Pragmatic Awareness in ESL and EFL Contexts: Contrast and Development

The study reported on in this article set out to replicate and extend Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei's (1998) investigation of pragmatic awareness by addressing two research questions: (a) Do learners in English as a foreign language (EFL) and English as a second language (ESL) contexts display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical errors?(b) Do ESL learners increase their pragmatic awareness during an extended stay in the target environment? The data were elicited using Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei's video-and-questionnaire instrument accompanied by post hoc interviews. The 53 participants in the study included 16 German students studying at a British university, 17 German students enrolled in a higher education institution in Germany, and 20 British English native-speaking controls. The data show that the German EFL participants were less aware of pragmatic infelicities than the ESL group and that the ESL learners increased their pragmatic awareness significantly during their stay in Great Britain.