A01 cohe4573 01 se fm. Qxd

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T H E N U T S A N D B O L T S O F P R A G M A T I C S I N S T R U C T I O N
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McLean (2005).
yourself why she needs to apologize. After all, she received faulty
goods and has had to go to the trouble of returning the product to the
store. She also says 
otesuudesuga. What does that mean?
If she is apologizing for returning what is clearly a defective item, what
would be culturally appropriate behavior for you, wanting to return an
item you just do not like? What language would you use in attempting
to return an item that works perfectly well?
In a web-based program, the learners’ observation of the situation is elicited
in writing. When the learners electronically submit their responses to the
curriculum writers (and/or their instructor) through the web system, pre-
programmed feedback can be presented instantly:
In this situation, the person ahead of you in line is probably using the
expression 
sumimasen(ga) as a conversation opener
and also as a way of signaling the upcoming request/complaint. She
may also be a bit apologetic for causing the store clerk some trouble in
having to deal with this defective item. 
otesuu desuga
“( literally) (I realize) I am causing trouble for you” is another com-
monly used apologetic phrase in this type of situation that softens the
force of the request/complaint.
Returning the item that works perfectly well is not acceptable in
many cases in Japan. It is best to check the store policy in advance, but
generally, you are often held accountable for the item when you
decide to buy it. You could try being as apologetic as you can in
attempting to return it, and see what happens. In cases where you are
not sure of whether to go ahead and purchase a certain product, you
can always ask about the store policy (although small retail stores may
not even have a policy). If you ask, they may make you an exception,
allowing you to exchange it later.
In classroom-based instruction, teachers may ask learners to describe
some social contexts in which they had problems responding appropri-
ately.
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These learner-generated scenarios would have an advantage of being
truly authentic to learners’ needs. Since the emphasis of this awareness-
raising unit is on the cultural aspects of language use and not on grammatical
fine-tuning, discussions may center on the cultural interpretation of the 
situation, if this exercise is to serve as an introduction.

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C U R R I C U L U M W R I T I N G F O R L 2 P R A G M A T I C S
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In further teaching of pragmatics, curriculum writers may choose to
directly provide information concerning appropriate pragmatic behavior, 
as opposed to simply presenting it and assuming or hoping that students
will learn it (see Chapter 6). Depending on the learner characteristics and
instructional contexts, the choice may be: 1) to start by providing the prag-
matic norms at the outset so that learners can study them and then practice
applying them to interactional situations (a deductive approach), or 2) to
expose learners to the situations straightaway and encourage them to use
their own powers of self-discovery to determine the pragmatic norms (an
inductive approach
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).
In another approach, learners can be exposed to language samples and
asked to guess the identities of the speakers and the relationship between
the conversation partners by attending to the linguistic features in the 
samples. For example, by focusing on certain verb forms or sentence-final