ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been increasing momentum towards a multilingual and intercultural perspective within L2 pragmatics pedagogy and research, which places emphasis on developing the productive and interpretive capacities necessary for engaging effectively with individuals from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. This has foregrounded the need for development of learners’ abilities to analyse and reflect on language use, particularly the ability to reflect on the ways that one’s own judgements about pragmatic (in)appropriateness are intertwined with broader judgements about people. This chapter considers the relationship between social cognition and evaluations of language use, looking specifically at the role of cultural stereotypes in L2 learners’ meta-pragmatic evaluations. The chapter first elaborates a number of insights from recent theoretical work on the interfaces between social (particularly intergroup) cognition and the evaluative bases of pragmatic judgements. The chapter then draws on classroom data from an English language classroom in Japan to illustrate some of the ways in which cultural stereotypes of self and other mediate the ways a small group of intermediate English language learners evaluate pragmatic phenomena.
