Pragmatic Development through Blogs: A Longitudinal Study of Telecollaboration and Language Socialization

Abstract

In the acquisition of pragmatic competence, technology-mediated telecollaboration can be a crucial advantage as learners can be socialized into the pragmatic strategies of expert language users in a dynamic interactive context. This chapter focuses on the pragmatic development of three foreign language learners of Japanese over 16-21 months as they blogged with Japanese learners of English in Japan before and after studying in Japan. The blog-mediated learning was provided in conjunction with face-to-face instruction, and the learners' sense of community expanded through the study abroad experience as well as the blog-based telecollaboration. The learners' pragmatic development observable in their blog posts included their use of address terms, gendered sentence-final particles, a regional dialect, emoticons, and style shifting between the clause-final desu/masu and plain forms. The findings indicate that learners' pragmatic language choices can be interpreted in relation to their language socialization and agentive negotiation of emerging multiple identities.