Your shoes are really cute!

The opening line to a girl-versation.  It may or may not be what the speaker was thinking, but opens a line of conversation that can be followed-up with any number of other topics.  So why then would someone choose to open a conversation about class work with a statement about shoes?

It may be easier for women to begin communication through a compliment or a communal statement of acceptance.  This can read into all sorts of implicit ideals relating to culture and gender that do not cross the speaker's mind when using such a conversational tactic.

However, as a NNS, such interactive practices are not obvious and may not make sense.  Interpreting such implicature in the culturally-related settings takes time and investment on the part of the multilingual learner.  Just as Norton suggests in her 1995 article on context and language learning, in addition to language classes, learners need support to navigate the social aspects of language use.

Different phrases and formations serve different pragmatic functions:
Whereas, 'nice shoes', may allow a complete stranger friendly access to another speaker in order to talk about more in-depth topics, 'can I help you?' is the sort of statement placing the listener with a certain power to demand information or a table for two and a burger.  Statements carry different pragmatic information and must be learned through practice.

Hall, in a similar fashion to Norton, focuses on the need to help learners notice the differing pragmatic uses of language.  She then proposes methods for allowing structured practice of these paradigms.

Unlike Norton, Hall leaves less opportunity for the student to hold power as the researcher, and I therefore see her method as basic.  It can be useful for limited functions of discourse, but when it comes to analyzing vastly differing or strange results to the same phrase, Norton's Classroom Based Social Research pulls ahead.

Imagine you run into the following situations:

You are in class and someone next to you asks, "do you have the time?"
You look at your phone then reply, "it is 10 o'clock".
The person replies, "thanks".

You are walking down the street and a man asks, "do you have the time?"
You take out your phone and before you have a chance to respond, the man grabs your phone and takes off running.

You (a girl) are walking down the street (in a city in France) and a man asks, "Pardon, quelle heure est-il?"
You respond, "il est 10 heures".
He responds, "Merci jolie, vous vous appelez comment?"

Each of these three situations propose nearly the same question but lead to vastly different responses and situations.  It is due to such great, and somewhat disturbing, differences that the study of  prosaics of interaction for language learners is so important.  It is also due to such great differences that Hall's suggestions of creating classroom set-ups to introduce topics can only be a stepping stone in the right direction.  In order to empower and invest students in a language, they themselves must pose the questions and become the cultural reporters.