Mixed methods in raising sociopragmatic awareness: a proposal for combining insights from the teacher’s feedback and the interlocutor’s point of view

This paper comprises two parts. First, it reports on native-speaker English lecturers’ envisaged reactions to and evaluation of Italian EFL graduate students’ written discourse (41 written offers and 17 written requests). Participants were asked to comment on the texts’ perceived positive and negative traits (e.g. (im)plausibility, (un)naturalness); to rate them along several dimensions (e.g. structure, amount of content); and to envisage their possible immediate and delayed effects. The teachers’ comments on and anticipated reactions to the student discourse revealed the importance they attributed to the learners’ awareness of interactants’ interpersonal needs and social rights, suggesting that perceptions of pragmatic norms may serve to explore language learners’ interactional competence. Instead, the teachers’ ratings expressed technical evaluations of the strengths and weaknesses (e.g. (in)coherence, register (in)appropriateness) of the texts, highlighting areas for focused instruction. In the second part, the lecturers’ responses indicated that they considered it useful and suitable to alert learners to the interpersonal-social consequences of linguistic-interactional choices. The findings suggest that foreign language learning could be enhanced through the provision of complementary forms of assessment: a projection of the envisaged reactions of a “model” interlocutor (socially oriented feedback) with a technical description of standard parameters of “communicative adequacy” (formal evaluation).