Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 172, January 2021, Pages 7-20
Journal of Pragmatics

A study of Chinese learners’ ability to comprehend irony

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2020.11.003Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A test was developed to measure learners' ability to comprehend irony.

  • Irony is a late acquired aspect of L2 pragmatic competence.

  • Explicit instruction is needed to help learners acquire the ability to recognize irony.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate Chinese University students' ability to recognize irony. To this end, we developed a test that included literal and ironic items and focused on the students' ability to identify which of the items were ironic. 112 first- and second-year Chinese university students completed the test, a C-test as a measure of language proficiency, and a language experience questionnaire. 24 native speakers completed the irony test and C-test to provide a baseline for comparison. Results showed that the learners' scores were markedly lower than the NS's on the ironic items but not on literal items. Both learners and NSs had difficulty with the positive irony items. The learners' response times were also markedly slower than the NSs. There were significant but relatively weak correlations between the learners' irony scores and their proficiency and the amount of time they had spent in an English-speaking country. Overall, the results of the study confirm the findings of previous studies, namely that irony is a late acquired aspect of L2 pragmatic competence. We concluded that unlike NSs, even those learners with advanced language proficiency rely on explicit processing strategies to detect irony and propose explicit instruction is needed to help learners acquire the ability to recognize irony.

Introduction

By and large native speakers seem able to identify and interpret ironical utterances rapidly and without conscious attention (Gibbs, 2012) using the same mechanisms as for processing literal statements (Attardo, 2013). A question of interest, then, is whether second language (L2) learners are able to comprehend irony and if they can whether they do so subconsciously. There are two reasons to believe that learners may find irony difficult. First, the use of irony and the kinds of situations in which it is pragmatically appropriate in their own culture may differ from English-speaking cultures. Kim (2014), for example, reported that sarcasm (a negative form of irony) is not as pervasive in Korean as in English, and that Koreans tended to interpret irony as always conveying criticism. She gave several examples of misunderstanding, including this one:

Kim suggested that whereas native speakers often use irony for humorous purposes (as in the example above), Koreans associate it with criticism or insults. The second reason why L2 learners are likely to find irony difficult is that it requires a high level of proficiency to understand that what is said is not what is meant. For these reasons, we can expect that many L2 learners, especially those of low proficiency, will struggle to comprehend ironic comments and will need to engage conscious processes to do so. Below we review studies that support this claim.

The purpose of this article, then, is to add to the quite limited research on L2 learners' capacity to understand irony by investigating a sample of mixed-proficiency Chinese university students. In the theoretical background section that follows we provide a definition of irony, explain the difference between negative and positive irony, and consider the processing mechanisms involved in comprehending ironic utterances. We then review previous studies of L2 learners' ability to comprehend irony and the methods that have been used to assess irony.

Section snippets

Defining irony

In an ironic utterance the intended meaning is different from the literal meaning. According to the Gricean definition, irony is a type of implicature that is triggered by the violation of the Maxim of Quality (i.e. ‘Do not say what you know to be false’), causing the hearer to recognize that the literal meaning of an utterance is not the intended meaning and therefore to seek an alternative interpretation (Grice, 1975). For example, if a friend turns up late for a meeting and the speaker says,

Studies of L2 learners

As Kim (2014) noted, Korean learners of L2 English experience considerable difficulty in comprehending irony. Other studies show that this holds true for other groups of L2 learners. Shively, Menke and Manzon-Omundson (2008) for example, investigated three groups of English-speaking learners of Spanish in a university in the USA and reported that even the most advanced students had trouble perceiving irony. Bromberek-Dyzman and Rataj (2016) compared the responses of advanced learners of English

Methods for assessing comprehension of irony

Irony tests differ in a number of ways. An irony test can require learners to simply indicate whether they think an utterance is ironic or it can ask them to interpret its meaning (e.g. indicate whether it is strongly or mildly critical or humorous). To measure identification learners can be asked to underline which utterance in a written dialogue is ironic as in Al-Fatlawi (2018) and Kim and Lantolf (2018) or just decide whether an utterance is negative or positive in meaning as in

Research questions

The study we now report drew on the theoretical background outlined above and previous research on L2 learners’ ability to identify irony. We developed a new test of irony to investigate whether a sample of mixed proficiency Chinese learners of L2 English were able to successfully identify positive and negative irony in English. We were also interested in seeing if the learners were able to identify irony implicitly (i.e. without conscious attention) and whether language proficiency and

Item discrimination indices

The results are shown in Table 1. Using Ebel's (1979) guidelines, it is clear that the discriminability of the positive and negative literal items is poor or marginal (with the exception of item 1). However, the discriminability of the ironic items was much better with several very good (items 7, 16, 17, 5 and 20) and only one poor (item 14).

Judgment scores

Table 2, Table 3 give the Irony Test judgment scores for the Chinese students and the native speakers respectively. The students were more successful in

Discussion

The discrimination indices for the literal items were generally poor or marginal. This was not surprising as these items were developed to be easy for the learners so as to provide a point of comparison with the ironic items, which were expected to be more difficult as the descriptive statistics in Table 2, Table 5 confirm was the case. The indices for the ironic items were either reasonably or very good with one exception. On the whole the Irony Test functioned as intended although the

Conclusion

We began by suggesting that the capacity to process irony constitutes an advanced pragmatic ability (Bouton, 1994; Shively et al., 2008; Taguchi, 2007). The results of our study confirm this. L2 learners from a top-rated Chinese university were unable to consistently identify irony and in the case of positive irony only below the level of chance. The explanation lies partly in the lack of language proficiency but even those learners with high proficiency scores often failed to spot an utterance

Funding

The research reported in this article is part of a larger research project investigating the development of tests of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge funded by the Australian Research Council.

Rod Ellis is currently a Research Professor in the School of Education, Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University and an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the University of Auckland. He has recently been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has written extensively on second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. His most recent book is Reflections on Task-Based Language Teaching

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    Rod Ellis is currently a Research Professor in the School of Education, Curtin University in Perth, Australia. He is also a visiting professor at Shanghai International Studies University and an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of the University of Auckland. He has recently been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has written extensively on second language acquisition and task-based language teaching. His most recent book is Reflections on Task-Based Language Teaching (2018), published by Multilingual Matters. He is is currently completing research funded by the Australian Research Council, investigating second language learners' pragmatic knowledge of English.

    Dr. Yan Zhu is an associate professor at the College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, China. Dr. Zhu's research focuses on foreign language curriculum innovation, task-based language teaching, and teacher education. Her publications have appeared in prestigious international journals, including Language Teaching Research, The Modern Language Journal, System, and Language Teaching, among others. She is currently the principal investigator for a project supported by the National Social Science Fund of China. Dr. Zhu is the associate editor of Language Teaching for Young Learners, an academic, peer-refereed journal. She was awarded ‘The Teaching Achievement Prize’ by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission in 2014 and 2018.

    Natsuko Shintani is a Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Language Studies, Kansai University. She obtained her PhD in Language Teaching and Learning from the University of Auckland in 2011. She has taught applied linguistics courses at the masters and doctoral levels at Nanyang Technological University and the University of Auckland. Her research interests encompass the roles of interaction in second language acquisition, second language writing, and task-based language teaching. Her work has been published in leading journals such as Language Learning, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Journal of Second Language Writing, and Applied Linguistics. She has published a book with John Benjamins, titled Input-based Tasks in Foreign Language Instruction for Young Learners. Her new co-authored book, Task-based language teaching: Theory and practice, has been published with Cambridge University Press.

    Carsten Roever is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in Second Language Acquisition from the University of Hawai'i. His research interests include language testing, second language pragmatics, conversation analysis and quantitative research methods. He is particularly interested in the learning of L2 pragmatics for languages other than English. He is the co-author (with Naoko Taguchi) of Second Language Pragmatics (2017, Oxford University Press) and (with Aek Phakiti) Quantitative Methods for Second Language Research (2018, Routledge). He is currently working on a volume on teaching and testing L2 pragmatics and interactional competence, which is to appear with Routledge in 2021.

    The research reported in this article is part of a larger research project investigating the development of tests of implicit and explicit L2 pragmatic knowledge funded by the Australian Research Council.

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