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exercises.) While a downside of providing individual feedback is its time-
consuming nature especially for large foreign-language classrooms, the 
systematic use of rubrics may alleviate the issue (see Chapter 15).
Providing interactional and language-focused practice
Although pragmatic awareness-raising is vital and may be an ultimate goal
in the instruction on pragmatics, learners also generally need to acquire the
linguistic forms that will enable them to produce the L2 in a culturally and
contextually appropriate way. With this aim in mind, some of the exercises
may focus specifically on producing commonly used words or expressions.
Other exercises may center on having the learners use pragmatic judgment
regarding alternate forms so that they come to fine-tune their language 
or interpretation of language forms (see more examples in Chapter 6). In
exercises where the focus is on language, a strategic approach may be to
limit the amount of contextual information and to provide clear-cut answers
regarding acceptable language forms (see Example 3, below).
In an exercise from the sample curriculum, learners focus on appropriate
adjectives or phrases that they could use for complimenting the particular
speaker in the given situation. As is the case with other exercises in the web-
delivered curriculum, learners can listen to samples and view vocabulary
assistance and clues to exercises whenever they want (see Chapter 13 for 
the technology). A disadvantage of this technology is that although an
unlimited number of appropriate expressions are possible, only typical word
choices are provided in this exercise. Classroom-based instruction would be
able to follow up on other expressions that are not pre-programmed in this
web-based exercise.
Example 3
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Another exercise encourages learners to attend to the various linguistic
forms and determine the degree of appropriateness of each form using a
multiple-choice format (see Chapter 13 for an example of this online exer-
cise). This type of exercise could be developed based on research findings
about respondents’ judgments.
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Another type of language-focused exercise
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Available at: http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/compliments/ex4 -2.
htm (accessed December 10, 2009).
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A sample exercise available at: http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/
requests/ex5-2.htm (accessed November 14, 2008). In this exercise, answers are based
largely on the responses that 100 native-speaking research informants provided to the
same prompts (Rinnert and Kobayashi 1999).

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