Can Second Language Pragmatics Be Taught? by Jocelyn Pollard

1. Teaching Goals

1.1. Pragmatic Routines & Strategies

1.2. Complaint & Refusal

1.3. Pragmatic Routines (Kasper, 1997, para. 2)

2. Definitions

2.1. Pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context.

2.2. Pragmatics as interpersonal rhetoric - the way speakers and writers accomplish goals as social actors who do not just need to get things done but attend to their interpersonal relationships with other participants at the same time. (Kasper, 1997, para.1 )

3. Examples

3.1. Students analyze speech acts by distiguishing the different contexts and choosing the correct response for that particiular context. For example, considering realization strategies for apologies. (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989, as cited in Kasper 1997, Can L2 Pragmatics Be Taught, para. 4)

3.2. The teacher assigns an e-mail writing assignment examining the task complexity. A rubric rates the complexity of the writing. (Taguchi, N. and Kim, Y., 2018, p. 19)

4. Assessments Used to Teach Pragmatics

4.1. Questionnaires and roleplay

4.2. Roleplay and holistic ratings

4.3. Multiple methods (Kasper, 1997, Studies examining the effect of pragmatic instruction. Table 1)

5. Level of Proficiency

5.1. Beginning

5.2. Intermediate

5.3. Beginning