Why Teachers Don’t Use Their Pragmatic Awareness
DESIGN OF THE RESEARCH
Awareness-Raising Program
The participants engaged in a short teacher-training program, which consisted of a seven-and-a-half-hour introductory course on Pragmatics. This course, entitled ‘Pragmatic Awareness In Language Teaching’, was administered by the present author and comprised three two-and-a-half-hour meetings containing lectures on Pragmatic theory, namely Speech Act Theory, The Cooperative Principle, Positive and Negative Politeness and Face Threatening Acts (FTAs), as well as a number of tasks aimed at providing the subjects with a certain degree of awareness of pragmatic phenomena. These tasks included cartoons with inappropriate pragmatic use whose inappropriacy learners were expected to identify and discuss, bubbles containing conflicting comments about how a language and culture are related and how they interact with the people who speak that language. Both appropriate and inappropriate pragmatic use was commented on. Video passages from films were also used to exemplify FTAs (“do not do the FTA”, for example, was exemplified by a passage from “The Remains of the Day” in which the act of declaring one’s love was so threatening that the speaker chose not to perform it). Transcribed discourse from the author’s own life was used to illustrate pragmatic failure, going on- or off-record and using a let-out.ii Moreover, examples extracted from Thomas (1995) were used to shed light on a number of pragmatic phenomena. Some basic reading was also suggested so that participants could have the opportunity to further reflect on issues of Pragmatics outside of classroom hours. In addition, authentic utterances (collected from both natives and Brazilian learners) were briefly discussed with the aim of raising the teachers’ awareness of the possibility of pragmatic transfer. Participants were also encouraged to contribute to the course by bringing their own material, i.e. examples of pragmatic phenomena they came across in their everyday lives. I believed that by giving the course a more practical orientation, I would be striving not only to facilitate the understanding of Pragmatics, but also to alert subjects to the ubiquity, and therefore importance, of pragmatic phenomena.
It is important to say that the awareness-raising program did not contain any emphasis whatsoever on correction in order not to bias the teachers’ performance.iii I expected that once they were more aware of Pragmatics, teachers would naturally offer CF in this area, as they seem to do with knowledge they acquire in other areas, such as Phonology, Morphology, Syntax etc. It might be that if specifically trained with that aim, the informants would succeed in offering feedback in Pragmatics, however that was not the scope of this study.
ii Going on-record means taking responsibility for one’s act, while going off-record means only hinting. Using a let-out means pretending one’s act was misinterpreted.
iii Correction was only brought up, along with awareness-raising tasks and role-play activities, as one out of several possible ways to improve learners’ pragmatic competence.
