Giving Students a Fighting Chance: Pragmatics in the Language Classroom

McLean, Terrence

doi:10.18806/tesl.v21i2.175

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989) found that "even fairly advanced language learners' communicative acts regularly contain pragmatic errors, or deficits, in that they fail to convey or comprehend the intended illocutionary force or politeness value" (p. 10). Furthermore, it has been suggested that pragmatic development may be inhibited in the absence of classroom instruction (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001;McLean, 2004). Therefore, the findings of this study suggest that it is worthwhile for Canadian language teachers to spend more time in their classrooms explaining and discussing norms of "Canadian" politeness to IBs and how these norms might vary, if at all, from IBs' own cultures.…”

Section: Other Specific Applications To Language Teachingmentioning

confidence: 78%

Perceptions of People in Canada: Canadian-Born vs. Internationally- Born Postsecondary Students’ Perspectives

Packer¹,

Lynch²

2014

TESL

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Section: Other Specific Applications To Language Teachingmentioning

confidence: 78%

Perceptions of People in Canada: Canadian-Born vs. Internationally- Born Postsecondary Students’ Perspectives

Packer¹,

Lynch²

2014

TESL

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“…Halliday (1972) and Hymes (1973) said that learners should learn language not only linguistically, but also to achieve communicative goals. Acquisition of pragmatic competence becomes fundamental part of the communicative competence as it studies the relation between language use and its sociocultural rules (Bachman, 1990;Canale and Swain, 1980;Celce-Murcia 1995;Mc. Lean, 2004).…”

Section: Speech Act Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Speech Act Functions on the Development of Efl Learners' High Order Thinking Skills

Saleh¹

2019

IJTRS

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In the globalized age, English language becomes lingua franca. Therefore, there should be convention between interlocutors on the intended meaning of utterances to avoid the misunderstanding of the speech acts used in cross-cultural speech communities. Speech act theory is a pragmatic theory which asserted that words are not just uttered words, but also they perform action. However, understanding and producing speech acts efficiently and appropriately in contextualized situations demands high order thinking skills such as to remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and create. EFL learners have many pragmatic problems that hinder using high order thinking skills in communication. Thus, an experimental research design with pre/posttest to control and experiment groups was done to cycle III students (N = 60) from the Lebanese Public Schools. The results revealed that analyzing the appropriate and relevant meaning of speech acts developed high order thinking skills, and thus they became proficient communicators in all language skills. Therefore, all EFL teachers, material designers, and learners are advised to incorporate speech act functions to develop high order thinking skills and create creative learners who are able to translate their intentions appropriately and efficiently in English in the global world.

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“…Learners, he keeps, need to acquire competence as to when to speak, and what to talk about with whom, where and in what manner in order to use language appropriately. McLean (2004) believes that taking pragmatics into account would give students a fighting chance, stating that, by attending to pragmatic factors in second language situations, students will be better able to make informed choices in negotiating effective communication. Meaning is not something that is inherent in the words alone.…”

Section: Language Pragmaticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effect of instruction on learning refusals in EFL learners

Rostamy

Parhoodeh

2015

JELL

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The major aim of learning a second or foreign language is communication. In order to be a competent communicator, we must get familiar with the ingredients of speech and language. Speech acts are one of the principal elements and functional units of communication. In this realm, refusals play a key role. Due to their inherently face threatening nature, refusals are of an especially sensitive nature, and a pragmatic breakdown in this act may easily lead to unintended offence or breakdowns in communication. Refusals are also of interest due to their typically complex constructions. They are often negotiated over several terms and involve some degree of indirectness. While there are a great number of studies which examine certain speech acts, the amount of research on refusals is much more limited. The aim of this study is to investigate whether either of the instruction types, explicit vs. implicit, proves more efficient in improving pragmatic performance of Iranian EFL learners. For this reason, 45 male, military intermediate EFL learners all between19-25 years of age in a military language institute, in Tehran, Iran, were selected to participate in the study. A pretest/posttest design was adopted in this study. Having formed the three groups under investigation, (explicit, implicit and explicit-implicit) I measured all subjects’ pragmatic performance of L2 refusals through Discourse Completion Tests, DCTs. All groups were exposed to conversations from 'spectrum' English books which embody refusals. The findings proved the efficiency of explicit instruction over implicit one in increasing Iranian EFL learners' pragmatic performance.

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Giving Students a Fighting Chance: Pragmatics in the Language Classroom

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Perceptions of People in Canada: Canadian-Born vs. Internationally- Born Postsecondary Students’ Perspectives

Perceptions of People in Canada: Canadian-Born vs. Internationally- Born Postsecondary Students’ Perspectives

The Effect of Speech Act Functions on the Development of Efl Learners' High Order Thinking Skills

The effect of instruction on learning refusals in EFL learners

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