in the use of requests on a DCTimmediately after instruction (e.g., the use of some mitigation), this e¤ect

was not maintained in delayed tasks. Her conclusion was that the e¤ects

of instruction were only for the short term.

Despite the studies with mixed results, it would still appear that

learners stand to benefit from explicit focus on pragmatics, rather than

simply being exposed to appropriate speech act performance in class.

Nonetheless, it would seem that such explicit focus is not su‰cient if the

learners do not have strategies for both learning this material and for per-forming speech acts based on this knowledge. One means of enhancing

learners’ use of strategies in dealing with speech acts is through styles-

and strategies-based instruction (see Cohen & Weaver 1998, 2005; Mac-

aro 2001). In this approach, the instructor and the instructional materials

are not just focused on teaching learners pragmatics but also on develop-

ing within the learners a keener sense of how to be more strategic in deal-

ing with this area of L2 language behavior. Orientation to speech act

strategies could either be through classroom-based instruction or throughself-access at a website—either as part of a distance learning course, an

out-of-class component of a traditional course, or as part of autonomous

learning to some degree or other.

The next section will provide a taxonomy of speech act strategies that

could be o¤ered as part of this style- and strategies-based instruction. The

section presents strategies that L2 learners may wish to utilize in their

learning of speech act material and in their performance of these speech

acts and also presents metapragmatic considerations learners are likelyto face in their e¤orts to have pragmatically successful L2 interactions.

5. Taxonomy of learner strategies for acquiring speech acts

The following is an e¤ort to provide a taxonomy which identifies key

learner strategies in the acquisition of speech acts. The taxonomy in-

cludes: 1) strategies for the initial learning of speech acts, 2) strategiesfor using the speech act material that has already been learned to some

extent, and 3) learner’s metapragmatic considerations regarding the de-

ployment of these strategies. Sources for strategies in this taxonomy


include the general learner strategy literature, the speech act literature,

and insights from recent strategy research conducted to enhance college

students’ learning of Japanese L2 speech acts through a strategies-based

online curriculum (Cohen & Ishihara 2005) and from a language and cul-

ture study abroad project (Paige et al. 2004; Cohen et al. 2005). While ex-

plicit strategy instruction has been found to benefit language development

in general (see, for example, Dornyei 1995; Cohen et al. 1998; Nakatani2005), its application to the learning and use of speech acts is, at present,

still limited. One recent application was in an investigation of speech act

strategy intervention in study abroad which included the administration

of a strategy inventory on a pre-post basis with 86 experimental and con-

trol students. A reported increase in the use of the strategy ‘‘figuring out

and modeling native-speaker language patterns when apologizing, re-

questing, or complaining’’ among the experimental group students was

found to correlate positively with higher scores of rated performance ona series of multiple-rejoinder DCT vignettes (Cohen et al. 2005).

With the exception of several instances indicated below, the strategies

listed in the following taxonomy are in need of empirical validation as to

their actual contribution to enhancing learners’ speech act ability. Hence,

it is best to consider the listing of strategies in this taxonomy as a series of

hypotheses.

5.1. Speech act learning strategies

� Taking practical steps to gain knowledge of how specific speech acts

work by:

1) identifying the L2 speech acts to focus on, using criteria such as:

a) their frequency of use in common situations encountered by

the L2 speaker in the given speech community (e.g., ‘‘request-

ing,’’ ‘‘refusing,’’ and ‘‘thanking’’),

b) their potentially high-stakes value in discourse (e.g., ‘‘apolo-gizing’’ and ‘‘complaining’’),

c) their special role in the given community of practice5 within

the speech community or the society, such as in creating soli-

darity (e.g., the use of expletives).

2) gathering information (through observation, interview, and

written material; see below) on how those speech acts are per-

formed by members of one or more communities of practice with-

in a given speech community (for example, at the workplace:making requests of age mates, refusing requests made by people

of higher status, and thanking people in service—e.g., cafeteria

workers, custodians).

288 Andrew D. Cohen

� Conducting a ‘‘lay’’ cross-cultural analysis by:

1) thinking through and even writing out what the appropriate things

to say would be for that speech act in the L1 speech community,

depending on the situation,

2) identifying the sociopragmatic norms for performance of these

speech acts in the target speech community,

3) assuming they can be performed in the given situation, identifying:a) the semantic formulas that tend to be used with the given

speech act in that situation (e.g., whether an o¤er of repair is

expected to be given in that apology situation),

b) the linguistic structures to use, consistent with the local prag-

malinguistic norms (e.g., whether to use the word ‘‘apolo-

gize’’ in the expression of apology or just ‘‘sorry’’; whether

to repeat ‘‘sorry’’ more than once, and whether to intensify

with words like ‘‘really,’’ ‘‘awfully,’’ or ‘‘so’’),4) determining the similarities and di¤erences between the two cul-

tures, and then making a mental note or a notebook entry regard-

ing the di¤erence(s),

5) obtaining a viable interpretation for the cross-cultural di¤erences

(e.g., by asking members of the L2 speech community, which

could mean members of a particular community of practice such

as a group at the workplace, or social or friendship group).� Observing what native speakers6 do by noting what they say, how

they say it (speed of delivery, tone, etc.), and their nonverbal behavior

as they say it (facial expressions, body posture, and gestures).� Asking natives (instructors and non-instructors) to model performance

of the speech acts as they might be realized under di¤ering conditions,

possibly to answer questions about their performance as well. A key

goal of the learner would be to see if there is variation in the realiza-

tion of the speech act(s) according to:

1) the magnitude or seriousness of the issue prompting the speech act(e.g., apologizing for missing a meeting vs. spilling hot co¤ee on a

friend),

2) the relative age of the speaker and the addressee (e.g., making

a request to a senior professor vs. making a request to a young

child),

3) the relative status of the speaker and the addressee (e.g., making

a request to the senior vice president of a firm vs. one to a

custodian),4) the relative roles of the speaker and the addressee in the relation-

ship (e.g., making a request to the chair of the board meeting vs.

to a waiter in a restaurant),


5) the length of acquaintance of the interlocutors (e.g., making a re-

quest to a stranger about switching seats upon boarding an air-

plane as opposed to making an appeal for assistance to a longtime

friend over morning tea).� Accessing published materials dealing with speech acts:

1) Websites with instructional materials on speech acts (e.g., websites

for self-access learning of key speech acts in a given language) (seeCohen & Ishihara 2005, Ishihara 2005a).

2) Corpora in the target L2 that provide samples of the given speech

acts in numerous contexts.

3) L2 textbooks which have coverage of the speech acts of interest.

4) Research articles providing insights on speech acts not available

from other sources (e.g., the study by Daly, Holmes, Newton, &

Stubbe 2004, on the f -word expletive being used in requests

and refusals on the factory floor in New Zealand as a signal ofsolidarity).

5.2. Speech act use strategies

� Devising and then utilizing a memory aid for retrieving the speech

act material that has already been learned (e.g., visualizing a listing

of the semantic formulas for a given speech act—possibly remembered

through an acronym—and then scanning down this list in order to se-lect those members of the speech act set that seem appropriate for the

given situation).� Practicing those aspects of speech act performance that have been

learned:

1) Engaging in imaginary interactions, perhaps focusing on certain

pragmalinguistic aspects of the speech act.

2) Engaging in speech act role play with fellow learners of the L2 or

with native speakers playing the other role.3) Engaging in ‘‘real play,’’ with native speakers in the speech com-

munity, where the native speakers perform their usual roles (e.g.,

lawyer, doctor, shop clerk, etc.,) but with the added knowledge

that the learners are simply practicing speech acts and may say

things that are contrary to fact (e.g., apologizing for something

that in reality they did not do).

4) Engaging in interactions with native speakers without them being

aware that the learner’s purpose is actually to practice speech acts.� Asking native speakers (of the L2 variety of interest) for feedback as

to their sense of what was and was not appropriate in the speech act

performance.

290 Andrew D. Cohen

� Determining their learning style preferences (whether informally

or through some style preference inventory) and then trying out an

approach to speech act delivery that is consistent with the results

(e.g., if the learners are found to be more reflective, then possibly

thinking through the elements in the speech act before performing the

speech act; if they are more impulsive, then possibly just ‘‘on-lining’’ it

and seeing what the response is).� Using communication strategies to get the message across:

1) Using an alerter as a social (interactive) strategy to signal to the

addressee before the delivery of the speech act that it may not

come out right (e.g., ‘‘I want to say I’m sorry, but I’m not sure

how to say it right . . .’’).

2) Upon delivering the speech act, using metapragmatic statements

to repair the situation in the case of possible or actual pragmatic

failure.3) Attempting to approximate what native speakers might do in that

speech act situation:

a) (For the more advanced learners) weighing the assumed force

and impact of several di¤erent approaches, and then on that

basis selecting one.

b) Going by ‘‘feel’’ as to what native speakers would do based

on L2 knowledge that has accrued (as in the case of a learner

in Robinson 1992, who knew the form ‘‘I would like’’ but wasmisguided by her sociopragmatic hypothesis that this was too

polite when talking to American friends).

c) Basing speech act performance on a sense of what seems rea-

sonable to expect native speakers to do in that speech act sit-

uation based on the learners’ psychotypology or perception as

to how similar the L2 is to their language (Kellerman 1983).

4) Compensating for a gap in knowledge by translating from the L1

or from another language exactly what would be said in that lan-guage in order to perform the speech act (i.e., without any precon-

ception that the words and phrases will be acceptable).� Having the knowledge to perform the speech act appropriately but,

as an expression of self-agency or subjectivity, remaining true to their

own inclinations in their speech act delivery, rather than being overly

native-like (see Cohen 1997; LoCastro 1998, 2003; Ishihara 2005b).

5.3. Metapragmatic considerations

� It is up to the learner to determine the speech act(s) they will work on

and the aspects of performance that will get attention. For example, to


what extent should the learner’s focus be on comprehension of the

speech act, on the production of it, or on both? How much concern

will there be for tone, facial expressions, and gestures in speech act de-

livery? (Whereas an actor usually gets coached in such matters, lan-

guage learners are invariably left to figure it out by themselves.)� With regard to metacognitive strategies, the learner needs to deter-

mine how much pre-planning of the speech act to do beforehand, aswell as the nature of the monitoring that will go on during its delivery

and the evaluation that will go on afterwards. In an e¤ort to avoid

pragmatic failure, the learner may monitor for:

1) the appropriateness of the chosen level of directness or indirect-

ness in the delivery of the speech act (e.g., finding the right level

of directness with an L2-speaking stranger on an airplane),

2) the appropriateness of the selected term of address (e.g., referring

in the L2 to Dr. Stephen Blake as ‘‘Doc,’’ ‘‘Steve,’’ or ‘‘you’’—either tu or vous),

3) the appropriateness of the timing for a speech act in the given

situation (for example, whether to make an apology for a work-

related incident to a colleague during a social event),

4) the acceptability of how the discourse is organized (e.g., convey-

ing the bottom-line message right at the start of the communica-

tion, gradually building up to it, or saving it for the last possible

moment),5) the sociopragmatic appropriateness of the selected semantic for-

mulas and the pragmalinguistic appropriateness of the linguistic

material used to represent them (e.g., whether it is appropriate

for a college student to give an outright refusal to the depart-

ment chair’s invitation to dinner and whether the refusal could

include—even in jest—an informal phrase like ‘‘No way!’’).

As indicated above, this is a preliminary e¤ort to provide a taxonomy

of strategies that might play a role in the learning of speech acts, as well

as in the subsequent comprehension and production of the speech acts af-

terwards. The next section will take up the issue of validating this taxon-omy through various kinds of research.

6. Areas for further research

If we accept the premise that this taxonomy of speech act strategies is po-

tentially beneficial to learners, then as researchers it is imperative to vali-

date its usefulness. This section suggests areas for research and raises

292 Andrew D. Cohen

issues regarding research methods and especially relating to the design of

strategy instruments.

Since an excellent source of insights about strategies is the language

learners themselves, it would make sense to refine the above taxonomy

by providing it to L2 learners. Various means could be utilized for collect-

ing learner feedback regarding the strategy taxonomy, such as obtaining

think-aloud data while the learners are engaged in interactive speech actlessons on a website, retrospective verbal reports just after the learners

have performed a speech act task (in class, on a website, or out of class),

or interview data of a more general nature, not linked to a specific speech

act learning or use task.

Another step would be to incorporate learner strategy instruction into

the design of research on the teaching of L2 speech acts. As indicated

at the outset of this article, numerous descriptive studies have been con-

ducted on strategies for reading, writing, listening, and speaking an L2,but few, as yet, specifically on strategies that may be beneficial in the

learning and use of speech acts. While the strategies appearing in the

above taxonomy were purposely phrased in a way that would make them

potentially applicable to the learning and use of any speech act in any lan-

guage, it may be beneficial to construct strategy taxonomies that are of

particular relevance in the learning of given speech acts in specific L2

speech communities and in communities of practice within those speech

communities. An e¤ort could also be made to empirically determine theextent to which speech act strategies either cluster together or are used in

strategy sequences or chains in the performance of given speech acts.

In addition, the experience of constructing a website for the strategies-

based learning of Japanese L2 speech acts revealed certain strategies that

were not, for the most part, generalizable to other speech acts (Cohen &

Ishihara 2005; Ishihara 2005a). While speech act strategy taxonomies will

predictably have strategies that are common across speech acts, there

would undoubtedly be a need to customize the taxonomy somewhat inaccordance with the targeted speech acts and the specific speech commu-

nity. Not only are there strategies that tend to recur in the performance of

certain speech acts within a given speech community, but there are also

strategies that are more prevalent in performing speech acts in one lan-

guage than in another. An example would be the strategy of purposely

being hesitant or even disfluent (stammering and leaving utterances in-

complete) in the delivery of a refusal in Japanese in order to appear hum-

ble in formal settings (Shimura 1995). This strategy would not necessarilygeneralize to English, for example, where such speech acts would most

likely be delivered in an e¤ort to be fluent and coherent, rather than

hesitant.


Yet another area of investigation would be to identify those speech act

strategies that are most beneficial to learners of a foreign language in con-

trast to learners of an L2, an issue which has been put aside so far in this

article. In cases where the learners are studying the L2 in a country where

it is possible to be in regular contact with speakers, presumably the

speech act materials contained in the lessons would be reinforced in daily

encounters, and strategy choices by learners would reflect this reality. Incases where the learner has little or no contact with speakers of the L2,

then strategies for providing this learner with a rich pragmatic environ-

ment for learning and then practicing their own use of the L2 can be a

challenge. It may be useful to see whether a strategic approach to speech

act acquisition in a foreign language situation can help to o¤set the disad-

vantages of not having easy access to native speakers of the language.

A further area for investigation would be the relative usefulness of dif-

ferent sources of input regarding L2 pragmatic behavior, especially withregard to foreign language contexts. For instance, one source of foreign-

language input is that of films, especially those rich in conversational ex-

changes which run the gamut of speech acts. An advantage of viewing a

film over live observation of speech behavior is that a learner can replay a

section repeatedly to have exposure to a given speech act, and they have

an opportunity to check the subtitles as well. However, a film in and of

itself may not provide adequate input. For example, a study comparing

compliments and compliment responses in films found that film languageappears to be most representative of naturally-occurring speech from a

pragmalinguistic perspective—particularly with regard to the major syn-

tactic structures found in compliments is concerned—and less so in terms

of sociopragmatics (Rose 2001). More recent studies (Tatsuki & Nishi-

zawa 2005; Kite & Tatsuki 2005) have tended to confirm this finding.

So, especially if the learners are learning in a foreign-language context,

they may be particularly receptive of strategies-based instructional mate-

rials that complement the film input with insights of a sociopragmaticnature.

Research on speech act strategy taxonomies would also benefit from

continued investigation of learners’ subjectivity and avoidance of L2

speech community norms. It cannot, after all, be assumed that learners

are striving at all times to assume nativelike performance standards

when it comes to speech acts. Learner subjectivity may well play an im-

portant role in speech act performance (see, for example, Siegal 1996; Co-

hen 1997; LoCastro 1998, 2003; Ishihara 2005b). In this regard, would L2learners in a speech community with pragmatic norms conflicting with

their often L1-based pragmatic standards be more prone to consciously

avoiding or even rejecting sociopragmatic norms for when to use speech

294 Andrew D. Cohen

acts and for the semantic formulas to include in those speech acts? Would

they likewise be more prone to reject the pragmalinguistic norms as to the

language structures to select in their speech act performance? This type of

strategizing constitutes a category often neglected by researchers since the

tendency is usually to assume that learners are striving for mastery or at

least some control over the target language. The reality may be that as an

expression of their agency, numerous learners are actually consciouslyshifting back and forth between conformity and avoidance or rejection

of the L2 sociopragmatic and also pragmalinguistic norms.

7. Concerns about research methods

There is unquestionably a need to construct better measures of speech

act strategy use, since this is still a relatively underdeveloped area. Whilethere exists at least one rather general inventory for gathering speech act

strategy information on the web (Cohen & Ishihara 2005), there is a need

to construct more finely-tuned measures, especially in keeping with the

taxonomy presented in this article. An inherent problem with strategy in-

ventories is that they tend to reflect a learner’s generalized perspective at

one moment in time, so there needs to be repeated collection of strategy

data in order to get a more accurate measure both of variation in strategy

use and of changes in strategy use patterns over time. In addition, thelearners’ perspective may be relatively impressionistic unless they have a

clear recollection of a series of performances of the given speech act to re-

fer to in responding. For this reason, it would be beneficial to have strat-

egy inventories be task-based so that the responses refer to speech act be-

havior that was just realized.

An additional problem with the construction of inventories is that they

often rely on a scale of strategy deployment. A common one in strategy

questionnaires currently is ‘‘frequency of use.’’ The problem with thisapproach is that of interpreting what ‘‘frequent use’’ on a 5-to-1 scale re-

ally means. It does not provide any information as to the quality of this

strategy use. What if one learner’s ‘‘5’’ is another learner’s ‘‘4’’ or ‘‘3,’’

and what if the strategy is being used frequently only because it is being

used unsuccessfully? Another approach is to ask learners to rate each

strategy according to how successful they think its use is for them. Even

more precise would be to have them fill out an inventory just after per-

forming a speech act task and rate the extent to which they used each ofthe strategies and the perceived level of success by using those strategies.

It could also be beneficial to ask learners whether they found strategies

easy to use, and to supply any tips they might have on how to use them.


Some of the speech act strategies in the above taxonomy, for example, are

likely to be easier to use than others.

With regard to the collection of strategy data, it is di‰cult for learners

to perform a meta-analysis of, say, their comprehension strategies at the

same time that they are trying to process an L2 speech act and respond to

it. This is why there have been speech act production studies which in-

volved the videotaping of learners’ speech act performance so that it ispossible to show the performance to the learners immediately afterwards

in order to assist them in reconstructing the strategies that they used,

along with a rationale for why (e.g., Cohen & Olshtain, 1993). Learners

may have an easier time focusing on strategies such as, for example,

‘‘observing how natives perform speech acts’’ while engaged in doing ac-

tivities that do not require them to be so actively engaged in the conver-

sation that there is little or no opportunity for metapragmatic analysis—

activities such as listening to model speech performance on a speech actswebsite or while engaged in the real-world activities of eavesdropping on

other peoples’ conversations (in a restaurant, on a bus or train, in a store,

etc.,) or watching T.V. shows or movies. While research has begun to col-

lect the reactions of learners to strategy information provided at a speech

act website through reflective e-journaling (Ishihara 2005a), it would be

beneficial to obtain further information on just how helpful various strat-

egies for learning and use of speech acts actually are.

8. Conclusions

This paper has made an e¤ort to underscore the need for more support of

learners in their e¤orts to acquire pragmatic ability by providing them

with strategies for enhancing how they learn and use speech acts. The

speech act strategy taxonomy provided here is seen as a preliminary step

in this direction. Hopefully, just as considerable research has been under-

taken to describe speech acts, and, more recently, to teach them to L2learners, there will be an increase in the number of research studies which

focus on enhancing learners’ pragmatic performance. The complexity of

speech acts and the challenge that they present to learners would seem to

amply justify the pursuit of research on interventions to assist learners in

being more strategic in their learning and use of L2 pragmatics.

Notes

1. While no distinction is being made between second and foreign language for the bulk of

the article, this distinction is taken up in the final section on areas for future research.

296 Andrew D. Cohen

The basic premise is that learners of a second language are likely to experience extensive

exposure at least to certain speech acts in the environment, while learners of foreign

languages—especially those with limited native speakers in the given environment—

will have only limited exposure to the spoken language outside of the classroom. The

truth is that this is an empirical question since exposure to speech acts may depend in

part on the learners’ strategies for accessing the language.

2. While the term cover strategy was suggested to me by Tim McNamara, University of

Melbourne, in July, 1996, the insight about learners using strategies to appear more

knowledgeable about an L2 than they are emerged from the early L2 diary studies (see

Bailey 1983).

3. Kasper (2000) actually includes four types of production questionnaires, namely: 1) the

‘‘classic’’ discourse completion, 2) dialogue construction (where the respondent can not

only give a rejoinder but continue the dialogue onward), 3) open item, verbal response

only, and 4) open item, free response (verbal response, non-verbal response, or opting

out). We could update this taxonomy by adding the more recent multiple-rejoinder ver-

sion of a DCT (Cohen & Shively 2002/03; Roever 2004).

4. In a rigorous study comparing native-speaker naturally occurring greetings to textbook

greetings, Kakiuchi (2005) found some striking di¤erences. For example, while the text-

book had the response, ‘‘Fine, thank you,’’ natives tended to say ‘‘good’’ and without

the ‘‘thank you.’’ In addition, whereas the textbook would include the name of the ad-

dressee in the greeting, ‘‘How are you, Kazumi?’’ none of the native-speaker participants

in the study used the addressee’s name in the inquiry.

5. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992: 464) define a community of practice as ‘‘an aggre-

gate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor. Ways of

doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations—in short, practices—

emerge in the course of this mutual endeavor.’’

6. For the purposes of this strategy taxonomy, native speaker refers to the native (and pos-

sibly near-native) speakers of the variety of the L2 of interest to the learner. In some

cases, it may actually mean that the learner would want to collect information on di¤er-

ent varieties or dialects, if the learners’ interest is in developing facility, say, with what

characterizes a given speech act such as requesting in Peninsular Spanish as compared

with how it is performed in a Latin American country, such as Uruguay (see Marquez

Reiter 2002; Marquez Reiter & Placencia 2004).

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