Development and Application of a Multimodal Corpus for Learners’ Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatic competence is the ability of learners to use language (speech) strategies to express themselves appropriately, to understand each other correctly, and to communicate fruitfully in specific contexts (Jiang 2013). Studies in this field have been centred on the development of pragmatic competence (awareness) and teaching methods (Taguchi 2015), pragmatic testing and assessment (Roever 2011), as well as the distribution of pragmatic knowledge in textbooks (Ren and Han 2016), all of which focus mostly on learners’ language forms and strategies, yet ignore the role of modalities other than language forms in the process of meaning construction and expression, as well as the contribution of corpus linguistics to the study of pragmatic competence. Professor Zhanhao Jiang’s new book, Development and Application of a Multimodal Corpus for Learners’ Pragmatic Competence , is a timely attempt to address the paucity of studies in this respect, by presenting an interface study between multimodality, corpus linguistics and pragmatic competence. The book consists of eight chapters, which are engagingly structured into four parts, leading readers through the practical process of building a multimodal corpus and showing them how to apply it to learners’ pragmatic competence research.