Development of second language pragmatic competence: The data-driven teaching of German modal particles based on a learner corpus

Interlanguage pragmatics is the study of how learners behave as social actors using their second language knowledge to accomplish specific communicative goals. This field is constantly growing, however, relatively few longitudinal studies have been published to date in which changes in learners' second language pragmatic competence have been monitored closely over time and explored in relation to particular types of instructional activities. This dissertation aims to fill this gap.; I analyze the influence of form-focused instruction on the development of pragmatic competence in German as a foreign language by American university students. I suggest a data-driven approach to teaching an important pragmatic feature of German, modal particles, and track the development of the comprehension and use of this feature by the learners over time.; This pedagogical intervention was administered during a tutored course where learners participated in electronically mediated email and chat exchanges with native speaker peers. The novelty of the proposed approach is that the instruction materials were created on the basis of the participants' own modal particle use, and where each succeeding stage of the intervention was based on gains made by learners in the previous stage.; The research data was elicited from learners' electronic writings, awareness questionnaires, course portfolio entries, class observations, and surveys. The application of the research methodology of contrastive corpus analysis allowed for valid comparisons of learner and native speaker written data since they come from the very same interactions between participants of similar age and social background. The use of the methodology of microgenetic analysis facilitated tracking the development of learners over time as well as the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data in its entirety and interconnection.; The results showed a significant increase in frequency, range, and accuracy of modal particle use by learners in approximation to the native speaker baseline as well as a significant improvement in pragmatic awareness. This study contributes to developmental SLA research by suggesting a new method of teaching pragmatic competence; by widening the scope of teachable pragmatic features; and by providing quantitative and qualitative characteristics of pragmatic development by American intermediate collegelevel language learners.