Topic:
“The role of Pragmatics in English Language Teaching”
Purpose:
The aim of this study would be:
• To analyze and identify the challenges a student can face while learning pragmatics in an ELT classroom.
• To revise and inspect the prevailing theories and methods of teaching Pragmatics in an English Language classroom
• To put forward my personal perspective of Pragmatics and its applications.
Statement of Problem:
To investigate the negligence of the use of Pragmatics in ELT and to check how teachers and lecturers will unlock the keys to culturally appropriate communication.
Background:
The inherent concept of practice in both explicit and implicit instruction seemingly provides both teachers and learners with deeper and insightful enlightenments
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Morris defined pragmatics as “the discipline that studies the relations of signs to interpreters, while semantics studies the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable” (as cited in Liu, 2007, para. 6).
On this same topic, research by Sharples, Hogg, Hutchinson, Torrance and Young (2009) provided a definition based on the concepts of context and identity. They mentioned Pragmatics as “Those aspects of the study of language that pertain to the identity and intentions of the speaker and hearer, and the context in which speech takes place.”
Objectives:
• To develop the understanding of how to teach English with the addition of Pragmatics.
• To explore ideas and ways of teaching and learning Pragmatics effectively in English Language Teaching.
• To evaluate the challenges faced by learners while handling Pragmatics.
• To present my personal view related to Pragmatics and its relevance.
Research Questions:
• Is pragmatics a relevant element to be taught or used in our language classroom?
• What are some potent and impressive ways for teachers to teach Pragmatics?
• What are the affective ways for students to learn Pragmatics in ELT
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Rationale of the study:
Currently some learners of English learn the language in foreign environments, where English is not the language of the surrounding culture. For example in Pakistan the learner may learn English as foreign language challenged by a lack of comprehensible input that needs to be supplied artificially by the teacher. This dynamic may lead to a pragmatic competence that it is limited to what can be taught in the classroom.
The audience of this research is members of the teaching community: ESL/EFL teachers native or non-native speakers of English, TESOL students, and professors of different universities in Pakistan. And I hope that teachers and learners will be motivated to use Pragmatics in their language lessons.
Limitations of
Communicating what we want to say, how we want to say it is the goal of expressing ourselves linguistically. For English Language Learners (and their teachers), the ability to do that successfully in their new language presents a challenge. In the content areas of instruction, it is especially important to draw out the information that a student already knows in their native language – even when they do not have the linguistic ability to express themselves in English – in order to assess their level of understanding and engage prior knowledge. Using non-linguistic representations provides a way of bridging that gap between actual understanding and the ability to express that
To conclude, in relation with the findings made and my own experience on my practicum in a public school, I can realize that my beliefs were similar to the students who participate in the research. Nevertheless, the only difference is that I do not agree with the memorization of the rules instead, with the internalization by connections with their mother tongue. Also, I believe that in our practicum, we tend to copy the strategies that our mentor teachers use, which are the mechanic activities, paper sheets or drills, and so forth, letting our belief that English is acquired through
In my experience, pragmatics, is disguise as many other terms in my curriculum: tone, voice, style, historical and cultural contexts. Style is how something is said. Tone is a writer’s attitude toward a subject. Voice is a writer’s unique use of language; the way a writer chooses words, construct sentences, and expresses ideas. Historical and cultural contexts refers to the events, social problems, traditions, and values that may have influenced the author and the writing. According to Lesaux and Harris, “Pragmatics refers to an understanding of the social rules of communication (Snow and Uccelli 2009)” (Lesaux Harris, p. 17). Even though I don’t directly teach the definition of pragmatics, I feel that in my middle school curriculum pragmatics
In line with the fact that speech acts of suggestion themselves have not been studied in the same capacity as other speech acts (Schmidt, et al., 1995), L2 pragmatics literature on suggestions is also quite limited. Only a small number of researchers have made attempts to explicitly address suggestions, how they are used in classroom interaction, and teacher-student conversations in conferences. Overall, a unanimous agreement exists among the available research (Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 1990, 1993; Bardovi-Harlig, 1996; Rintell, 1979; Bell, 1998; Matsumura, 2001) that L2 learners fall short of institutional expectations to use pragmatic strategies effectively because of a lack of the socio-cultural and sociolinguistic knowledge
The second chapter of "Foundations of Pragmatics" describes three essential concepts in pragmatics. It starts with identifying the pragmatic perspective as a scope concerned with "all aspects of human (linguistic) communication" (Fetzer 2002); such as the speaker's background knowledge, intentions and assumptions, etc. This perspective also examines the linguistic and non-linguistic resources available for a speaker to accomplish a communicative goal in a certain social context.
“Pragma” is a Greek word meaning act or deed, named in order to emphasize the fact that words derive their meanings from acts of some sort (stumpf 399). “Through thought, we try to fix our beliefs so that we shall have a guide for our action,” Peirce said.
The world of English language teaching (ELT) presents a great number of ideas and concepts, expounding a vast assortment of styles, models and techniques, but often makes a general assumption on the
Adult learners can feel ‘infantilised’ when they speak a foreign language. They may have a
(if ?required) ? ? Journal of Pragmatics ? ____________________ ?
Schools are excellent environments in which to develop knowledge of the courtesies and conventions of communication in a wide variety of situations. The achievement aims of the National English Curriculum state that:
A task involves a primary focus on meaning and engages learners in using language pragmatically.
Pragmatics is “concerned with the study of meanings as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader)” (Yule 1996). Pragmatics target is to bring speech to its context in order to understand correctly; as basically in the communication through language there is a way more than what is said. Pragmatics cannot by any means be explained without comparing it to semantics. Semantics is known as the study of literal meaning, on the other hand, pragmatics is the study of non-uttered meaning intended by a speaker (writer). Pragmatics is not concerned with the mere meaning of the language, rather it is concerned with examination of language and the effects of language on hearer. It investigated also inference of what is said (written) to finally arrive at true interpretation of intended meaning. Speaker (writer) may say a
According to Yule (1996), pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). “Pragmatics focuses more on how we achieve meaning in a particular context, by considering such factors as how, where and when something is said, who says it, what is the relationship between the speaker and the listener, and how we understand the use of ambiguous language” (Baker and Ellece, 2011, p.100). In other words, pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning. Therefore, from the
In addition, Leech (1983: X) asserts that "Pragmatics can be usefully defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in situations." He also adds, "The meaning in pragmatics is defined relative to a speaker or user of the language, whereas meaning in semantics is defined purely as a property of expression in a given language, in abstraction from particular situation, speaker or hearer." (ibid: 5).
Pragmatics is "the study of the purposes for which sentences is used, of the real world conditions under which a sentence may be appropriately used as an utterance" (Hatim, Basil (1992), p.59). Pragmatic Equivalence as a theory demonstrates the close relation between the meaning of a text in the source language and the target language. Speech Act Theory and Grice's Cooperative Principle set the basics of linguistics related with translation studies in terms of the meaning and its effect between two different languages, the meaning and intentionality are primary elements to any translator seeks to transfer the exact message of the text in the source language .