Pragmatic Awareness of EFL Teacher Trainees and Their Reflections on Pragmatic Practices

Year 2013, Volume: 2 Issue: 4, 176 - 190, 27.01.2014

Mehzudil Yıldız Ekin Ebru Atak Damar

Abstract

Knowledge of pragmatics has been a crucial element of language teacher training programmes. Future teachers should be aware of the pragmatic constraints of the target language to teach it to the foreign language learners. In general, language teachers intensively focus on grammar during lessons as they may lack pragmatic awareness in the target language, or they have difficulty to put into practice the pragmatic knowledge they already possess. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the pragmatic awareness of EFL teacher trainees and their use of and difficulties in practical pragmatic applications. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was given to 30 EFL teacher trainees to investigate their awareness of pragmatic knowledge. Also, teacher trainees wrote reflection papers about their strengths and weaknesses about pragmatics in their actual teaching process and planned and practised a specific pragmatics-focused lesson. 10 teacher trainees were interviewed to get in-depth information about the problems they faced in teaching pragmatics. DCT results indicated teacher trainees have pragmatic awareness; however, the reflection papers and interviews revealed that their awareness was mostly on theoretical pragmatic knowledge. Lesson plans and reflective comments written following the lessons indicated EFL teacher trainees could not perform well in practical applications of their pragmatic knowledge. 

Keywords

EFL, instructional pragmatics, practicum, pragmatic awareness, teacher trainee

References

• Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1992). Pragmatics as part of teacher education. TESOL Journal, 1, 28 – 32 .
• Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Mahan-Taylor, R. (2003). Teaching pragmatics [Online]. Retrieved from http://exchanges.state.gov/education/engteaching/pragmatics_htm
• Basturkmen, H. (2007). Signalling the relationship between ideas in academic speaking: From language description to pedagogy. Prospect, 22(2), 61-71.
• Biesenback-Lucas, S. (2003). Preparing students for the pragmatics of e-mail interaction in academia: A new/forgotten dimension in teacher education. Teacher Education
• Interest Section Newsletter, 18(2), 3 – 4 . Blum-Kulka, S. and Olshtain, S.E. (1984). Requests and apologies: A cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics. 5 (3), 196 – 213 .
• Cohen, A. (2010)Coming to terms with pragmatics In N. Ishihara & A. D. Cohen (Eds.),
• Teaching and Learning Pragmatics: Where Language and Culture Meet (3 – 21). Malaysia: Pearson Education. Ellis, R. (1994). Pragmatic aspects of learner language. In, Studies in Second Language
• Acquisition. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Eslami-Rasekh, Z. (2005). Raising pragmatic awareness of language learners. ELT Journal 59, 199-208.
• Glasgow, G (2008). Language awareness, metapragmatics and the L2 Teacher. Accents Asia
• [Online], 2 (2), 1-16. Available: http://www.accentsasia.org/2-2/glasgowg.pdf Gürsoy, E. (2011). The effect of textbooks on ELT trainees’ use of pragmalinguistic features.
• Novitas-ROYAL. 5.(2), 247 – 264 . House, J. (1996). Developing pragmatic fluency in English as a foreign language: Routines and metapragmatic awareness. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 225 – 2
• Ishihara N. (2010). Assessment of Pragmatics in the classroom. In N. Ishihara & A. D. Cohen
• (Eds.), Teaching and Learning Pragmatics: Where Language and Culture Meet (286- 317). Malaysia: Pearson Education. İstifçi, İ. (2009). The use of apologies by EFL learners. English Language Teaching. 2 (3). 15 –
• Jie, C. (2005). A Comparative Study of Chinese EFL Learners’ Performances in Different Pragmatic http://www.cxrlinguistics.com/UploadFile/201191983513522.pdf Unpublished M.A. Thesis. Available online at:
• Karatepe, Ç. (1998). Teaching pragmalinguistics in teacher training programs. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK.
• Karatepe, Ç. (2001). Pragmalinguistic awareness in EFL teacher training. Language Awareness, 2(3),178 – 188.
• Kasper, G. (1990). Linguistic politeness: Current research issues. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 193 – 218 .
• Kasper, G. (1997) The role of pragmatics in language teacher education, In K. Bardovi-Harlig and B. Hartford (eds), Beyond methods: Components of second language education
• (113–36). New York: McGraw-Hill Company. Kılıçkaya, F. (2010) The Pragmatic Knowledge of Turkish EFL Students in Using Certain
• Request Strategies. Gaziantep Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi. 9 (1), 185 – 201. Koike, D. & Pearson, L. (2005). The Effect of Instruction and Feedback in the Development of Pragmatic Competence. System, 33, 481 – 501 .
• Nureddeen, F. A. (2008). Cross cultural pragmatics: Apology strategies in Sudanese Arabic.
• Journal of Pragmatics. 40, 279–306. O’Keeffe, A., Clancy, B. and Adolphs, S. 2011. Introducing Pragmatics in Use. London: Routledge.
• Özyıldırım, I. (2010). The Level of Directness in Turkish Apology Forms in Relation to the Level of Education. Edebiyat Fakültesi Dergisi / Journal of Faculty of Letters EFD/JFL. 27 (1). 179 – 201.
• Povolna, R. (2012). Pragmatic awareness in teacher education. Acta academica karviniensia,
• Karviná: Slezská univerzita v Opavě, Obchodně podnikatelská fakulta v Karviné, 12/1, 148 – 158. Rose, K. & Kasper, G. (2001). Pragmatics in Language Teaching. USA: Cambridge University Press.
• Sachtleben, A. & Denny, H.G., (2012). Making the implicit explicit: raising pragmatic awareness in trainee interpreters, using semi-authentic spontaneous discourse samples
• TESOL Journal, 3(1), 126 – 137. Tatsuki, D. H., & Houck, N. R. (2010). Pragmatics from research to practice: Teaching speech acts. In D. H. Tatsuki and N. R. Houck (Eds.), Pragmatics: Teaching speech acts (1 – 6) . Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
• Thomas, J. (1995) Meaning in interaction: An introduction to pragmatics. London: Longman.
• Uso-Juan, E. (2007).The presentation and practice of the communicative act of requesting in textbooks: Focusing on modifiers. In Soler, E. A. and Jorda, M. P. S. (Eds.)
• Intercultural language use and language learning. Netherlands: Springer. Vásquez, C., and Sharpless, D. (2009) The role of pragmatics in the master’s TESOL curriculum: Findings from a nationwide survey. TESOL Quarterly, 43(1), 5–28.
• Yates, L. (2004). The secret rules of language. Prospect, 19(1), 3 – 21.
• Yates, L. (2008). Teaching in Action 3. The not-so generic skills: Teaching employability communication skills to adult migrants. Sydney, Australia: Adult Migrant English