View Content #23778

By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director

While often the source of funny anecdotes, pragmatic missteps can cause frustration for learners as they interact with expert speakers of their target language.  Pragmatics, or “meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader)" (Yule, 1996, pp.3-4), is critical for successful communication. Often relegated to advanced levels of instruction, pragmatics is unnecessarily absent from novice-level classrooms. This week’s Activity of the Week exemplifies ways in which new media can be implemented in small bursts starting at a learner’s first week of class, when they typically learn common greeting expressions. This is a great place to start with pragmatics and extend cultural differences beyond formal and informal structures.  Take, for example, the common English greeting, “Hey, how are you?” with the typical response of “I’m well” or “I’m fine.” For a speaker who interprets “How are you?” to be a sincere inquiry into one’s well-being, their response can extended beyond a short phrase and can be interpreted as too much sharing. This pragmatic misstep, due to mismatched expectations, can cause frustration on the part of both speakers. If one is expecting to talk about their day and the other is expecting a short greeting sequence both are not interacting in the way they had hoped. As learners move through the beginning levels of language learning, small chunks are a very useful start to considering the way meaning is expressed in language.

Reference

Yule, G.  (1996).  Speech acts and events. Pragmatics (pp. 47-58).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.