Colloquium: Dr. Marta Vacas, "COREMAH, a native and non-native corpus created to teach pragmatics"

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COREMAH, a native and non-native corpus created to teach pragmatics

 

Most of the mistakes the students make in their second or third languages are not only linked to grammar, but also to pragmatics. Pragmalinguistic mistakes come from the literal translation of pieces of language from one language to the other, whereas sociopragmatic mistakes come from a different perception of the world. This presentation talks about the creation of a corpus that analyzes and compares three conflictive speech acts (compliments, refusals, and apologies) and the sources of the mistakes that occur when interference comes into play. The use of upgraders and downgraders in both cultures, Spanish and American, are also analyzed amongst the three groups of the research: intermediate students of Spanish (at the college level), advanced students of Spanish (at the master’s level), and native speakers of Spanish. Furthermore, given the multimodal nature of COR.E.M.A.H (www.coremah.com) the differences in nonverbal behavior, gestures, proxemics, and tone of voice are also addressed. Results of comparing these three groups of subjects show us that grammatical competence is not always a good indicator of pragmatic competence or communicative competence. It has been observed that the students with the higher level of Spanish were, often, those that showed more pragmatic negative transfer. The corpus comprises 72 subjects who perform a total of 108 videos which are transcribed and tagged. The website of COR.E.M.A.H is an advanced resource to teach pragmatics in a foreign language class at many levels. Transcriptions can be downloaded in three different ways: raw transcription, transcription with non-verbal language annotations, and transcription with non-verbal annotations and strategy tags. The COR.E.M.A.H web page also allows search by word or by strategy amongst the whole corpus, by speech act, or by role-play/situation. Pedagogical implications for the L2 classroom will be discussed.