EL APRENDIZAJE PERCIBIDO POR LA JUVENTUD EN LOS MEDIOS COMUNITARIOS (ISABEL LEMA BLANCO Y GLORIA ROSIQUE)

The current study contributes to and extends the current knowledge and theory of (L2) pragmatics in several ways. Furthermore, the study also has some contributions to the current methods used in L2 pragmatics studies. These contributions are summarized below.

Theoretical contribution

The current study contributes to making up for the research shortage in L2 impoliteness in general and L2 sarcasm in particular by investigating the comprehension of English sarcasm by L2 learners. It is one of a few L2 pragmatics studies dealing with the comprehension rather than production of an L2 construct. The study contributes to increasing the body of literature on L2 comprehension and redressing the balance with L2 production literature. This study is also, to my knowledge, the first to investigate online English sarcasm as an L2 pragmatic phenomenon, adopts a gender balance in the data collected from the internet and analyse gender difference in the investigated sarcasm. All the previous studies have tackled online English sarcasm within the domain of L1 and the L2 irony/sarcasm studies did not do any analysis for gender difference (see 2.8 and 3.5).

This study is also innovative in investigating English sarcasm as it is naturally used by native speakers and see how L2 learners of English recognize it with all its complexities. In this sense, it is the first to study L2 English sarcasm as a first-order construct wherein the focus is on how the laypersons native speakers use sarcasm. The study judges the different scholarly accounts of irony/sarcasm according to this use. The study provides empirical support for some of these accounts and invalidate others. This is also the first L2 sarcasm study that adopts a prototypical view rather than a sufficient-and-necessary-condition view

when dealing with sarcasm. It is the first to extract the general pragmatic and pragmalinguistic characteristics of sarcasm from the different accounts and definitions of irony/sarcasm and investigate which are more prototypical and which are less.

It is also, to my knowledge, the first study to find out that ‗Insincerity‘ is the most

prototypical general pragmatic characteristics of sarcasm and favours Grice‘s account of irony based on evidence from naturally-occurring data. Perhaps, the only parallel finding comes from Vergis (2017) who discovered that flouting Quality, which results in insincerity, is a crucial act for materializing banter which is akin pragmatic phenomenon to sarcasm.

Finally, the current study is one of the few L2 pragmatics studies that involves Arab L2 learners of English and the first, to my knowledge, to investigate Iraqi learners. By so doing, it attempts to turn the spotlight rather away from the Japanese, Chinese and European L2

learners of English towards Arab learners who are highly under-researched in L2 pragmatics studies.

Methodological contribution

The current study seems to be the first to introduce a metalanguage strategy as a data collection procedure to L2 irony/sarcasm studies. The strategy proved to be effective in locating the target data within the investigated corpora without much effort. The two-fold judgment task used in this study with ‗Sarcasm rating‘ part and ‗Sarcasm identification‘ part is also something new to L2 irony/sarcasm studies. Combining these two parts together in a single judgment task adds more precision to the measuring capability of that task. Two participants may give the same rating to the sarcasm used in the same tested item, but they may differ in identifying where sarcasm is within the text of that item. This reveals that although they give the same rating in the same item, they rate different things. In addition, being a two-fold task enabled it to be versatile and serve different purposes at the same time. The ‗Sarcasm rating‘ part of this judgment task served to reveal the degree of rating, whereas the ‗Sarcasm identification‘ part helped us know the matching status of the recognized sarcasm among the examined groups and revealed which general pragmatic and pragmalinguistic characteristics are used and their frequencies.

The stimuli selection task, which is used for selecting final stimuli for the L2 pragmatics study, is another contribution for this study. According to its results, the task systematically selected the required number of stimuli for the L2 experiment depending on the score of every average category (see table 10). In other words, all the average categories are represented in the final selection of stimuli according to their proportions or scores in the stimuli selection task. This is to prevent the overrepresentation of some average categories at the expense of others which may, in turn, distort the results of the L2 study. This technique was not used

before, to my knowledge, in any L2 irony/sarcasm study or even in any L2 pragmatics study.

The main L2 pragmatics study was conducted online and self-administered by the participants themselves. This procedure proved to be effective in the case of distant

participants. Participants who are scattered over different regions or different countries cannot be reached physically easily. Thus, conducting the study online is an ideal solution in such a case. This is the first L2 sarcasm study to be conducted online using Facebook and email communication. This procedure saves time, effort and money if participants are not easy to reach.

Pedagogical implications

The difference found in sarcasm recognition (sarcasm rating and sarcasm identification) between Iraqi learners and native speakers attracts attention to a gap in teaching L2 irony and sarcasm. Teachers of pragmatics can utilize the discussed general pragmatic and

pragmalinguistic characteristics of sarcasm especially the more prototypical ones when giving explicit instructions to learners regarding L2 irony/sarcasm. Furthermore, they can make use of the judgment task used in the current L2 pragmatics study for some pedagogical purposes (e.g. designing a ‗conscious raising task‘). For example, teachers can prepare some texts and ask some native speakers to identify where sarcasm is within them (e.g. via highlighting). Then, they give the same texts to their L2 learners and ask them to identify sarcasm as well. Afterwards the teachers disclose the native speakers‘ highlights to the learners for comparison. Finally, they comment on the learners‘ errors in the light of mainly the characteristics of sarcasm.