View Content #25247

By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director

The teaching and learning of interlanguage pragmatics, or the interpretation and expression of meaning, is of fundamental importance to human interactions. Miscommunications that occur as a result of mismatched meaning can, sometimes, be avoided, and other times significantly reduced through pragmatic skills. One key challenge is what to teach when it comes to pragmatics. While resources are available in languages like Spanish (http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/sp_pragmatics/home.html) or Japanese (http://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/introtospeechacts/index.htm), other languages are more challenging. So, what do we do where no materials are available? Exploring the community and helping learners develop meaningful observation skills can be key. As they explore, they collect their own data and begin to focus on critical pragmatic information. This week’s Activity of the Week is one way to help facilitate the exploration process.

While they engage in their own data collection, it is important to help learners keep the following in mind:

1. What they observe is just that, what they observe. This does not mean it will apply always or is reflective of everyone who speaks that language. Rather, the purpose of the task is to build observation skills and see how the findings can be applied to their own learning experience.
2. Help learners use the information they glean in a meaningful way for them. This means they may model what they observe exactly or might decide to deviate. Critical to the process is their ability to observe, analyze, and then extend this experience to their own.
3. Have fun! Encourage learners to share what they are doing. This often sparks conversation as people tend to enjoy talking about language and the way things are done. If it doesn’t fit the context, this fact can be helpful to share with learners as well.

Happy Exploring!