ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews L2 pragmatics research taking a ‘cognitivist’ perspective. According to R. Ellis (2008), cognitive approaches to L2 acquisition focus on learners’ internal mechanisms that account for the representation and acquisition of L2 knowledge (p. 405). This understanding of the ‘cognitivist’ stance in SLA suggests two areas of research. The first area is investigating the nature of L2 knowledge, that is, how L2 knowledge is mentally represented in terms of structure and organization (e.g., declarative vs. procedural, explicit vs. implicit). The second area is examining the cognitive processes (e.g., attention, restructuring, and monitoring) involved in knowledge acquisition (i.e., development of mental representation of knowledge). According to R. Ellis (2008), theorizations of cognitive SLA primarily address issues related to knowledge representation (e.g., Bialystok’s two-dimensional model and skill acquisition theories) or issues regarding cognitive processes (e.g., Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis, 1993, 2001). This chapter adopts R. Ellis’s classification of cognitive theorizations and reviews empirical L2 pragmatics research accordingly.
