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
Dialogue 1*
Dialogue 2*
(a) Functions of each turn
Host mother (M)1: How about more rice? (Offer)
Host student (S)1: Oh, I already have a lot.
(Refusal/Ritual refusal)
M2: We have plenty of nikujaga too. (Insistence)
S2: This is really good. (Compliment)
M3: Really? Don’t be shy to ask for more then.
(Insistence)
S3: Really? Could I have just a bit more then?
(Acceptance of the offer/request for more 
food)
M4: Sure, of course. I’m glad I made a lot. 
(Response to the request)
(b) Six turns of offer and acceptance
(c) M1 directly offers more food and S3 also 
directly accepts the offer.
M2 and M3 continue indirectly to make 
the offer.
S1 and S2 indirectly accept the offer (though 
they may be intended as an indirect refusal).
(a) Functions of each turn
M1: How about more rice? (Offer)
S1: I’ve had enough. (Refusal)
M2: We have plenty of nikujaga
too. (Insistence)
S2: It was really delicious.
(Compliment and/or possibly a
refusal)
M3: Really? Don’t be too shy to
ask. (Insistence and possibly an
acceptance of the refusal)
S3: Yes, thank you. Thank you for
the meal. (Refusal /thanks for the
offer)
(b) Six turns of offer and refusal
(c) M1 directly offers more food.
M2 and M3 represent indirect
insistence without pushing too
hard.
All turns by S (1–3) constitute
indirect refusal of the offer in a
thoughtful, subtle manner.
(d) The situation is an everyday family dinner, so not formal. The mother’s insistence
and the student’s polite desu/masu language leads me to infer that this is still in the
first phase of the visit and that they do know each other very well yet.
* Dialogues 1 and 2 were originally delivered in Japanese and have been translated here as literally as
possible.
All sets of activities above are designed to teach pragmatics at the level of
discourse and illustrate how a conversation analytic approach can be incor-
porated into L2 instruction. Needless to say, the use of natural or naturalis-
tic conversations is crucial in the instruction of pragmatics and discourse as
demonstrated here. Ideally, collective resources of this kind will expand so
that L2 pragmatics instruction will be further based on authentic language
use and research-supported insights.
We now turn to the discussion of the role and potentials of language 
corpora in pragmatics-focused instruction.

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D I S C O U R S E , I N T E R A C T I O N , A N D L A N G U A G E C O R P O R A
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The role of language corpora in teaching 
L2 pragmatics
This section considers the application of language corpora in teaching prag-
matics. A language corpus is a large, purposively assembled collection of
computerized texts in spoken or written form which is available for analysis
using corpus software programs.
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The appendix to a relatively recent book
about electronic text analysis lists over 30 available language corpora,
including the British National Corpus (BNC)
and the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/index.htm>.
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While it is not a new thing to extol
the praises of electronic corpora in the design of instructional materials,
their use in the field of applied linguistics is just coming into vogue. The
advantages were noted over a decade ago:
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1
Automatic searching, sorting, scoring. The computer has speed and
accuracy in doing certain low-level tasks, and can be valuable in
providing data to learners through concordances, frequency lists, and
other formats.