Convenors: Kate Beeching (UWE, Bristol) and Helen Woodfield (University of Bristol)

Building on the Sociopragmatic Variability colloquium which took place at i-mean2 in 2011 (see Beeching and Woodfield (eds.) forthc.), the 2015 colloquium aims to create a dialogue between researchers and practitioners, experts in sociopragmatics, publishers, curriculum and text-book writers, and practising language teachers. It seeks to explore the impact of sociopragmatic research on practice and the impact of practice on sociopragmatic research, with a specific focus on speech-act realisation and pragmatic markers. The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2011) includes the teaching of sociopragmatic competence, but does not provide guidance on how this might be implemented. The colloquium is thus timely and responds to a particular, and urgent, need in the applied linguistic field.

It aims to bring together insights from, and data collected by, practising teachers with a view to informing ongoing sociopragmatic research, and to gauge the extent to which insights from ongoing research can inform text-book writing and teaching.

Papers in the colloquium will present:

• Recent findings on speech act realisation and the sociopragmatics of markers in different languages

• Reflections on methodologies which have been used to present, and practise, speech acts and the functions of (individual) pragmatic markers in the classroom

Invited Contributors:

• Kate Beeching (UWE,Bristol)

• Evgenia Iniushkina (University of St. Petersburg)

• Michael McCarthy (University of Nottingham, tbc)

• Liubov Patrukhina (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3)

• Patricia Pullin (University of Zurich and ETH Language Center)

• Sophie Reissner-Roubicek (University of Warwick)

• Wei Ren (University of Bristol)

• Helen Woodfield (University of Bristol)

• Qun Zheng (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing)