View Content #22856

By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director

For classroom purposes, it can be helpful to define pragmatics as “meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader)" (Yuul, 1996, pp.3-4). This focus on meaning is critical for successful communication and can help learners move beyond a one-to-one association with words and structures towards a more comprehensive approach to the language they are learning. While often the source of funny anecdotes, pragmatic missteps can cause frustration for learners as they interact with expert speakers of their target language.

Explicit pragmatic instruction and attention to pragmatic behaviors in the language classroom can help learners avoid miscommunication, and, when missteps occur, analyze their implications. While complex approaches are possible, and in some cases, feasible, attention to pragmatic details in the everyday classroom is also possible.

1. Ask learners to observe the ways people around them greet one another, make a list, and then analyze them in class by social dimensions, such as age, power, and closeness. This adds to the greetings often learned in a textbook and expands learners’ understanding of possible greetings.
2. Have learners watch the ways people tell stories in 1 or 2 films being watched and then have them make a list of three pragmatic strategies for increasing the intensity of a story or lessening the importance of a detail, for example. Then, demonstrate to learners the ways stories can be used in making apologies.
3. Offer learners three lexical phrases used for complimenting and have them look for those items in a corpus. Then, ask them to categorize the type of compliment associated with each item as well as the three most typical responses.