讲座预告丨明德致远系列学术讲座第61期

日期： 2025-04-15

第61期

Stages of Development: Researching a Research Task for Pragmatics and Conventional Expressions

主讲人：Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig

Professor of Indiana University - Bloomington

主持人：

田丽丽

中国人民大学外国语学院教授

郦帅

美国佐治亚州立大学教授

时间：2025年4月20日（周日）09:00-10:30

腾讯会议：853-138-242

讲座简介

This talk has two main goals: The first goal is to describe the development of a data-driven multiple-choice aural discourse completion task (DCT) for the purposes of researching the knowledge of conventional expressions among EFL learners and subsequently developing a means suitable for large-scale needs assessment. The second goal is to demystify the steps of research design for students and early-career researchers. Published research often reports on only the outcome of task developed by presenting the final product, that is, the task that was ultimately used to collect data. This has the consequence of making it appear that experienced researchers “hit on” their data collection methods with ease. I welcome any questions about this “behind the scenes” aspect of research and research design, as well as other questions.

This talk is situated in pragmatics, the study of “how to say what to whom, when, and what not to say.” I will also be introducing the concept of conventional expressions which members of speech communities use to accomplish certain speech acts (like greetings, leave-takings, apologies, refusals, thanking, or even replying to a wrong phone number). In some situations, speech is highly conventionalized meaning (technically) that more than half of the speakers tested say the same words. Most situations are not conventional, but those that are present interesting opportunities to understand how language learners acquire conventional expressions and the role that input and instruction can play, especially in a foreign-language context.

The task that I will be discussing was tested at three universities in northern China, and later in Mexico. If you would like to read about the task in advance, here are two articles:

Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Su, Y. (2023). Developing an empirically-driven aural multiple-choice DCT for conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics. Applied Pragmatics, 5(1), 1-40. 

Bardovi-Harlig, K., Izquierdo, J., & Su, Y. (2022). Recognition of conventional expressions by EFL learners in Mexico and China. System, 110.

主讲人简介

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is Provost Professor Emerita in the Department of Second Language Studies at Indiana University. She has taught courses on second language acquisition, research design, and pragmatics. Her research focuses on the acquisition of tense-aspect systems and the expression of temporality, the acquisition of second-language pragmatics, formulaic language in pragmatics (including conventional expressions and pragmatic routines), and research design. She is a former editor of Language Learning and past president of the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL). Her research has appeared in Journal of Pragmatics, System, Language Learning, Research methods in Applied Linguistics, SSLA, SLR,and numerous handbooks, encyclopedias, and edited volumes. 

编辑：董秀怡