Pragmatic Competence and Its Cultivation

1. Pragmatic Competence and Its Cultivation Hong Gang Zhejiang International Studies University

2. This talk aims to answer the following three questions • What is pragmatic competence? • Why should we help students to acquire pragmatic competence? • How can we help students to acquire pragmatic competence？

3. What is pragmatic competence? • Pragmatic competence is regarded as a part of language competence or communicative competence by many people.

4. Bachman (1990:87) • Language competence is divided into • Organization competence • Knowledge of linguistic units and the rules of joining them together at the levels of sentence (grammatical competence) and discourse (textual competence). • Pragmatic competence • Illocutionary competence: knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out • Sociolinguistic competence: the ability to use language appropriately according to context.

5. Thomas (1983: 92) • Linguistic competence is made up of • Grammatical competence: ‘abstract’ or decontextualized knowledge of intonation, phonology, syntax, semantics, etc.) • Pragmatic competence: the ability to use language effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and to understand language in context.

6. Pragmatics • Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983) proposed to subdivide pragmatics into pragmalinguistics and sociopragmtics.

7. Pragmalinguistics • Pragmalinguistics refers to the resources for conveying communicative acts and relational or interpersonal meanings, which include pragmatic strategies like directness and indirectness, routines, and a large range of linguistic forms which can intensify or soften communicative acts.

8. Sociopragmatics • Sociopragmatics is described as ‘the sociological interface of pragmatics’. • It refers to the social perceptions underlying participants’ interpretation and performance of communicative action, which include the perception of relative power, social distance and degree of imposition (Brown and Levinson, 1987) as well as knowledge of mutual rights and obligations, taboos and conventional procedures (Thomas, 1983).

9. Pragmatic competence consists of • Pragmalinguistic competence • involves the assessment of the pragmatic force of particular linguistic forms and the ability to use them appropriately • Sociopragmatic competence • involves the correct social perceptions underlying participants’ interpretation and performance of communicative action and the ability to use language appropriately according to context.

10. Pragmatic competence • Based on the previous description of pragmatic competence and for the purpose of foreign language teaching, pragmatic competence can also be divided into: • Perceptive pragmatic competence • Listening and reading • Productive pragmatic competence • Speaking and writing

11. 2. Why should we help students to acquire pragmatic competence? • The independence of grammatical competence and pragmatic competence • Consequence of pragmatic failure • Limitations of teacher-fronted teaching

12. Grammatical vs pragmatic competence • Bachman makes it clear that pragmatic competence is not extra or ornamental, like the icing on the cake. It is not subordinated to knowledge of grammar and text organization but coordinated to formal linguistic and textual knowledge and interacts with organizational competence in complex ways.

13. Evidences • Research (Hong Gang 1991) shows that • A learner who is proficient in grammatical competence is not necessarily proficient in pragmatic competence; • If language system is taught, use will not take care of itself.

14. Consequences of pragmatic failure • In cross-culture communication, errors can be roughly classified into two kinds: • linguistic error: errors in pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, etc • pragmatic error (failure): errors in using the language. • Both kinds of errors may lead to miscommunication.

15. Consequences of pragmatic failure • “Grammatical errors may be irritating and impede communication, but at least, as a rule, they are apparent in the surface structure, so that H is aware that an error has occurred. Once alerted to the fact that S is not fully grammatically competent, native speakers seem to have little difficulty in making allowances for it.

16. Pragmatic failure, on the other hand, is rarely recognized as such by non-linguists. If a non-native speaker appears to speak fluently, a native speaker is likely to attribute his/her apparent impoliteness or unfriendliness, not to any linguistic deficiency, but to boorishness or ill-will. While grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less than proficient language-user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him/her as a person.” • (Thomas, 1983: 91-112)

17. Why? • In every society there are some things that are simply not said or asked about and others that are absolutely required in certain situations. It is often assumed that every well-brought-up person knows these rules of behaviour of his/her own culture. And furthermore, most people take their own behaviour pattern for granted and are unaware that pragmatic patterns are far from universal. Thus, pragmatic failure has serious consequences.

18. For example • Americans tend to give compliments more than most people of other nations. Sometimes it is necessary for Americans to give compliments but it may be totally inappropriate to give compliments in other cultures.

19. A particular interesting example of this came about when an American politician (Carter, J.) visiting France happened to compliment one of the members of the French government on the job he was doing. The French were very annoyed and articles appeared in the French press attributing all sorts of hidden implications to the act and condemning it as interference in French internal affairs. In reality, of course, the visiting American politician had done no more than the typical American would do when trying to be friendly to a stranger: give a compliment. • (Wolfson 1981:123)

20. A rich (Chinese) merchant went to London and was entertaining some very important European guests. He had the affair catered at a famous hotel. In the Chinese manner, he said that he was sorry that the food and drink were not very fine. Some hotel employees overheard these remarks and the management, feeling quite insulted, preceded to sue the merchant for defaming the character of the hotel. (Craig 1979: 2-3)

21. Inadequacies of teacher-fronted teaching: • Studies show that teacher-fronted classroom discourse displays • A more narrow range of speech acts (long, Adams, Mclean, & Castanos, 1976) • A lack of politeness marking (Lorscher & Schulz,1998) • A shorter and less complex openings and closings (Lorscher, 1986; Kasper, 1989) • Monopolization of discourse orgnization and management by the teacher (Lorscher, 1986; Ellis,1990) and consequently, • A limited range of discourse markers (Kasper, 1989).

22. 3. How to help students to acquire pragmatic competence • Pragmatics competence is different from grammatical competence. • Pragmatic competence (the ability to use the language appropriately) cannot be taught but can only be acquired. • As is said previously, pragmatic competence can be divided into perceptive and productive. Here in the following I’m going to focus on the oral pragmatic competence.

23. Kinds of activities • Activities aiming at perceptive pragmatic competence • Raising students’ pragmatic awareness • Helping students to assess the pragmatic parameters • Activities aiming at productive pragmatic competence

24. Pragmatic awareness • Pragmatics awareness is part of metapragmatic competence; it refers to the ability to analyze language use (Sharwood-Smith, 1981: 162-63). • Pragmatic awareness is the prerequisite for pragmatic acquisition, without which pragmatic competence can hardly acquired especially in FLL/SLL.

25. Tasks for perceptive pragmatic competence (2) • Pragmatic awareness raising activities • Observation • Open • Structured

26. Observation tasks (expressing gratitude) • Sociopragmatic tasks • Under what conditions native speakers of American English express gratitude: when, for what kinds of goods or services, and to whom. • Pragmalinguistic tasks • The strategies and linguistic means by which thanking is accomplished: what formulae are used, and what additional means of expressing appreciation are employed, such as expressing pleasure about the giver’s thoughtfulness or the received gift, asking questions about it, and so forth.

27. Observation tasks can be open or structured • Open observations leave it to the students to detect what the important context factors may be. • For structured observations, students are provided with an observation sheet which specifies the categories to look out for • Speakers and hearers’ status and familiarity • The cost of the good or service to the giver, • The degree to which the giver is obliged to provide the good or service.

28. Structured observation sheet • Request analysis worksheet • Participants • Speaker M/F AGE: • Hearer M/F AGE: • Dominance S>H S=H S<H • Distance + -- • Situation • Request • Level of Directness • Direct Conventionally indirect Hint (Rose, 1994:57)

29. Tasks for perceptive pragmatic competence (2) • Analysis tasks • Analysis of pragmatic factors • Analysis of appropriateness

30. Analysis of pragmatic factors Questions should be asked on aspects like: • In what situations, if any, will speakers employ or encounter the pattern (at work, at home, at play, etc.)? • With whom will the pattern be used (native or non-native speakers of English, friends, associates, acquaintances, teachers, bosses, etc.)? • What is the social status of each speaker (equal, superior, inferior)? • Are there other factors involved when the speech act will be used (age, gender, etc.)? • What topics will be discussed when the speech act is used (clothing, work habits, personal behaviour, etc.)? • How the speech patterns would be used under the same situation in learner’s native language?

31. Approaches to achieve this • The actual approach can be inductive (from data to rules) or deductive (rules to data); • Natural media (films, videotapes, radio broadcasts, or printed sources) can be presented for examples of the pragmatic features being taught.

32. For example: • Studying how to disagree • Prof. A: I think we should continue our study to see if additional factors can be identified. • You may be right, but I think we’d better recheck the statistics first. • Who disagrees with whom, what features indicate that there is a disagreement, where the conversation is occurring, and what the participants’ social relationship is?

33. Students can also be exposed to contrasting pieces of discourse and asked to identify the factors that account for the differences in language behaviour. • Susan: I really think the concert was awesome. • Barbara: Well, I don’t. I think we got ripped off. • to compare in terms of linguistic differences, the factors that may account for the differences in style, directness, and other features.

34. Analysis of appropriateness • Students may also be presented with some conversations which contain pragmatically inappropriate utterances and asked to judge the appropriateness of the targeted utterances.

35. For example: • Teacher: Ann, it’s your turn to give your talk. • Student: I can’t do it today, but I will do it next week. • Was the last part appropriate? Why? • If there was a problem, how do you think it was?

36. Activities aiming at productive pragmatic competence • Such activities require student-centred interaction, in which students take alternating discourse roles as speaker and hearer and different tasks may engage students in different speech events and communicative actions. Such activities include role play, simulation, drama etc.

37. Such activities may include such communicative acts as in thanking and apologizing, or influencing the other person’s course of action as in requesting, suggesting, inviting, and offering (Kasper, 1997)

38. The activities can be controlled or free. • In designing such activities, it is very important to identify very specifically which pragmatic abilities are called upon by different tasks.

39. Controlled activities • Role plays • A friend invites you to a party on an evening when you want to stay at home and watch the last episode of a television serial. Thank the friend and refuse politely.

40. Example • You are in the corridor of your department. Your next seminar is taking place in the Trent Building, but you don’t know where the Trent Building is. • One of your professors, Professor Jones, is walking down the corridor towards you. You ask him for directions to the Trent Building. • You say… (Schauer 2007)

41. Contrastive role plays • Specify the situation including the sociolinguistic information. • Students are asked to apologize • to a stranger whom they have accidentally bumped into on the street, • to a friend after coming 20 minutes late for an appointment, • to a professor with whom the students had an appointment to discuss a term paper.

42. Free tasks • Your school has a substantial budget to spend on improving facilities. The following have been suggested as possible purchases for the school. • Video equipment • A swimming pool (indoor or outdoor? But how much would this cost?) • A mini-bus • Computer equipment • A sauna • Any other suggestion • Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each suggestion with your partner and try to reach agreement on the most suitable. Make other suggestions if you wish.

43. Bibliography • Bachman, L. 1990. Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford: OUP. • Ellis, R. `990. Instructed Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell. • Judd, E. L. 1999, Some issues in the teaching of pragmatic competence. Culture in Second Language Teaching and Learning, pp:152-166. Cambridge: CUP. • Kasper, G. 1989 Interactive procedures in interlanguage discourse. In W. Oleksy (Ed.), Contrastive Pragmatics. (pp. 189-229). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

44. Kasper, G. 1997. Can pragmatic competence be taught? Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center. University of Hawai’i. • Lorscher, W. 1986. Conversational structures in the foreign language classroom. In Kasper (Ed.), Learning, Teaching and Communication in the Foreign Language Classroom (pp.11-22). Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. • Lorscher, W., & Schulze, R. 1988. On polite speaking and foreign language classroom discourse. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 26: 183-199.

45. Long, M. H., Adams, L. Mclean, M, & Castanos, F. 1976. Doing things with words – Verbal interaction in lockstep and small group classroom situations. In Brown, H. D., Yorio, C. A., & Crymes, R. H. (Eds.), Teaching and Learning English as a Second Language : Trend in research and practice (pp.137-153). Washington, D. C.: TESOL. • Rose, K. R. 1994. Pragmatic conciousness-raising in an EFL context. In L.F. Bouton & Y. Kachru (Eds.), Pragmatics and Language Learning Monograph Series, Vol. 5 (pp. 52-63). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

46. Thomas, J. 1983. Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4: 91-112. • 洪岗，语用能力调查及其对外语教学的启示《外语教学与研究》1991年第期。

47. Comments and Criticism Are Welcome!

48. Thank you!