LANG41915: Pragmatics and the Language Classroom

• at the end of this module, students will be able to:
• provide an up-to-date understanding of pragmatics as the basis for contemporary syllabus design/materials development and classroom practice, thereby countering the prevalent speech act dominated influence of pragmatics on language teaching methodology in which native member sociopragmatic awareness and native speaker pragmalinguistic formulas are considered relevant

• speech acts aside, there is surprisingly little literature on the implications of most pragmatic phenomena for L2 pedagogy. Accordingly, this module will consider a range of phenomena which are often overlooked despite their significant implications for L2 pedagogy and classroom practice, especially in the ELF context
• these include indexicality (how language encodes context), the relationship between words and mental representation, presumptive meaning (the degree to which the implied meaning of an utterance is predictable from its form), implicature (the inferences that a hearer must make in order to understand a speaker), the metapragmatic dimension of language (how speakers direct hearers in the interpretation of utterances by means of intonation, discourse markers, etc), propositional attitude (the stance speakers take in relation to what they say), pragmatic accommodation (how speakers in intercultural encounters converge) and language evolution seen from a pragmatic perspective

Subject-specific Knowledge:

• a wide range of contemporary pragmatic phenomena relevant to second language learning as detailed above

Subject-specific Skills:

• understand and be able to describe the role of pragmatic knowledge in determining appropriate language teaching methodology and effective classroom practice
• be accustomed to thinking about the functional as well as the formal properties of language and be able to take into account appropriateness and optimality as well as grammaticality in course planning, materials selection and design and classroom teaching
• recognize the relevance of different pragmatic phenomena in cross-cultural and intercultural communication
• have an enhanced ability to react to learners' use of language in a pragmatically aware way

Key Skills:

• analyzing data
• using digital technology for instructional purpose
• developing academic literacy
• enhancing metalinguistic awareness

• the default teaching method will include a short student-led PowerPoint presentation related to an area of pragmatics, followed by a tutor input leading to class discussion of the implications of the area studied for language teaching practice.
• sometimes this will be at a practical level (for example, we might discuss the implications of lexical pragmatics for vocabulary teaching), sometimes at the level of methodology or rationale (for example, we might think about whether the path of second language acquisition should follow the path of language evolution)
• the teaching methods will therefore include tutor-fronted input, student presentation, data analysis, participatory discussion and debate

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