House Work and Student Work: A Study in Cross-cultural Understanding

The title of this volume refers to translation, language acquisition and intercultural communication, and to living with more than one language. In a way, our contribution has to do with all of these, but from our particular perspective of textual pragmatics. Textual pragmatics is, of course, a particularly appropriate topic for this volume, and so is the text we have taken for analysis. For it is a recent paper by Juliane House herself, entitled “Developing pragmatic competence in English as a lingua franca” (House 2002). What we propose to do is to consider what kind of reaction this paper gives rise to among a group of its readers, readers in fact who are themselves developing such a competence in the language, and to speculate a little on the general question of how readers assign significance to texts in different ways. Such a question, of course, involves the kinds of issue that arise in crosscultural pragmatics and translation. The readers whose responses we are examining were asked to read the paper (we shall for convenience refer to as ‘developing pragmatic competence’ or ‘DPC’ in what follows) from their own point of view as students and prospective teachers of English. They were therefore encouraged to interpret the text, and render its significance in the light of their own cultural assumptions. In this sense, their responses can be taken as various translated versions of the original.