Developing an awareness of the literary and its effect on the L2 language development of three non-native English speaking teachers

Bachman and Bachman and Palmer's model of communicative language ability from the domain of second language acquisition framed this exploratory mixed-methods developmental case study. The study examined the acquisition of both pragmatic language and language processes as they are related to the reading of authentic literary texts by non-native English speaking teachers (non-NESTs), a cohort recent research has shown desires more access, in both understanding and use, to the kind of pragmatic language use that marks native-speaker usage, and which can be found in literary language. The participants were three non-native English speaking teachers in Sri Lanka who participated in a seven-week intervention involving the study and use of literary language. These are the summarized findings about the participants' pragmatic language use in the post-test conducted after the intervention: literal-level questions elicited less pragmatic language use than inferential-level questions; post-intervention responses elicited greater pragmatic function use, especially for a story with greater cultural resonance for participants; decreases in certain pragmatic functions often indicated the engagement of a wider variety of pragmatic functions in the post-tests; and variety of pragmatic function use appears to be an indicator of language ability. These are the general conclusions about the processes that need to be engaged in the successful reading of literary language by L2 users: a capacity to recognise inferential details in literary texts is key to interpretive understanding; ultimate comprehension and interpretation of inferential meaning is compromised when respondents assign incorrect meanings to lexical and semantic elements; texts from the participants' native culture elicited more interpretive understanding; and composition of "correct" and "incorrect" answers to inferential-level questions contain nuances that are of interest to researchers in SLA and applied linguistics, as they appear to suggest at least some of the processes that need to be involved, and so engaged, in reading and understanding texts with high inferential content.