Multilingual pragmatic awareness in collaborative writing

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these aspects in mind, this paper focuses on the pragmatic awareness of multilingual learners while they are performing a collaborative writing task in three different languages, namely those of Catalan, Spanish, and English. The corpus consists of recordings from 30 university students' oral interactions while working in pairs to write three email request messages. In an attempt to provide a holistic and ecological account of learners' performance, pragmatic-related episodes were identified by considering Brown and Levinson's politeness features (1987 Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Leech's (1983 Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. Longman. [Google Scholar]) approach to pragmatic competence. Results are in line with previous studies tackling multilingual learners of English and they provide us with interesting insights about the mechanisms that multilingual students activate when planning and performing pragmatic production tasks during collaborative work.