Subjectivity, second/foreign language pragmatic use, and instruction: Evidence of accommodation and resistance. Study I. Emulating and resisting pragmatic norms: Learner subjectivity and foreign language pragmatic use. Study II. Centering second language

This dissertation attempts to respond to current gaps in L2 pragmatics education and research in its alternative format with three independent studies. Studies I and II challenge the conventional assumption that acquiring nativelike pragmatic competence is the goal of all learners, and explore L2 speakers' pragmatic L2 use in relation to their subjectivity. Study I investigates the stated reasons that seven advanced Japanese learners provided for their pragmatic choices. Interviews and follow-up e-mail correspondence examined learners' deliberate pragmatic decisions made while performing elicitation tasks. The interviews identified instances where learners intentionally accommodated to or resisted perceived L2 pragmatic norms. The learners largely converged towards L2 norms to emulate the culture, while they sometimes intentionally diverged from L2 norms to resist certain L2 pragmatic uses (e.g., higher-level honorifics). Their agency can be explained by speech accommodation theory (Beebe & Giles, 1984) which views learners' pragmatic decisions as the enactment of their social, psychological, and affective dispositions.; L2 speakers' resistance to L2 norms is further investigated in Study II through a phenomenological inquiry into their lived experiences. The meaning of resistance was explored based on six interviews with fluent SL speakers of English and Japanese. These speakers were found to sometimes deliberately diverge from SL norms that conflicted with their own standards to express their subjectivity or to deliberately maintain distance from the SL community. In their acts of resistance, SL speakers negotiated their subjectivity and contested pre-existing SL norms in the community.; Study III attempts to respond to the current paucity of L2 pragmatics curriculum/instruction by describing a web-based curriculum and reporting its preliminary effects on learners' pragmatic awareness. In this curriculum designed for intermediate/advanced foreign language learners of Japanese, explicit awareness-raising (Kasper & Schmidt, 1996) tasks guided learners to self-discover a range of L2 pragmatic norms. The curriculum features naturalistic audio samples, empirically-established pragmatic information, explanatory information on L2 norms, and self-evaluation of pragmatic uses. Deductive analysis of 18 learners' reflective journaling demonstrated the range of pragmatic awareness gained through the use of these materials, and revealed that the instruction enhanced pragmatic awareness of different pragmatic aspects by varying degrees.