It is also a strand which is woven through several of our other areas of emphasis. Research to date in this area has concentrated on speech act realization differences across languages and has included bibliographic research, descriptive research using especially discourse completion tasks, and developmental research.
Current research emphasizes the research of methodological aspects of interlanguage pragmatics.
Relatively little research has been conducted on the opportunities for pragmatic development in foreign language classrooms. For a variety of reasons, discourse markers in Japanese, an indispensable part of communicative competence, seem particularly difficult for English-speaking learners to acquire. The goal of this study is to identify teaching strategies that facilitate the acquisition of discourse markers by advanced learners of Japanese as a foreign language and to explore the function of discourse markers as socialization strategies as they occur in teacher talk. The treatment for the experimental group will consist of additions to current course syllabuses in advanced Japanese classes which will directly address the appropriate use of Japanese discourse markers in spoken and written discourse. In order to examine the language socialization strategies adopted by Japanese teachers, classes will be video recorded, transcribed, and computerized in CLAN format.