Individual differences in pragmatic development

Abstract

Conventionally, L2 learners are assumed to be able to absorb both linguistic and pragmatic competences simultaneously. Then, researchers find out the importance of an authentic environment for L2 learners and assume that the learners will learn the pragmatic rules of the L2 automatically under an authentic setting. However, even this informed point of view discounts a number of other factors such as "individual factors" and "societal factors." As a result, several different learner characteristics, including age, gender, motivation, proficiency, and social identity/learner subjectivity, in L2 pragmatic development are scrutinized in this paper. With the advancement of technology, it is suggested that individual difference factors should be incorporated into different genres of research on second language acquisition, especially on computer-assisted language learning since many different social network websites and web 2.0 studies are here to stay in this 21st century. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.