Elizabeth Hassell and Professor Jennifer Brown, Russian
How we got started
Dr. Jennifer Bown and I wished to assess how gender affects the pragmatic competence of students learning Russian. By analyzing the differences between men and women’s ability to form appropriate requests in their second language, we hoped to assist other researchers in developing better language-teaching techniques.
Background for the study
People who set out to learn a second language are faced with many challenges—unfamiliar grammar, foreign syntax, new vocabulary and pronunciation—but all of these can be overcome with time, work, and the help of good teachers and textbooks. However, one of the most important components of a language, pragmatics, is rarely addressed by teachers or in books. In linguistics, pragmatics is the study of the meaning of words in context, or the study of how people express meaning indirectly. For example, saying, “My, is that really the time?” is one way in which English speakers indirectly convey the meaning of “You should go home now” to a guest who lingers too long. Speech acts that require pragmatic competence include expressing and receiving compliments, giving excuses, making apologies, and making and refusing requests (Barron 2003). Since these acts form a large part of everyday communication, a knowledge of pragmatics is essential to smooth social interactions. However, pragmatics is also one of the hardest things for learners of a second language to master. Difficulty arises because second language learners tend to use and interpret sentences literally instead of using social conventions of indirectness to interpret sentences based on context (Rose 2001). In addition, second language learners often mistakenly rely on the social conventions of their first language when performing speech acts in their target language. Misunderstandings can arise as a result of such pragmatic failure.
One specific area in which miscommunication may occur is in the making and interpreting of requests. For instance, native Russians tend to phrase requests more directly (e.g., “Give me the pencil”), whereas English speakers tend to use more indirect phrasing and modal verbs to downplay their requests (e.g., “Would you mind passing me the pencil?”). This means that when Russian- and English-speakers make requests to each other, they may sound, respectively, either blunt and rude or over-polite and obsequious. This illustrates why understanding the pragmatics of a target language is essential to conveying an appropriate level of politeness in that language.
Past research has examined what role pragmatics play in language learning and how language learners acquire pragmatic competence. Much attention has been paid to how study-abroad experiences and classroom instruction affect pragmatics acquisition. However, little research has addressed how individual differences such as gender affect the acquisition of this important language ability. This is surprising, considering that men and women have long been known to have many differences in their speech patterns. One well-documented difference is the elevated level of politeness in women’s speech (Coates 2004, Brown 1998). Women use politeness markers more often, apologize and hedge statements more often, and interrupt less often than men. Intriguingly, in folk linguistics women are often labeled as “naturally ‘good at languages’” (Burton 1994), and studies show men and women acquire particular language-related skills at different rates (Brecht 1993). This naturally raises the question, does a higher sensitivity to one aspect of pragmatic competence in a first language (politeness) translate into more successful acquisition of the pragmatics of a second language? This is exactly what our study will shed light on. There little information about how individual factors affect pragmatics acquisition (Barron 2003). With this study we hoped to help fill that gap.
Research method
We used the ability to make appropriate requests as a measure of pragmatic competence. We did our best to select a mixed-gender group of fifty advanced students of Russian with comparable grammatical competence. Using an IRB-approved survey, we tested their ability to employ appropriate levels of politeness while making requests in Russian. Subjects were asked to respond in writing to various scenarios in which a request must be made. Some scenarios required the subject to make an easy request requiring little formality, such scenarios in which the subject asks a good friend for a small favor. Other scenarios required greater formality, such as those in which the subject asks an unfamiliar person in a position of authority for a difficult favor. A similar test has been successfully used to measure the effectiveness of various teaching methods in pragmatics (Takimoto 2008).
We successfully recruited a large body of advanced Russian language students to take the survey. The ORCA grant allowed us to reimburse these students for their time. We plan to hire four native Russian speakers (another expense made possible by the grant) to grade all of the subjects’ responses on a scale of 1 to 11 for appropriateness, using a scale employed by Takimoto (2008). For each subject’s response, we will average all four of the graders’ scores. We will perform standard statistical analyses to assess differences between men’s and women’s test scores. We experienced delays because there are very few female students in higher level Russian classes at BYU. Without a robust sample size, our statistical power (the ability to have confidence in the patterns you see in your results) could be limited. With this in mind, we are considering adjusting our study to address pragmatic differences between other groups. This requires more data collection and so the results of our study have not yet been made public.
Anticipated academic outcome
However, we plan to widely disseminate the results of this study when it is complete. We plan to submit this study to a peer-reviewed journal such as Language Acquisition, Russian Language Journal, Journal of Politeness Research, Foreign Language Annals, or Journal of Pragmatics. Possible venues for oral presentation include the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages and the International Pragmatics Conference. Presentations to language instructors at BYU and the MTC are also possible.
Sources Cited
- Barron, Anne. 2003. Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: How to Do Things with Words in a Study Abroad Context. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins.
- Brecht, Richard D., Dan Davidson, and Ralph B. Ginsberg. 1993. Predictors of foreign language gain during study abroad. NFLC Occasional Paper. Washington DC: National Foreign Language Center.
- Brown, Penelope. 1998. How and why women are more polite: some evidence from a Mayan community. Pp 81-91 in Coates, Jennifer, editor, Language and Gender: A Reader. Cited in Coates, Jennifer, 2004, Women, Men, and Language: a Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language. New York: Pearson.
- Burton, Pauline, Ketaki Kushari Dyson, and Shirley Ardener, ed. 1994. Bilingual Women: Anthropological Approaches to Second Language Use. Oxford: Berg.
- Coates, Jennifer. 2004. Women, Men, and Language: a Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language. New York: Pearson.
- Rose, Kenneth R., and Gabriele Kasper. 2001. Pragmatics in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Takimoto, Masahiro. 2008. The effects of deductive and inductive instruction on the development of language learners’ pragmatic competence. Modern Language Journal 92:369-386.